In Attendance: Marc (sec), Ty, Salem, Jackson, Rae, Jacob
Meeting Start: 7:00 PM (!)

Event Review

• Our booth at Star City Pride was pretty darn successful! We ran out of the vast majority of things we had (buttons, stickers, and zines). Thank you to everyone who helped prepare and staff the event!
• We got tons of emails for our newsletter, which we hope to debut soon.
• Rae pointed out that the “BASH BACK” stickers seemed to inspire some folks into action (i.e. use them to cover up hateful messaging), which was cool to see.
• The Pride planning committee will likely send out surveys asking for feedback; Marc will forward any links to the BCH Discord.
• Marc said that having a more substantial break would have been helpful.
• Rae said that it would be helpful to have more staff willing to be at the booth to swap out, and fewer people at the booth at once (since sometimes all BCH volunteers were there at the same time). It would have also been helpful to known exactly what time people would be available to staff, rather than providing vague times.
• We also didn’t have the clearest understanding of how vendor staffing worked at the event; Marc was worried about not being able to get back into the festival if he left and needed to come back.
• The Compost the Rich stickers were a HUGE hit; Marc suggested reordering more of these for future events.
• If we do buttons again, Marc suggested not making quite as many, since there’s just one button press between us, and they’re tedious and time-consuming to make.

Upcoming Events

• Ty will write up the description for the Creating Trans Safety event ASAP. Jackson will post it after it’s reviewed.
• For the upcoming workshop on transforming conflict, we’ll need to meet at least 2 Mondays before the day itself, as it will be on a Tuesday, to discuss any needs for the event.
• Rae has the event description for the workshop written up; she will share the description and others will provide feedback for what’s written.

Reimbursement and Supplies

• We need more supplies for the button maker, since we’re out of the clear plastic covers and running low on other pieces. Jackson will research and confirm the cost.
• Ty bought the table for Pride; it’s a nice 6′ folding table and was $75.05 total.
• Rae bought bottled water for volunteers at Pride – $6.99
• Ty paid $10.00 for volunteer passes at Pride, and Salem paid $5.00 for their pass as well.
• These costs and others in previous meeting minutes need to be reimbursed still.

Newsletter Updates

• Our RiseUp account and listserv is good to go and as mentioned, we have plenty of contacts to add to it. Marc will take point on this. Emails will be sent out using our contact @ email address.
• Rae suggested having a featured book section of the monthly event newsletter as a way to highlight the contents of our library and encourage people to use it. It could also have a blurb that more explicitly advertises the library. Folks were very fond of this idea.
• Rae also likes the idea of changing up “featured” content in the newsletter so that we can express ourselves more, such as by having a photo related to BCH in some way. (Like something cool in the garden, things like that.)

Accessibility of the House

• The ramp and porch are currently cluttered, and paths are not wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs/might be difficult for people using other mobility aids to navigate.
• The interior of the house is also quite cluttered (with lots of yard sale leftovers).
• For the porch, we currently have a couch on it that needs to be discarded, as it’s taking up too much space. We discussed using folding furniture for greater accessibility – so we can still enjoy outdoor meetings/events, but can remove the chairs easily so people can access the front door.
• We discussed keeping an eye out for yard sales and used furniture for this express purpose.
• Rae suggested making a list of what needs to happen to improve the house’s accessibility, and when we’d like to accomplish that. Others supported this idea.
• Rae also suggested changing the most pertinent accessibility needs (namely the ramp/living room) before the upcoming workshop in July.
• We plan to talk about accessibility on an ongoing basis, and have it as a running meeting topic.

Meeting Adjourned: 8:30 PM (!)

In attendance: Jackson, Salem, Ty, Marc (secretary)
Meeting Start: 7:05 PM

Event Review: 10th Anniversary Celebration

• Our 10th anniversary celebration was 6/1. We had a good turnout, Sorry to Bother You generated some good discussions, and the food was well-received. We went with getting pizza from Mellow Mushroom and cupcakes from Butterfly Bakery, since they both have good vegan and gluten-free options.
• Pizza was $72, and cupcakes were $75; Ty paid for these. He would like reimbursement for these, but we will decide on that.

Upcoming Event: Transport Reading Discussion

• This reading discussion will be on June 24th. We have the articles printed out and ready to go already.
• Marc and Ty will write up the description together, and Jackson will post it soon.

