For CAA’s November Board Meeting, we decided to gather remotely. Our hope was to explore this as an option so that we can recruit board members who may not be able to make it to the CAA community space.

We began with a discussion of the incredible success of our fourth annual Twin Cities Veg Fest. The event attracted about 2,500 people and more food vendors than ever before. We’re looking forward to moving the event to a new venue next year as a way to make room for the festival to grow.

We really like the idea of offering an event like the Twin Cities Veg Fest on the U of M campus, though, so we discussed the possibility of holding a small scale version of the festival at the U of M campus during spring semesters. We thought we could encourage U of M students to plan the event during the school year and the event itself could be held outside of Coffman Union, for example, where food trucks could park. Holding the event outside could attract lots of passersby as well.

CAA is working with a new bookkeeper who has transitioned us to new web-based bookkeeping software. This will make the business of keeping up with the finances much easier, since those who need access will be able to log in to the online site rather than make their way into the office.

We ended the meeting by discussing how it went to meet remotely. In the beginning, it was difficult to iron out some minor technological difficulties, but in the end things seemed to go pretty smoothly. We tried using video chat for the first part of the meeting and then we transitioned to a conference call for the second part of the meeting. We found video chat was best.

We’ve decided that we’ll continue with remote board meetings. Our next meeting will take place on Google Hangouts on Monday, January 21 at 6:00pm. Be sure to let us know if you’d like to join in. If interested, email Unny Nambudiripad at unny@exploreveg.org.