Meeting Minutes

October 9, 2001

Recorded by Charlie Ledley

I Intros

II. Opening Remarks by Jeffrey Paul Bobrick

Thrilled to have a really solid core group. Lou has been involved from the beginning, and new additions today are Gerald and Bob Solomon. (Lou Simon on phone)

Debating saying something about this—talking about September 11. Everyone talking about it, upset, etc. No one we know of is missing or dead. One missing father. Being supportive is the best we can do.

We are moving forward, there’s a lot to look forward to with the association.

III. Reports from each Committee Director. As part of this presentation, Alumni Council Members will be asked to join at least one committee. Depending on the nature of the presentation, there may also be open discussions and voting.

We want every member of the Alumni Council (approx 60) to be on a committee. Many have expressed interest either at the memorial or via email. People want the opportunity to be involved and the committees will give them that opportunity.

Fundraising and Membership are huge, and the more people we have working for these committees, the faster we can make progress

Charlie: so excited that Lou Simon has joined us. Experience at camp and as principal at Laguardia HS.

Eric: (legal) We have incorporated, received certificate from NYS—non profit. Put in for tax ID # with IRS, which will enable us to open a bank account etc. that application is coming along, but there are a few pieces we need to fill in. i.e. budget—Charlie’s working on it. Narrative description of all the activities of the organization, other is fundraising (for stephanie). Both of these are detailied. Narrative should be no more than 2 pages—includes all the activities we’re going to do. All of this has to be pretty detailed.

Catherine—non profit covering all or only certain activities?

Eric—yes, covers all activities.

Stephanie taking both for now. Lisa and Jeffrey helping. work on them and fax to Eric by the end of the month.

Jackie—donations before the end of the year?

Eric—those will become tax deductible i.e. retroactive

Charlie—we can disclose that info in fundraising letters.

Stephanie—we are incorporated as “Friends of Buck’s Rock, Inc.”

Eric—we can do business with the word alumni, but not with the government. I would prefer to use the corporate name, although it’s possible that there won’t be problems with using the other name. I would reccommend using the other name.

Lou—Laguardia has “alumni and friends” is this different
Eric—no.
people will write checks to “Friends of Buck’s Rock, Inc.”

Jeffrey—vote: in a public sense as well as a legal sense—do we want to call ourselves “Friends of Buck’s Rock, Inc.”

Brett—on Web site, what will be the domain name? use both, register as many as possible.
all of them will link to the same IP address.

WE ALL AGREE. Friends of Buck’s Rock.

Legal committee: Eric, Catherine, Josh Abrams, Alexis Greer.

Fundraising: Stephanie
A Little hindered in fundraising since we don’t have 501C3 yet, so best approach is within our community. Do a fundraising letter in testimonial style. find someone who had been given a scholarship to BR before—interview the person and write a story...say what it’s done for this person’s life. send the letter by mail and by email. usually a 2 page letter—small paragraphs and a donation form. set a target amount—what most people would give. possible tie-in gift if you give a certain amount. we have the “And then I discovered Buck’s Rock” book that we could give. or t-shirt, video. something that doesn’t cost us a lot of money.

Lisa—fundraising seperate from membership?

Stephanie—yes. probably take 2 months to send it out. Probably after the new year—after we have membership names.

Jeffrey—we will, at the end of today, have a membership director. Before we can do fundraising, we need to know who our membership is. We need to target a specific group.

Lou—database?

Charlie—the camp owns a database that Ron Danzig put together after the 50th reunion, updated after the 55th reunion and again this spring after the memorial service. The database is in Microsoft access. arranging logistics to get a copy. can still go back to old directories. for starters, a very large list.

Lou—old databases on floppy disks. (5”)

Stephanie—address verification. online? give each person a few pages of the list. or get som CIT’s together—big corporations donate phone banks.

Juliet—CIT’s should get community service for high school.

Stephanie—go put your info on web site. but someone will have to enter some info.
Art event in the spring.

Marc—performance show first. easier to pull off right away. build things on successes. art gallery takes a lot of work. with a show, it can be a couple hours, charge admission, rent a place.

Lou—non profit bulk mailing rate.

Stephanie—very expensive to have things mailed back to you at non-p. rates.
Lou will look into it.

Jeffrey—this summer is the 60th anniversary of Buck’s Rock & there will be a huge influx of people for a reunion. pool of people to get as members and donors

Charlie—Mickey and Laura are very open to our opinions about the anniversary. they are still deciding if they want to have it before or during camp.

Jeffrey—focus on membership for now. web site can be up this month. membership can take a couple of months. then focus on fundraising and concert. including performance art—all-inclusive.

Marc—people will come out of the woodwork.

Jeffrey—concert in march or april. get enough money for scholarship for one person.

5K is the target for one camper for the whole summer.

Stephanie—video, cd tied into the performance.

Committee for concert—Marc, Brett, Jeffrey, Charlie, Erika Blumberg, Catherine, Ivan Rubinstein-Gillis, David Grousman (sp?).

Lou—look into Laguardia as a venue for the concert. and others. Juliet can look into it a little bit.

Art Gallery—one night or same time as concert?

Juliet—less professional, lower-key event?

Marc—exploratory committee for concert.

Fundraising committee—Lisa, Charlie, Juliet, Brett, Catherine.

