In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (moderator), Sammi, Tati (secretary)
Start time: 7:01 PM

1. Website: We received a message from Ella. She’s working on the website still and is looking into paying the website hosting fees monthly if possible until she can get it worked out.

2. Event Review: Letter Writing and the movie night went well! Movie night’s turnout was a little less than expected, but we had a good discussion from those who did come.

3. Upcoming Events: We have a feminist discussion group coming this weekend. We still don’t have an event up yet! Ashley apologizes, and will get it up tonight.

4. Reimbursements: Jackson printed some fliers, for $2.14, and bought a book to donate for $2.12. We approve.

5. Buttons: Ashley’s gonna get some designs ready to go, to bring to the collective at a later date to approve.

6. Books: We went through a lot more book donations again! We have just a few more to go through, and a few to look over to see if they’re accessible enough, and we’ll talk about them next week.

7. Love+: Due to personal problems, Ashley asks to postpone Love+. We can make an open-ended announcement on the Facebook group and see if anyone would be willing to take it up.

8. Calendar:
Lincoln Secular Humanism Pastafarian Pasta Feed Fundraiser Sept 4th
What is… the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? Sept TBA
Trekkies for Humanism: “Who Watches the Watchers” (TNG) Sept TBA

Anti-Columbus Day Protest Oct 13th
Trekkies for Humanism: “Catspaw” (TOS) Oct 24th

Movie Night: (A)sexual – Nov TBA (early in the month)
Trekkies For Humanism: “Critical Care” (VOY) Nov TBA
[workshop on organizing protests, name TBA] Nov TBA

Other event ideas: Feminist Discussion Group, zine making workshop

The Beehive Collective event is subject to change, potentially even after we print the fliers, so we will not put it on the calendar. We will make a flier specifically dedicated to it when the date is finally set in stone.

9. Activists and “Difficult People”: We discussed the next sections, “Antisocial Behavior” and “Stalking and the Potential for Violence” and the conclusion. Ashley proposes a similar article to read for our next one, dealing specifically with difficult behaviors during events. However, ‘cause this article took us several meetings, we’ll take a break.

Meeting adjourned: 8:30 PM
Tabled: Networking, Website, Speaker Stipend, Books

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (secretary), Sammi (late), Tati (moderator)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event review: The discussion went well on Saturday, and we raised a little bit of money for Owe Aku. We were also able to raise some awareness of the event, and several people indicated an interest in making donations on their own.

2. Upcoming Events: We have the letter-writing event on Wednesday, and we should be ready for that. We also have the _Pink Ribbons Inc_ movie on Sunday, and Ashley is planning to run it off of her computer since it is on Netflix. We’ll put out a few simple refreshments. We’re ready.

3. Fliers: Ashley reports that we are running low on the “Capitalism got you down?” BCH fliers. We’ll print another 50 sheets of them.

4. Buttons: Our pronoun buttons made their debut at Pride over the weekend, and Ashley reports that they were well-received (especially by younger people). We have enough of them left over for basic house events for the foreseeable future. Jackson will be reimbursed $3.21 for the printing costs of the papers for those buttons.

We also discussed other ideas for buttons. Our main priority is probably adding a Black Cat House logo button, but we’ll probably have to wait for Ella to get around to it (and she is very busy with our website right now). Ashley and Tati also propose adding queer-identity flag pins, and also some anarchist-identity flag pins as well.

Ashley also recommends that we offer our services to allied groups, as they may have button-making needs as well. Ashley thinks that the Lincoln Atheists in particular have several designs that would look good in buttons.

5. Mail: We received a letter from the Sporeprint Infoshop in Columbus, Ohio. They’re excited to hear about our activities, and are hoping for a penpal here (and some of our pronoun buttons). Ashley volunteers to stay in contact with them.

6. Books: We received many donations for the lending library. We took some time to sort through them and decide which ones we wanted to pick up.