Pride Boothing

• We discussed staffing plans for Pride and have good coverage for staffing the booth and switching out for breaks. Salem also indicated being available to help set up on Friday.
• Check-in on Friday is at noon, and Saturday check-in is at 10 AM. There is also overnight security at the venue.
• Ty picked up the prints of button designs and zines. The total cost was $83.87, which Ty would like to be reimbursed for. Same as above, we’ll wait for a future meeting when more members are present.
• Ty and Marc have been busy folding and stapling those zines and making buttons. They’re turning out nicely.
• We’ll need to get a six-foot table in time for Pride. Ty has researched ones, and found potential folding tables that would work well. They are either $60 or $70, depending on the color (“almond” or black, respectively). Marc suggested getting the black one, since it wouldn’t show stains as easily as the off-white one. Ty has offered to pick it up this week.
• There will be a mandatory meeting for vendors on Wednesday at 5 PM. Marc will attend this and convey information.
• The items we still need for boothing are: zine stands, summer calendar handbills, and prints of the button sticker labels
• We will also need to order more button-pressing supplies in the future, since we’ve been pressing a lot of buttons lately.

Meeting Adjourned: 8:15 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Salem
Start time: 7:10 PM

1. Event Review – Our yard sale fundraiser was last weekend. Jackson reports that we currently have $1116.59, with a handful of IOUs left to collect and a few items that he will be listing online. Jackson thinks that our crowd was smaller than in the last couple of years, possibly because of our late scheduling putting this sale on Memorial Day weekend. It would be more ideal to do this earlier next year.
2. Upcoming Event – Our 10th Anniversary celebration is this Thursday night! The event is now up online. We have advertised pizza, but this may be somewhat complicated as some of our friends (including Salem) are vegan. We will have to settle some of these details on the Discord chat. Jackson will have the room cleaned up of yard sale leftovers by Thursday.
3. Summer calendar distro – Progress on this is unclear as none of the people who volunteered to distribute last week are here tonight to report back. TABLED.
4. Tabling at Star City Pride/Reimbursement – Ty and Marc continue to take the lead on organizing our upcoming tabling at Star City Pride. We’re still trying to work out some of the specifics as far as who will staff the table and when. Salem may be available to help Ty set up on Friday, since he still needs a second set of hands and Marc has a work conflict. We will also be printing some stickers, and have “pre-imbursed” Marc $152.19 to get those printed in time for Pride.

Meeting adjourned: 7:35 PM

Tabled: summer calendar distro

In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Marc, Rae, Ty (secretary)
Meeting Start: 7:12 PM

Yard Sale: Our yard sale is coming up this Friday and Saturday! We’ll be doing some pricing after the meeting adjourns today. Jackson will make yard sale signs. Jackson will also be out and setting things up on Friday + Saturday really early, at 6 AM, and would appreciate some assistance in set-up and tear-down on both Friday and Saturday. Rae and Arya think they may be able to come over early to help set up.

Calendars: Summer Calendar has been printed, and we split up the handbills and full-size calendars for distro purposes. We also had an extra stock printed for distro at Pride. We’re reimbursing Jackson $30.83 for paying for the calendar prints.

Pride Planning: Marc went over the designs he has for pride buttons, and we’re thinking to make 100 of pronoun buttons and 500 total of the historical buttons. He also showed a design he made that would make for a good sticker if we wanted to get those printed. Ty bought tablecloths for this and future tabling events, as a donation to the House. He also needs to get zines printed, as he wasn’t able to since the House is very full of yard sale donations.

Work time for yard sale pricing!

Meeting adjourned: 7:57 PM

In attendance: Jackson (secretary), Marc, Ty
Start time: 7:15 PM

1. Summer Calendar – Our summer calendar is ready and going to the printer this week! Jackson will pick them up. We will be printing a lot more handbills than usual between our yard sale and tabling at Star City Pride.
2. Yard Sale Prep – We spent the remainder of the meeting preparing for the yard sale but pricing and sorting a few of our early donations already on hand.

Meeting adjourned: 8:30 PM

Meeting Start: 7:04 PM
In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Rae, Salem, Ty (secretary)

Event Review: The film was good, the turnout was good, the discussion was good!

Sustainable Supplies: Some discussion was had regarding single-use plastics at the House, specifically in reference to the plastic cups we use for water during events, though the discussion could be relevant for other House supplies. Jackson mentioned that most of what we have is hand-me-downs from other people, and that it’s been since 2019 or even earlier that we’ve had to buy these supplies ourselves. Rae brought up that for visitors that might not know this, they might think we’re like too many other community orgs that verbally support sustainability but aren’t sustainable in their actions. There was agreement that modeling sustainability is worthwhile, but we need to address what we should do with our plastic cups, since we don’t want them to go unused at all. Ty asked that we table this until we had some more opportunities to chat about options.

Yard Sale: The yard sale is coming up quick, the 26th and 27th! Jackson will draft a description and a call for donations to post online. Then it’s a matter of pricing donated items and setting up days-of.

