In attendance: Wren Keturi, Eric Coker, Forrest Parker, Braden Elliott, Danny Ritter, Michelle Marie, Sydney Householder; special guest member Luke Fredericks (briefly!); Ashley Bromley
Meeting called to order at 10:08 AM
Minutes from 4-16-13 meeting – Approved!
Email Decisions – (1) Approved the ASOSU questionnaire to go out; (2) Approved adding a Dues Consideration Committee to the GMM agenda ; (3) Approved paying each driver $25 to go to Labor Notes in Portland (splitting the $50 allocated).
GMM Agenda—Agenda items, order, speakers, and times are set. We have a plan for getting everything everywhere on time. Ashley will circulate an expanded agenda & action plan for tomorrow. If you need any materials on hand tomorrow, let Ashley know.
ASOSU Elections—no responses to our questionnaire yet.
Driving Budget—Our official driving reimbursement will from this time forward be: $0.35/mile based on the roundtrip distance to/from the destination city. Ashley will make a quick list of what we reimburse for common trips (Newport, Lincoln City, Portland, Sunriver, Albany, Salem).
Bargaining – Bargaining Team meeting tonight that will get people ready for our first session on Thursday (9-11 AM). We’re going to go through the contract article by article to see which articles we can be done with right away—though we might not be able to finish that process because their full team won’t be at the table. We’re likely to drop our quorum requirement to 3 members because we’re having a hard time getting people to sessions & meetings and because we have a smaller team. Survey should be ready to go out by early next week. We’ll work extra hard to organize members out to bargaining sessions since this contract will have less member input on the bargaining team side of things.
Solidarity Fair—CGE will be responsible for having a table there and also running kids’ activities. We also want several volunteers to set up & take down the event. Eric & Ashley will work on getting folks signed up to help from the EC, SC list, & social list. CGE will have tables & chairs for use and will donate some art & button making supplies. We’ll work on informational material about CGE & also an events calendar to have at the table. We also want to make some food to give away. Danny may work on planning a BBQ to follow.
SEIU Bargaining—Bargaining in Newport May 2-3. We’ve been invited to stay in the house with SEIU members who are attending. We probably won’t be able to go because we have so much going on that week. Ashley will email their organizer Brett to see if they’re planning an action and to let him know we can get people out there on Friday if things go poorly Thursday.
May 1 Action—There will be a labor/immigrant rights solidarity action in Salem on May 1. Danny will get an email out to the social list to see if people want to carpool up. Ashley will email Brett/Gloria about the potential for an action on campus.
Safe Space Training—Ashley will sign up for June 28 so the CGE office can become an official Safe Space. As the date approaches, Ashley will get the info out across other lists to see if CGE members/officers want to sign up too.
Office Materials—Ashley will get couch cover, preferably purple and a non-annoying but stain concealing pattern. Forrest will deal with the wiring issues.
Brew-Off Committee—punt!
Strategic Plan—We assessed our successes & what still needed to be done. Created some priorities to work on.
Member Benefits: Had a goal of yearly stickers & 10 businesses. We did nothing on this, but Ashley will spend some time this summer working on building member benefits.
Communications: We did develop a newsletter (late start but did it) though decided to not have it be print. We met the FB benchmark and almost hit twitter followers. We almost put together a working communications committee (Eric may get on the committee if he doesn’t run again).
Membership: We haven’t quite hit our goal of membership percentage in the bigger unit, but it is in sight by the end of the year. Toward that end, Ashley will set up a regular time for office visits for the rest of the term (particularly focusing on non-member vote yes petition signers) and also get lists out to stewards so they can do more organizing in their departments.
Caucuses: Michelle wants to get the family issues caucus off the ground. Ashley will get the list of folks who indicted interest in family issues to MM and she’ll email them asking for input on the Ed Ray meeting. We may also start a women’s caucus just to set the example of what a strong caucus could look like.
Social Events: We never formed a committee, but we did have a lot of the events. No parade of intramural champions, though. We’ll prioritize getting the ladies in labor film series back up & running—tentatively Monday May 13th.
Stewards: We held all the meetings, but didn’t do some of the usual organizing & department chair meetings we’ve done in the past (RA campaign triage, instead!). We want to get back to long term, internal organizing now. Need to do a steward training once new folks are elected. Steward training tentatively scheduled for May 12, with brunch!
External Relations: We mostly did these things except we were a little spotty on CLC meetings. Pretty good!
Beaver Community: Didn’t do many of these. Doing some solidarity with SEIU, not so much on the coalition event, not so much on the joint event with grad school (but waiting to hear back).
Quarterly budget reviews: Haven’t really happened. Forrest will give one next week.
AFT-OR: We accomplished some reform, but not percaps (hope springs eternal).
Bargaining/RA Campaign: Did it. Did it. Did it.
Ed Ray Meeting—We officially have work-life balance issues on the agenda for the meeting. We’ll work on the rest of the agenda next week.
Offsetting Consumption—We want to donate & plant trees to offset some of our paper use in the RA campaign. Wren will look into (fruit?) trees to donate (to SAGE garden?).
Meeting adjourned at 11:27 AM