7. Calendar:

LSH Pastafarian Pasta Feed Fundraiser Sept 4th
Trekkies for Humanism: “Who Watches the Watchers” (TNG) Sept TBA

Love+ Oct 11th (Formerly SexyFest; Add a Feminist Discussion Group for one of the panels?)
Anti-Columbus Day Protest Oct 13th
Trekkies for Humanism: “Catspaw” (TOS) Oct 24th

Trekkies For Humanism: “Critical Care” (VOY) Nov TBA

Other event ideas: workshop on organizing protests, Movie Night: (A)sexual, whatever we can schedule with the Beehive Collective

8. Sammi: We voted to give Sammi full membership/voting privileges.

Meeting adjourned: 8:27 PM

Tabled: Networking, Website, Love+, Speaker Stipend, Activists and “Difficult People”, Calendar

7/7/14
In attendance: Ashley (secretary), Jackson (moderator), Jamie, Sammi, Tati (moderator), Tessa
Meeting started: 7:00

1. Upcoming Events: the KXL event is this weekend. Ashley did a ton of research on the subject, so we’re probably good as far as running the event goes. Ashley will research handouts and see if we can have anything to give out.

2. Reimbursement: Ryan Harvey was able to stop by on the 4th on his way home to Baltimore. He has all of his AK press books with him, along with his CD’s. He donated over a dozen CD’s, and Jackson bought a book called “We Are Many”. We agree to reimburse him $20 for the book. We also need cases for the CD’s, because most of them are in paper cases. Jackson will look into this.

3. Radio Interview: Ashley got interviewed for Earth to Lincoln this afternoon, about the Black Cat House and the KXL event. It’ll probably premiere tomorrow at 6:30.

4. Calendar:
Sammi had some suggestions for sexyfest. They recommended that instead of doing “posi” in the titled, add a plus sign (sex+, love+). We really like love+, it seems more all-ages and would be easy branding.

LSH Pastafarian Pasta Feed Fundraiser Sept 4th
Trekkies for Humanism: TNG Who Watches the Watchers Sept TBA

“SexyFest” Oct 11th
Trekkies for Humanism: TOS Catspaw Oct 24th

Other event ideas: workshop on organizing protests, Trekkies for Humanism, Movie Night: (A)sexual, whatever we can schedule with the Beehive Collective

5. Activism and “Difficult People”: We only made it through one section of the article tonight. We went through the list of difficult people and discussed what they were and how we would handle them depending on the situation. We also talked about ways to handle calling out our friends as being difficult, or being difficult ourselves.http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01san.html

Meeting Adjourned: 8:29

Tabled: Networking, Website, SexyFest/love+, Speaker Stipend, Activists and “Difficult People”, Calendar

6/30/14

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (moderator), Sammi, Tati (secretary)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review: Trekkies For Humanism was great! We easily hung out after the episode for a few hours, and the discussion was great. Might even do another as early as August, as it might be worth it to do one off-calendar. Looks like the crowd wants Enterprise next time!

2. Book: Ashley’s donating The Sustainable Kitchen to the library. Ze doesn’t ask for reimbursement. We approved its entry!

3. Beehive Collective: The Bees have moved their dates to between October 1st and the 5th to dodge Huskers Homecoming. It bumps up against the date we tentatively picked for SexyFest, but since it wasn’t a done deal we’ll just move SexyFest to a different date. Sammi offers to get the Bees a contact within UNL if they don’t have one yet.

4. SexyFest: We’ll reschedule it to October 11th! We talked about renaming it, though we haven’t yet decided on a particular name. Perhaps PosiFest? It might be important to give the event a subtitle of sorts. We also discussed emphasizing that sex positivity does not necessarily involve sex itself, and to include asexuality and sex-repulsion in the event.

5. Speakers: We decided we can offer stipends for speakers and set a separate treasury for it. We’ll wait to put any money directly from the treasury into it until we figure out the amount we’ll spend on the website, and once we have some money in it we’ll start formally advertising it.

6. “Difficult People”: We continued discussing “Activists and ‘Difficult People’” particularly the sections on sexual harassment and workplace bullying. Sexual harassment was pretty straightforward, though we’ll have to take things on a case-by-case basis, and workplace bullying didn’t really apply, though Jackson suggests reading follow-up material on general bullying and dealing with people with aggressive dominating personalities. Reading the next two sections by next week!http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01san.html

Meeting adjourned: 8:30 PM
Tabled: Networking, Website, SexyFest, Speaker Stipend, Activists and “Difficult People”

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (secretary), Tati (moderator)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review – LSH had a picnic for World Humanist Day. We had fun. It’ll have to be discussed further at the next LSH meeting.

2. Upcoming Events – Trekkies For Humanism is coming up on Friday. We’re ready for it.

3. Reimbursements/Treasury situation – Jackson wants reimbursements for buying a box of printer paper ($4.28), button parts ($64.29), and a button press ($124.00). All are approved by consensus. Jackson should also have the treasury updated tonight after the meeting, but he reports that the new balance will be approximately $300 after new donations are factored in.

