In Attendance: Jackson (moderator), Ty (secretary)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review: We watched Reds, but it was just us. Enjoyable film though! We need to get Facebook events up sooner.

2. Web Presence: The Tumblr has been tanked. We don’t really have the time to maintain it, and it’s not really the right medium for what we’re trying to do. Ty wants to put more focus into the Twitter account. Our Facebook posting has increased, but we haven’t really put up the engaging posts we have wanted to yet, so that still needs to be something to work on.

3. Winter Calendar:

No Woman No Cry – Saturday, December 5th, 7 PM
LSH meeting – Thursday, December 10th, 7 PM
Winter Solstice Party – Saturday, December 19th, 6 PM

What is… Communism? – Saturday, January 9th, 1-3 PM
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – Saturday, January 16th, 7 PM
Counter-Protest Against The Anti-Choice “Walk For Life” – Saturday, January 30th, 10 AM, north side of the Nebraska State Capitol

Movie Night: Panther – Saturday, February 6th, 7 PM
Revisiting Ferguson: Where’s #BlackLivesMatter Now? (A Community Discussion) – Saturday, February 13th, 1-3 PM
Movie Night: Black Power Mixtape – Sunday, February 21st, 7 PM

Ty will whip up a calendar plus handbills, to be finished by the 17th at the latest.

Meeting adjourned: 7:59 PM

In Attendance: Jackson (secretary), Ty (moderator)
Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review – We hosted a concert on Wednesday, but nobody else showed up! We’re not sure what else we could’ve done about it, as we’re not really much of a concert venue.

2. Upcoming Event – We’re showing Reds on Sunday. We’ve decided we’ll offer pizza to help people get through the length of this film.

3. Winter Calendar:

No Woman No Cry – Saturday, December 5th, 7PM
LSH meeting – Thursday, December 10th, 7PM
Winter Solstice Party (maybe?) – Friday the 18th or Saturday the 19th of December (start time?)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, January 2nd/9th/16th, 7 PM
January discussion?
Second January screen?
Revisiting Ferguson: Where’s #BlackLivesMatter Now? (A Community Discussion) – Saturday, February 13th, 1-3 PM
Feb screens?

Potential movies:
Panther (1995 film; Feb), Black Power Mixtape (Feb)

We’re not quite ready to finish the calendar tonight, so this is tabled one last time. We are in agreement that the calendar must absolutely be finalized next meeting.

Meeting adjourned: 8:34 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Ty (moderator)
Start time: 7:02 PM

1. Upcoming Event:  The Great Swamps will be playing here on Wednesday at 7 PM.  We emailed them and asked whether they had any food preferences while they are here, and Jackson will put up a last minute flier at his work.

2. Police Brutality Event: Alicia and Devin came to our meeting and told us what they could about their story.  We gave them all the resources and names we had available as far as people who could potentially help them organize an event of the caliber they are thinking of.

3. Winter Calendar:

No Woman No Cry – Saturday, Dec 5th, 7PM
LSH meeting – Thursday, Dec 10th, 7PM
Winter Solstice Party (maybe?) – Friday the 18th or Saturday the 19th of December

Revisiting Ferguson: Where’s #BlackLivesMatter Now? – February

Potential movies:
Che (Part 1) (Jan), Ma Vie en Rose (Jan), Panther (1995 film; Feb), Black Power Mixtape (Feb), Angola 3 (Feb)

Meeting adjourned: 8:20 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Ty (moderator)
Start time: 7:02 PM

1. Event Review: We had our discussion on protesting on Saturday. The turnout was low, but the discussion was still very good.

What should we be doing to boost turnout? Jackson admits his Facebook event went up late. Ty suggests possibly creating queued FB statuses right after creating the event to make sure we remember to remind people about the upcoming events. Jackson also wonders how many of our calendars are no longer posted around town; Ty will bring some more to possibly refresh the bulletin boards when he distributes concert fliers this week.

2. Ella’s fundraiser – Our friend and collaborator Ella is trying to crowdfund to cover some travel expenses to help her attend a conference that would make her an even greater asset to community groups like ourselves. We agree to commit $100 from our treasury to help her out.

3. Reimbursement – Ty got a bunch of color printing done for us last week, and wants to be reimbursed $13.94 for those expenses. We agree, of course!