Pride Tabling: We have a table! Ty was already given some funds to cover what we thought the table may cost, but he will need to be “preimbursed” for $110 to cover the remaining price of the table. We will need to have this booth staffed from 4-9 PM Friday June 9th, and 12-8 PM Saturday June 10th. We’ll also need to make sure we bring our own table – Wyatt has one that folds in half that we can ask him about using for that weekend. We’re not concerned about material costs, and Marc is working on button designs.

Website: We want to continue working on this so that it’s in a more complete state for the Pride booth. Tabled.

Summer Calendar: Marc sent a draft of the summer calendar to look over in his absence, and those at the meeting looked over it and sent him suggestions to edit. Rae will draft a short description of the workshop in July. Once these edits are made, we can send them for printing and start getting them distro’d.

Meeting adjourned: 8:15 PM

Tabled: Sustainable house supplies, website edits

In attendance: Arya, Dan, Jackson, Rae (secretary), Salem

Start time: 7:05 PM

1. Event Review – Our latest garden day workshop was on Saturday. We had to improvise, with our planned event leader Wyatt unable to make it. We had a large turnout, possibly due to our Facebook event being seen by many unusual suspects (50+ “interested”, many of whom we aren’t connected to). Rae points out that we need to get back to our habit of passing handbills to event attendees. Hopefully we’ll see some of those new faces again soon.
2. Upcoming Event – Our Salt of the Earth movie night is this Friday night. We want to invest in blackout curtains soon, as glare from the window was a factor in our last movie night. Jackson needs to do some serious room prep, but we should be good to go.
3. Summer Calendar –
   Thursday, June 1st, 7-10 PM — Black Cat House 10th Anniversary Movie Night: Sorry to Bother You
   Saturday, June 24th, 1-3 PM — “Transport” reading discussion (need help from Marc and Ty naming this event)
   Tuesday, July 18th OR Wednesday, July 19th, 7-9? PM — Conflict Transformation Workshop (Rae and Rae’s friend need to finalize exact day and time and event title)
   Saturday, August 12th, 1-3 PM — The Rise of Right-Wing Cults (a community discussion)
   Friday, August 25th, 7-10 PM — Movie Night: Hail Satan
   
   Meeting adjourned: 8:25 PM

In attendance: Marc (secretary), Ty, Jackson, Rae, Arya, Salem
Meeting Start: 7:05 PM

Event Review

• We showed Snowpiercer on Friday and had excellent turnout and a good discussion. The audience had lots to talk about!

Upcoming Events

• This upcoming Saturday (4/29) is the Garden Workshop day about planting native plant species. This will be a pretty hands-on workshop! Wyatt is ready to go for this.
• We will be showing Salt of the Earth on Friday, May 5. Jackson will be writing up the description and posting the event.
• Our yard sale fundraiser will be coming up soon! Marc suggested posting the event 3 weeks ahead of time instead of the usual 2 to give people time to go through their stuff for donations. As usual, this is the only time where we do any active fundraising or donation soliciting. We accept most anything except clothing.

Pride Boothing

• We’ll be taking part in Star City Pride and boothing at the festival!
• We plan on making buttons, stickers, and zines to give out. The buttons will be inspired by queer organizations/activists from the past.
• Arya pointed out the inherent value in having a presence at Pride to connect with the community and encourage others to get involved.
• Marc will also work on getting our Riseup email list started again in time for Pride.

Summer Calendar

• We brainstormed plenty of summer events, and decided on a few mostly-certain dates. The most-well-received event ideas are bolded.
• June 1: 10th Anniversary Party and Sorry to Bother You screening
• June 9 and 10: Boothing at Pride
• June 11: LTRUE Garden Tour (haven’t applied yet but basically planning to)
• June 18 or 19: Conflict Transformation Workshop
• June 24: “Transport” Reading Discussion and trans rights update
• Brainstorming ideas:
• Movies: Hail Satan (documentary), Coco (family friendly look at immigration and classism), Clerks (work alienation), Triangle of Sadness (classism), The Menu (alienation and class warfare, very graphic), God Bless America
• Events:
• Neighborhood Cleanup – Salem offered to spearhead this
• Ancient Labor Organizing – we might want to do more research for this and table it for later
• News and the state of journalism generally
• Right-wing cults
• Gaming the System: We talked about playing Bang! or Secret Hitler, as well as Bloc by Bloc

Meeting Adjourned: 9:00 PM

4/17/2023 Minutes
In attendance: Arya, Jackson, Marc, Rae, Ty (secretary)
Start Time: 7:10 PM

Event Review: Earth Day went well! Quite a few organizers and volunteers thanked us for going for the greenwashing angle. We passed out the entirety of the handbills we brought, all but a couple of the zines, and a good quantity of stickers. “Compost the Rich” was the most popular by far!