Scholarship fund: Charlie
Take on task of figuring who receives scholarships, mechanisms of getting there-partnering with another non-p. fairness and philosophical issues. It’s not on the critical path at this moment because we need to start raising the money.
We still need to sit down with Mickey and iron out the details, but conceptually, we would propose paying 80% of full tuition for a spot that’s full. but for spots that are not full, where he has no marginal costs, we would pay 20%. Involve Charlie, Eric, Catherine, and Lou. also Marc and Anita Dupree. Also figure out how to take care of the kids at Buck’s Rock—Juliet volunteers, Lou is an expert. Marc, Bob, and Stephanie too.

Lou—maybe hold off on giving scholarship this year.

how many kids? how long? one kid alone at BR? lots of ideas and questions, but lots of missing info.

Events Outreach: Lisa
Just a draft—incorporate comments. how to set up the committee. What it would do for this organization.

Events that are not fundraising but are for the pleasure of the people who belong to FOBR—events that would add value to the membership. Also to help the camp in many ways. set up events and programs at BR and not at BR. anybody can suggest an event, discuss at meetings, place on calendar, event leader, establish committee

Retreat at Buck’s Rock!
mentoring
intensive workshop

all services to BR communtiy with no effort from them—there should be little resistance from them. It makes them more attractive with no expense from them.

we will have to budget for all of these things—pay transport for visiting artists?

camp fairs—talk to propective
Events Outreach: Jackie, Catherine, maybe Juliet and others?

Newsletter: Jackie
Journal, folio—informational newsletter. writing and creative pieces from alumni, editorial pieces.

Get committee and talk more later
Erica Babad, Roberta Berger, Nate Schierman, Brett (design), maybe Juliet (write/edit)

Web site: Jeffrey (from Nat—se his notes)
There is a Web site, it’s already there:
3 video clips from Ernst’s memorial service, Ernst’s last goodbye. design template using industry standard. rotating quote of the day with over 100 quotes. layout for contacts database. set up online store for purchasing BR merchandise. set up way of donating over the internet.

Charlie—looking at different options for online donations.

Jeffrey—a lot of areas on the site where people can contribute content. message board, alumni works (written, photos of artwork, video clips, sound—music)

Gerald—has a collection of silkscreens from a long time ago. Brett will get them digitized, Nat will get them online.

Jeffrey—group of people reviewing content.

Lisa—Web site has to have an editor

Brett—the BR site had sign-ins and that helped them a lot. password protected, remove people’s privilages if they are coninually offensive.

Editorial group: Jeffrey—quotes. artisitc? writing—Jackie, Juliet. Lisa, Brett.
control content on certain elements—all elements that are representative of us.
monitor content on alumni works, message board, etc—we are not responsible for content.

Brett—how to link to members’ own sites? it’s a bandwidth issue. Provide a list of their Web sites.

Lou—each of these sounds like a full-time pursuit. does anyone have a full-time job? among volunteers, there is usually a core group who does all the work.

grow, scale back, include more people. natural selection. important stuff gets propelled ahead. reach out more to our friends to get them to help. encourage people who are retired to join in.

Jeffrey—chat room. membership data for database. make decision about Web site:

Charlie—one of the most important things for the organization as a whole is to get the database set up. mailing list, track event data, fundraising data, people can have profiles. we have an issue because there is an unofficial alumni web site started 4-5 years ago by Dan Grossman. Jeffrey tried to contact Dan several times and invited him to join our organization. Dan never responded to his attempts to approach him. Dan later sent out an email about his new web site. Jeffrey finally did speak with Dan and came to agreement that Dan would maintain an alumni contact database and we would do everything else. but we have decided that it is crucial to our organization to have our own database for membership, fundraising and event planning purposes. however, there is confusion—people think his web site is ours and think they have already registered for membership with us when in fact they have posted their info with him. we decided to talk to Dan again about combining with him and working together. tough converation between Charlie and Dan. he has been the only alumni association for the last 4-5 years. He was very hostile and saw us as the big corporate folks trying to take over—make money for the camp, whereas he just wanted to create an informal place to contact friends. Charlie tried to explain our mission and invited him once again to join our organization and run our web site with Nat. we offered to credit him on the alumni contact portion of the site and to keep the look and feel of his site. however, he was not interested in being involved with us – he preferred to do something informal – as he had been. he did finally offer to shut down his site and give us his data if we thought that was best for the BR community. however, he suggested that the ethic of the BR community was to live and let live—and not to step on him.

We have several alternatives:
(1) accept his offer to close down his site and give us his data.
(2) link the two sites more closely, with automatic updates for both databases. this is theoretically possible but technically very tough.
(3) continue to have regular links between the two sites. Alumni would enter their profile data on both sites. each site would say—“hey, we’re not the other site.” As per our previous agreement with Dan, we would not publish alumni profile data – we would only use it for our own fundraising and event planning purposes. But this is confusing and our site needs to have the community aspect of publishing alumni profile data.
(4) Charlie recommends sending an email in which we tell him lets live and let live, and let it go. The 2 web sites will now have some overlapping features – which may be confusing for some; but we can move forward with our mission and he continues with his own thing. Everyone agrees.

Logo: Stephanie
Recognizable, snazzy. Jackie will work on it, but it should be brainstormed. We need to put something out there, contact Jackie with ideas.

Brett—friend who went to BR—Alan Frankel.
Jackie--Think about what kind of icon they might associate with BR. something that can be easily reproduced.
Jackie and Lisa will work on logo.

IV. Elections and nominations for Membership Committee Director and Publicity Committee Director.
Catherine interested in Membership Committee—unanimously voted in.
Publicity Committee Chair—Alex Saltzman