4. Library treasury allocation – Ashley proposes adding up to $20 to the library treasury, since the whole treasury is currently earmarked for picking up The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. Ashley has a friend holding a moving sale, and ze believes that hir friend will have many books and zines relevant to our library. We approved this by consensus.

5. Beehive Collective – They want to come to Lincoln the weekend of September 27-28. They would like to do a workshop in our space on one of those two days. We’d all love to have them, but we have a strong preference for doing it Sunday the 28th. Jackson points out that September 27th is a Husker Gameday, and UNL Homecoming to boot. The logistics of competing with that are a nightmare. We’ll wait and hear what they think about this and want to do. Ashley will contact them.

6. Website – Jackson is starting to get word from our host that our site is within a couple months of expiring. As per our desires when we renewed last year, Ella will be working to convert our site into WordPress and transfer it to her server. We discussed offering payment for this service. We will be looking forward to further updates on this important issue.

7. Activists and “Difficult People” – We spent the last part of our meeting starting an article Ashley shared about dealing with personality conflicts and other outbursts in an activist setting. We’ll continue to discuss this over the next few weeks.

Meeting adjourned: 8:14 PM
Tabled: Activists and “Difficult People”, Beehive Collective, Networking, Sexyfest, Speakers, Website

6/16/14
In attendance: Ashley (secretary), Jackson (moderator), Tati (moderator)
Time started: 7:00

Event review: The event on Saturday went fairly well. The turnout was a little low, but that might have been because we couldn’t plug into the students. We might do this again during a time when more people would be interested. Ashley suggests that it might be a good idea to work with the student humanist group at UNL if we want to do it again.

Upcoming events: the picnic is this weekend. We’re probably going to buy meat to grill, and maybe drinks as well. We’ll probably bring blankets as well. More promotion needs to be done for the event, we’ll all work on that this week.

Buttons: Ashley finished the button designs, ze will do a test print and then send them off to Jackson. Ashley suggests we just print one of each this round, so that way we can test them in the buttons and make sure everything looks good before investing a lot of money into it. Jackson has yet to buy the button parts, but he has a few ideas as far as the punch goes. Jackson will make the purchases this week.

Books: Ashley received a few books to donate to the library, and Tati has some as well. We go through and approve most of them.

CD Library: Last week, Chris recommended that we start keeping CD’s in the library. He has some CD’s he’d be willing to donate. We all approve of the idea.

Occupy Play: A guest brought us a 1-scene play draft about the occupy movement. He’s looking for someone who was involved with the occupy movement to take the themes of the scene and reinterpret it (rewrite it, write a poem, make artwork), so they can publish it in a book. We know a few people who might be interested, and if none of them want to we can put it up on the occupy Lincoln page.

Tyranny of Tyranny: We didn’t identify with this article nearly as much; it seemed really reactionary, and was poorly edited so it was difficult to understand at points. The parts we found valuable was the discussion about the inefficiency of larger organization, and the issues of burnout. The other parts we agreed with, like that education and consciousness raising will never end, but those were parts we already discussed with the last article.

Disruptive Guests: Ashley found an article entitled “Activists and ‘difficult people'”, we agree to read it for the next few weeks. For next week, we’ll read the intro an “The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense” http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01san.html

Adjourned: 7:53

Tabled: Button parts, networking, sexyfest, speakers, “activists and ‘difficult people’

6/9/14

In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Chris, Ella, Jackson (moderator), Sammi, Tati (secretary)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event review – Behind the Badge was a great show! Unfortunately it was a Wednesday, and that might have contributed to a lower turnout, but everyone who was there had a good time and learned a lot. Sammi suggested that we try asking critical questions via Facebook or similar sources, to get people thinking about the topic before hand and inciting them to come to the events.

2. Upcoming events – LSH meeting is coming up, as well as What is… Secular Humanism. Ashley needs to make more cupcakes! Jackson and Ashley will also make sure their presentation gets set up nicely on our new projector.

3. Reimbursement – Jackson bought a copy of I Am Troy Davis for $15 to help out the International Socialist Club, and a $4 stack of zines from Ben Turk, and we approved reimbursement for both.

4. SexyFest – We picked Saturday, October 4th as the date, as the other dates that were suggested fell on Husker game days, and we just didn’t want to compete with that traffic.

