Location: Recess Coffee House @ 110 Harvard St.

Attendance: 27 people!

Started: 5:00pm

A. Introductions (Who are you? What is your favorite food?)

B. Updates

a. Media Activity

A lot of great feedback from the Post-Standard article! We now have nearly 60 people on our announcements list and had a lot of new faces at this meeting. Welcome all!

b. Slow Food USA application

We have had all of our round one information approved! Now we need to work on getting the more technical, legal information submitted. Then we’ll be official. The chapter board will take these tasks on!

C. Designate interim Chapter Board positions

Paul can’t do this alone. He called for two volunteers to fill two other executive roles. These roles are temporary, interim positions until we can set up our own bylaws for elections and actual positions.

a. Chair: Point person for the chapter, coordinates with regional and national officers. Paul will remain!

b. Secretary: Takes minutes, sets meeting agenda. Seth appointed!

c. Treasurer: Setting up bank account, getting EIN from government, managing dues. Meredith appointed!

D. Committee brainstorming

For this part of the meeting, we all broke out into six groups, listed below. Each group had a list of possible actions. They were tasked with brainstorming additional ideas, determining a committee leader and prioritizing one item for action. A LOT of ideas were generated during this part of the meeting. In order to keep these minutes mentally digestible, the committee chairs will be sending out an email on each committee within the next week. This email will do into more detail. In the meantime, here are the highlights:

a. Chapter Board

i. Chair: Paul

ii. Priority: Getting an EIN and submitting the second half of the application forms! ASAP!!

b. Event Coordination / Fundraising

i. Chair: Kris

ii. Priority: Introductory potluck.

c. Public Relations (Outreach and Communications)

i. Chair: Melissa

ii. Priority: Put together listserve groups and build a SFCNY website!

d. Slow Food in Schools

i. Chair: Jennifer

ii. Priority: Talk to a health class/food club in a specific school and do a harvest dinner. Perhaps Corcoran? Possible coordination with Syracuse Grows on this one.

e. Food Justice and Advocacy

i. Chair: Hanah

ii. Priority: Create a sustainable code to explicitly allow productive animals and urban gardening..

f. RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions)

i. Chair: Travis Hance

ii. Priority: Create a list of local varieties of foods!

E. Next Steps

a. Get listserves set up for each group.

b. Work on getting us to be on the SFUSA website to make signups easier!

c. Set up standardized meeting schedule and avoid conflicts. Veto 2^nd Tuesday of the month because of conflict with Syracuse Grows (4pm-6pm at CCE. Harold Pl/Franklin)

d. Finalize status with Slow Food USA

e. Get working on committee priorities!

F. Closing: 7:00PM

• SFCNY Announcements: This is the default list that everyone should be on. It is for the Chapter Board to send out announcements to the community. If you want to know what’s going on with Slow Food in the area, sign up for this low-activity list.
• SFCNY Discussion: Using this group is like sitting in a large meeting room. Everyone can hear you – you’re never responding to just one person. Every email you send in will be received by every member of the group, whether you initiate a topic or hit “reply” in response to a message. Please be aware of this. If you want to reply privately to someone, you will have to CHANGE the email address in your “To” box before you hit that “send” button.
• SFCNY _____ Committee: We now have five committees (more on this in the meeting #3 minutes), each with its own unique group discussion list. Committee chairs will email more information about his/her specific committee in the coming week.

  o Slow Food in Schools

  o Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT)

  o Food Justice and Advocacy

  o Public Relations

  o Events and Fundraising

• SFCNY Chapter Board. This list contains the Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and the five Committee Chairs. It is a way for the local leadership to all be on the same page.

To sign up for one or more of these lists, please email Lonnie at “lonnie dot chu / at / gmail dot com.” She has taken charge of managing the lists and for that I am so grateful. Also, if you have a gmail account, you should be able to sign up for the groups on your own by following the links above (except for Chapter Board – you need to be on the board for that one).