4. Police Brutality Event – We were contacted by someone wanting to do some kind of public event on police brutality and racism. As this is obviously within our interests, Ty has emailed the person to see how we can be of service.

5. Winter Calendar – Ty has created a Facebook status asking our friends there what kind of events they’d like to see of us in the Winter Calendar. It will run tomorrow afternoon.

LSH meeting – Thursday, Dec 10th, 7PM
Winter Solstice Party (maybe?) – Friday the 18th or Saturday the 19th of December

No Woman No Cry (Dec), Panther (1995 film; Feb), Black Power Mixtape (Feb), Angola 3 (Feb)

Meeting adjourned: 8:10 PM

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

1. Event Review – Trekkies was on Friday, and it was a fun show. Not a great turnout, but a good discussion. Our Indigenous People’s Day Rally was just an couple hours ago. We got some channel 8 coverage! “The revolution may not be televised, but the protest did,” as Jackson put it. Handed out a few zines. We think we might need a specific flier for the event next time.

2. Upcoming Event – Protest: What Is It Good For? is this Saturday. We need to continue promoting it, but other than that, we think we’re ready. As an aside, Jackson thinks getting a big whiteboard would come in handy with this sort of event in the future, to jot down ideas the discussion generates.

3. The Great Swamps – Ty put the Facebook event page up! We’ll start inviting people and sharing it around.

4. Buttons – We have labels, so Ty will make some with our website to put on the back of our buttons.  We’re also going to send some pronoun and pride buttons to be printed.

5. Anniversaries – In our project to add anniversaries of important historical events, we added May Day and the Stonewall Riots.

6. Winter Calendar – Items to consider:

Winter Solstice Party in December

Mardi Gras: Made in China in late January

Black History Month in February. Maybe try The Angola 3 again? Malcolm X or another biography? Or the 1995 film Panther?

Jackson suggests polling the Facebook page, see what our fans want us to host.

Tabled: Winter Calendar

Meeting adjourned: 8:09 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Ty (moderator)
Start time: 7:01 PM

1. Event Review – We showed Food Inc on Saturday night. The turnout was ok, but the conversation afterward was excellent.

2. Upcoming Events – We’ve got Trekkies on Friday. No problems there.

We’ve also got our Indigenous Peoples’ Day Rally on next Monday. Ty is going to promote it online. Ty will also get our zines assembled. He declines reimbursement for getting those materials printed. We’ll probably not host a sign-making party, as our offer to do so didn’t attract any interest online.

3. Copy Machine – Ty will finish setting that up on Saturday, as he has time to do so.

4. Black Cat Appreciation Day – Ty wants us to do themed posts on social media surrounding August 17th, which is apparently Black Cat Appreciation Day. He thinks it would be a good time to highlight some of the historical influences that inspired us to name our house, such as the Black Panthers. Jackson likes the idea, and we spent several minutes discussing several possible strategies for doing so (but no decision was made at this time)

5. Calendar of Holidays, Anniversaries, and Commemorations – (This is a tangent thought of by Jackson in the wake of the last item.) We need some kind of system for better remembering all of the holidays and historical reminders that we try to keep up with all year. Ty suggests building them into our existing events calendar on the website; additional information on the event can even show up when one hovers the mouse over the day on the calendar. We added anniversaries for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to our calenar, and table the item to consider more dates to add to our calendar in the upcoming weeks.

6. Band – We’ve been contacted about hosting another concert. The performer’s initial email doesn’t have enough information for us to make a good decision, so Ty will email them and try to figure things out.

7. Buttons – Ty is looking to enlist some help with button design. Jackson has ordered a free “sample” of label sheets that should be what we need.

Tabled: Calendar of Holidays, Anniversaries, and Commemorations, Buttons, Winter Calendar

Meeting adjourned: 8:22 PM

In attendance: Jackson (moderator), Ty (secretary)

Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Upcoming Event: Food, Inc. is this Saturday! Should be simple to set up.

2. Concert: A touring artist is coming through the area, and wants to book a show here on October 2nd. We listened to some songs, but we didn’t really get any explicit social/political content out of them. We decided it wasn’t worth making last minute accommodations for.