Rae did note that passing out the calendar handbills and noting that people could go to our website to keep an eye on upcoming summer events was awkward. This reinforced our need for a formal listserv, so for future events we can just have a sign-up sheet for emails.

Upcoming Event: We’re showing Snowpiercer this Friday! We just need to clean up.

Black Musicians and Liberation: This year’s edition of Black Musicians and Liberation fell through. We’re going to aim to start organizing for next year’s much earlier, in order to accomplish the “emerging scholars” theme we tried to do. Marc came up with a handy reminder for ourselves: “On Black Friday, we start Black Musicians”

Black Cat House photos: A friend of The Black Cat House reached out offering use of their drone for aerial photos! We’re super excited, and Marc reached back out on our behalf.

Library Donations: Ty donated a couple of books he got from the Earth Day event to the library.

Website Reimbursement: Jackson paid $34.99 to pay for our secondary domain name. Everyone says it’s fine to reimburse him for that.

Summer Events: We’re still working on it!

Thursday, June 1st, 7pm: Sorry to Bother You… but We’ve Been Here 10 Years!
Saturday, June 24, 1-3p: TRANSport article reading discussion

Date/Time TBD: Conflict transformation workshop
Date/Time TBD: Gaming the System – ideas include, Atiwa, Trains, Anti-Monopoly, Bloc by Bloc

Further event ideas: Ancient labor organizing? Anti-Amazon? Antifa history? Right-wing cults, possibly tying in the assassination of Shinzo Abe?

Movie night ideas: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Clerks, Triangle of Sadness, Hail Satan? (maybe not this one – need to do further looking into The Satanic Temple)

Meeting Adjourned: 8:52 PM

In Attendance: Jackson, Rae, Ty, Marc (secretary), Arya, Binah
Meeting Start: 7:15 PM

Upcoming Events

• Movie Night: Snowpiercer – Jackson will purchase the DVD for this.
• Black Musicians & Liberation – The event will not be a panel this year, since potential panelists weren’t able to participate. That said, we are thinking of changing the format to a 1-on-1 conversation about “new school vs. old school.” The event would be hosted a week from Thursday from 7:00 PM to 8 PM. Jackson will be in contact with the potential scholars to see if this still works. Marc will be able to make the flyer fairly quickly.

Earth Day Booth

• The activity board for identifying greenwashing is just about complete. The stickers are done, along with wildflower-themed buttons.
• Ty worked on printing zines to hand out at the event tonight. We got several put together.
• The event will be at Innovation Campus on Saturday, April 15. Setup starts at 9 AM, the event goes from 10 AM to 2 PM.
• We also printed out the labels for the backs of buttons to hand out at the event.

Website Updates

• We’re still making progress with site content.
• Marc will make the new layout live on Wednesday night, with some links either hidden or set to go to a “work in progress” type page. Given our timeline, we’re on track; the site content should be complete before Pride.
• Marc also thinks it’d be cool to see about borrowing a drone camera to take some sky photos of the Black Cat House. Binah offered to speak to someone about potentially using a drone to accomplish this.

Summer Calendar Brainstorming

• Movie: Triangle of Sadness; recent fictional film. Rae suggested this but wanted to see if it would be a good movie for a discussion after viewing it.
• Hail Satan Documentary, discusses the temple of Satan and religious freedom in the US.
• Board Game ideas: Atiwa, about bats and pollinators and ecological concerns; Trains, a deck-building game where as you create skyscrapers or trains, your deck gets filled with waste that must eventually be dealt with
• Ancient Labor Organizing: Thinking of doing this as either a presentation or community reading discussion. Basically showcasing examples of labor organizing before the industrial revolution, across multiple cultures around the world.
• 10th Anniversary Celebration: Party with a game-like activity, e.g. bingo (with lefty-oriented questions) or scavenger hunt. Could also be a re-watch of “Sorry to Bother You,” with the ad saying something like “Sorry to Bother You, but we’ve been here for 10 years” or something lol
• Anti-Amazon discussion – why Amazon is SO bad, and alternatives to use/why to use those alternatives
• Conflict transformation – using conflict as a way to change the way we behave/think about things/our relationships, etc. Could be a good workshop
• Boothing at Pride
• A discussion with an update to the state of trans rights in Nebraska, depending on how things go at the legislature. Perhaps focusing on how to tangibly support the trans community, rather than strictly legislative action.

Meeting Adjourned: 8:36 PM