Tag Archives: ev-board

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.

CAA’s August board meeting began with a report from our Executive Director, Unny Nambudiripad, about some recent successful outreach events CAA has been engaged in. We leafleted at the Warped Tour and ran a pay-per-view event at Twin Cities Pride. Unny also reported on CAA’s presence at the national Animal Rights Conference in Washington D.C..

As we transition to a new internal website used to plan events and projects, a lingering worry has to do with whether we will be able to export content from this site if we find ourselves needing to make a change down he road. While there is no built in option to do this, it appears that Dave Rolsky (our treasurer) will be able to write a software program that can do this for us. Good thing we have someone with computer programming skills on the board!

We next turned our attention to the complex business of evaluating the effectiveness of our programs. Unny and Justin (our Communications and Events Coordinator) had discussions around these issues with leaders in this area at the Animal Rights Conference. One of the suggestions we look forward taking up was the idea of engaging in dialogue with members of our target audience about how to help them make more compassionate food choices. Once we have good information about those needs, we can tailor our programs to meet them. We also decided to continue making use of existing research (for example, Nick Cooney’s excellent book Change of Heart) to inform our outreach and communication efforts.

We revisited the question of board member recruitment and we decided that we will announce opportunities for volunteer board members through the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. We also decided to explore the possibility of recruiting folks from across the country who work successfully on the kinds of issues that are central to CAA’s mission.

Our next board meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, November 5 at 6pm. You should consider being a part of that meeting if you’re interested. If you’d like to participate, contact Unny Nambudiripad at unny@exploreveg.org.

We began CAA’s June board meeting by briefly reviewing and unanimously ratifying the budget for the coming fiscal year. We have a growing interest in assessing our work as an organization, so we decided to have a look at donation history to begin to get a better sense of the impact of our fundraising efforts. We’ll take a look at that history at our next meeting.

Board members were then introduced to the new website where organizational information will be collected. Because of its ease of use and integration with Google services, we feel this new site will offer lots of advantages over our current wiki for everyone involved in CAA’s work.

Our discussion then turned to the difficult task of assessing the extent to which CAA should get involved in campaigns like promoting Meatless Mondays. Traditionally, CAA has focussed on organizing outreach events (like leafleting and pay-per-view) and community building events (like the Chili Cook-off and the Twin Cities Veg Fest). We see campaigns like Meatless Monday as potentially powerful ways to help reduce the amount of suffering animals endure on factory farms as well. While these campaigns can generate a lot of energy, it happens that support for them among volunteers can fade over time. In view of this, we considered the possibility of allocating more staff time to work on these efforts and drawing up contracts between staff and volunteers that lay out clearly in advance the amount of time being involved in these campaigns will require of volunteers.

We also discussed board recruitment. Board members are central to helping shape CAA’s work and we are currently looking for new board members to join us. You should consider coming to a meeting if you’re interested. Our next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, August 25 at 6pm. If you’d like to attend, contact Unny Nambudiripad at unny@exploreveg.org.