3. Columbus Day: Ty made a post in the event page asking if there would be interest in a sign-making party. We also need to make copies of Brian’s “Why We Should Abolish Columbus Day” zine. Jackson found a digital copy of it, and will send in a request to the copy center for 50 copies.

4. Copy machine: Ty needs the proper usb cord in order to set up the software. Then it’ll be good to go! Jackson ordered it, and he’ll be reimbursed for it.

5. Data entry: Looks like we waited too long on that. We’ll have to ask for Ella’s help in getting the missing pieces in our archive.

Tabled: Copy machine, data entry (LGBT fundraiser removed. We don’t have time to organize something like that after all.)

Meeting adjourned: 7:39 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Ty (moderator)

Start time: 7:00 PM

1. Event Review – We had our discussion on gentrification on Saturday. It had a solid turnout, despite the fact that we had a lot of competition as far as interesting stuff happening around town on the only non-Husker Gameday in September. Ty thinks that if we’re going to lead off a discussion with some potentially lengthy background, as happened Saturday, that we should offer the clarification that we can be interrupted so that we’re not monopolizing the conversation.

2. Buttons – Ty has been hung up on logistics details concerning the labels we want to put on the backs of them. We took some time to look around at options. We decided we can use ones that are 1″ by 0.5″, but at that size we’ll probably only have space to print our website on them.

3. October Events – We took some time to put up our upcoming October events on Facebook and begin to promote them online.

Tabled: Columbus Day protest, Copy Machine, data entry, LGBT fundraiser

Meeting adjourned: 8:25 PM

In attendance: Jackson (moderator), Ty (secretary)
Start time: 8:15 PM

1. Event Review: We had an LSH meeting on Thursday, and a movie on Friday. Anarchism in America had a very good turnout and discussion, and Ty figures that we have better showings when the movies are relatively hard to get a hold of or are otherwise not in the public eye.

2. Upcoming Event: What is Gentrification is coming up on Saturday. Jackson’s going to be the moderator for that discussion, and he’s doing a bit more studying on the subject.

3. Columbus Day Protest: We should put together a flier, and get that event posted soon. Perhaps a poster making party? That will likely depend on how much interest there is for one.

4. Buttons: Ty is continuing to work on button designs. He’s making pretty decent progress, by his own account.

5. Copy machine: The copy machine still needs to have the software uploaded to our computers. Just a note that it needs to get done.

Tabled: Data entry, LGBT fundraiser

Meeting adjourned: 8:25 PM

In attendance: Jackson (moderator), Ty (secretary)
Start time: 7:03 PM

1. Upcoming Events: LSH is meeting here on Thursday. There is a movie on Friday as well!

2. Fundraisers: A friend of ours has started Equality Press, a non-profit publishing company focusing on making radical literature accessible to children, and they are crowdfunding their first book. Jackson suggested donating $100 to the campaign, and Ty recommended bumping that up to $115 to count for a reward tier that would give us three hardcovers and five softcovers of the book, because while we only need one or two for the House library, being able to donate copies to other organizations would be awesome. As Ty has a Kickstarter account, we will give the money for him to pledge on the website.

We Are Vital is also raising money for a canvassing campaign to do a broader poll of the neighborhood residents on what they think of the neighborhood, rather than merely the landlords and business consultants that those in charge of the SoDo project are basing their opinions on. We plan on donating $100 to this effort, and we’ll get in touch with the organizer of this project whether she wants it through GoFundMe or through a more direct means.

3. Buttons: We need more pronoun buttons! Organizations at UNL found them to be a big hit, and we need to restock! Ty will have to figure out how to design them, or get in contact with someone who has the proper templates. Also, we would like to get a sticker designed to place on the back of pressed buttons with The Black Cat House name and website.

4. Fundraising Event: The LGBTQA+ Resource Center and similar student organizations on campus usually start raising money to go to social activism conferences around this time. Since Ty wishes to go as well in order to bring back networking and knowledge around activism, he was wondering whether we could put on some sort of fundraising event. A benefit dinner worked really well last time, but since this is a different crowd, we’re not sure if it would work. Jackson suggested selling buttons and the jewelry that Ty makes, but we’re not sure where. We’re tabling this until we can fully form a plan.

Tabled: Data entry, LGBT fundraiser

Meeting adjourned: 7:50 PM