5. Buttons – Jackson thinks we have enough funds to buy button-making parts, so he’ll go ahead and get them. He also brought up the price of a button cutter, and we thought that it might be a little pricey to go for right away. Jackson will also look for the cheapest cutter while he’s researching for

6. Speakers – scott crow mentioned when he was here that if we offered stipends for speakers, people will contact us to hold talks here, as opposed to us asking people. However, to guarantee that we have enough money to provide to speakers, we’d have to do fundraisers outside our yearly one, and we’d like to still spend most of our energy on projects and events. Sammi suggests collaboration with other organizations on certain speakers in order to split costs between us. Ella brings up cutting costs in the House, finding ways to reduce printing costs, etc., or offering zines and buttons for suggested donations. Jackson thinks that just having a fund for speakers can be a selling point, that saying donations will be guaranteed to go to bringing speakers into the House might encourage people to donate for it.

7. Tyranny of Tyranny – We read an article a few meetings back called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and the discussion was really good! We talked for about an hour about what we learned from it and how this info can help the collective. We decided we also wanted to read “The Tyranny of Tyranny,” which is a critical response to the first essay, since we liked the first so much.

8. Handbill – Ella brought the summer calender handbill to edit, we checked it over for errors and called it good!

Meeting adjourned: 7:50 PM

Tabled: Button designs, networking, event moderation training

May 6, 2013
In attendance: Ashley (moderator), Jackson (secretary), Tati (moderator)

Start time: 7:00 PM

1) May Day

Our event failed! Why didn’t anyone show up?

The weather was terrible. Was it just too cold for people to show up? Do we need to include an indoor backup if we have poor weather again in the future? Tati suggests that we would normally have an afterparty, and maybe we should just include an option to move the party up to the time of the rally/march if the weather sucks again.

Ashley says that maybe the date was a problem. Maybe we’re not going to get students on the day after school lets out? Even if young people aren’t students at UNL, they may have friends who are and get booked up with parties that weekend.

Was it a problem to hold the event after the actual May Day? We’re still committed to trying to get it done on a weekend to make it easier for all the working folks who are busy during the workweek.

Was our event just stale? Ashley notes that we’ve had trouble getting people to come back after previous May Day events. (Brian also said something at the Capitol on Saturday to the effect that maybe a march/protest wasn’t the best way to commemorate May Day.)

2) Library meeting

We’re having one tomorrow at 4 PM to discuss library rules.

3) Open House

Ashley has advertised on the networking sites. We’ll start putting up fliers tomorrow. Ashley will go south; Jackson and Tati will do downtown.

We’re close to having the snacks settled. We have regular and vegan crackers, and cheese. We’ll get hummus. Ashley is planning for more food. Tati wants s’more cookies; they’re not vegan, so we’ll need something else sweet.

Ashley is thinking about activities for kids, since we may have a few attending. Ashley is thinking of organizing a game; possibly outside.

We still have to figure out where to put a few things. We’ll probably need to set up a table to hold our fliers, etc.

4) Reimbursements

May Day expenses: Jackson is reimbursed $6.69 for printing more fliers last week. (This was pre-approved.) Ashley is reimbursed for $13.78 worth of march supplies (whistles and armband fabric).

Other expenses: Ashley is reimbursed $5 for getting us a donations box. Ashley is pre-approved to spend up to $20 on materials for the sign we’re going to make for our front porch.

5) Collective Editing

Ashley presented a draft of the “What is Gender Identity” handout for our upcoming event. We spent the last hour of our meeting editing it.

Meeting adjourned: 8:29 PM

Meeting started: 7:03
In Attendance: Ashley (secretary), Ella (moderator), Jackson, Tati (moderator)

May Day: Ashley looked at 3 different stores and couldn’t find the supplies we needed to marshal the march. Ashley is going to look at a different store tonight hopefully, and if they can’t fins them there, they’ll buy them online. We messaged Brian and see about the microphone and speakers. All other matters have been taken care of.

Flyers: We need handbills for the open house by this weekend. Ella is going to print off handbills and larger poster-sized flyers. Jackson is going to print off more handbills for the march, and the collective agrees to reimburse him for it.

Opening: We discuss what we want to do at the open house. We decide to serve appetizers and a couple of deserts, and play some music.

We had a brainstorming session after the formal minutes to talk about future projects.

Meeting ended: 7:50