Board Minutes Sept 2017
DAL Board Meeting MInutes: 19 September 2017
Omar’s Dream Run: 15 of October is the race and to volunteer go to omarsdream.org to volunteer. Rick Sutton is delivery link. Mike Ringer is organizing and Thursday AM meeting will be a check to see who can help out, in lieu of quite a few who are gone during that weekend and usually help out. They can use our canopies but no membership booth. Pick up on Friday, deliver Sunday AM, and return Sunday afternoon.
Fiscal: taxes are filed, nothing changed since last board meeting.
Membership Moment: LCIF says we should do a membership survey once a year. John passed around the potential form, created by LCIF. May have 7 new members, so will need sponsors. John will keep after them and then he can ask other members to sponsor whoever follows through.
Thanksgiving Food Drive: Jen Smith said she would step up to the role that John had which is overall organization, but Al commented that we need two people: one who wants to coordinate the hall with packaging. Amy is willing to help organize the hall, but we need someone who will be in charge for Saturday through Monday. Jen Smith may already have this set up, so John will check with her. We won’t have car group, or their donation, so we may need to add in our own money to supplement. We may need to cut back. By next Board meeting, we may need to put some additional money in for the Food Drive. Focus energy on Food Drive at the next PM Meeting, see if Jen wants to have a pre-meeting.
Installation/Fiesta: Looking at Christmas Party for installation-possibly the 2nd or the 9th. Too much going on in October and November. Don Lang is the Oddfellow’s Hall contact, so we could possibly have it there.
Student Speaker Contest: packet ordered, need a new chair. Dagi is working on it, but needs a co-chair. The first contest has to be done by February.
R4D Quantitative Review: Al said he is not comfortable with the fiscal because he was told he has all the forms from Eventbrite, but it is 6-8 thousand less than what the fiscal says. Al sat with Jen, Claire, and Jeff to see how the info was collected. $885.00 came in on day of. Donations collected: 4,900.00 (it includes the 885.00). Eventbrite: 9, 230.00 which excludes fees. Eventbrite Registration: 4,100.18. Al says this matches his figures.
- Revenue: 18, 242.18 (This is what Vijay put in the bank as a total).
- Expenses: 20,749.81 of which 1, 250.00 should come back. There is about 400 in expenses that we may need to reconcile. This is not going to swing the numbers one way or the other.
- Net Proceeds: negative 1,257.63
When it comes to expenses, there were not enough checks and balances, and there was no approval for most of it. The questions is who was authorizing the expenses? No one, but we pay it because we don’t want to leave anyone with out of pocket problems. Many were not invalid needs, but they weren’t approved. The T-shirts and food was way out of line and so much was wasted. We needed event day donations and we needed to sell the t-shirts.
R4D Qualitative Review: We are too small to pay for this on our own. We originally did not have the numbers needed and we approved it anyway. It is not our usual plan to just say pay for whatever it takes, even if it was beyond our originally approval. Right now, the way the event went, we don’t have any board ownership, the timing of the event in our calendar does not work. It was objected at first that it wasn’t a DAL event, but we found a way around it. Now, we don’t have our name on it as our event. People in our club have reported that this event is causing them to shake their faith in this club and even want to resign. Carl, Al, Amy, and Jill are concerned about the wellness of our club. There is resentment for how this was handled. There is usually a full-time person who runs events like these. This club is not a Ride for Diabetes club, we are the De Anza Lions and it changes our identity. Many on the board and in the club felt like it was misrepresented from the beginning. Yet, we had all the liability and all the work. We have a common pool of donors (Vijay, Coppe’s, formerly, the Fimby’s) who don’t see our name on the event. We do not want to lose fundamental members, even if we gain some members, too-this doesn’t sit well with many lions. We feel like there is some lack of transparency and the feedback was slow to be gathered. We need to hear from everyone and we need to hear from them right away. It’s also just way too much work for our club to do-people worked more hours than should be expected of any one Lion for an event. R4D Feedback sent to John as of this board meeting: he got feedback that was mostly 50/50 between positive and negative. John got many ideas for improvement and many comments about what to do next year, most implied that it might happen again next year. 87 registers riders, 75 showed up, 14 paid their pledge. John says that it wasn’t bike riding season, which is in the spring or fall. John’s friend Randall said that we would need a hook, like a “Silicon Valley”.
Side Note Ideas: Any event should be a club event, not sponsored by the larger club and not with it’s own EIN number. No event should exceed its original approved amount, unless more has been approved by the Board. If someone spends beyond that without approval, they will not get reimbursed.
Could we have a survey summary by the next meeting? John will provide this in advance of the next board meeting. Jill will compile her feedback from the board as well into categories before the next meeting.
The Board Response: The person who made the comment about staffing the membership booth with younger females, other than those who volunteered, should be spoken to about that behavior.
Good of the Order:
Motion: passed about the Lions Club International Foundation for $5,000.00 to LCIF for Hurricane Relief. Passed unanimously.
Crabfeed Location: St. Simons, meeting with two ladies, they have never leased out their kitchen before and they’ve never partnered before. They need to speak with a few of their priests about the situation. Since it’s a Catholic church, every single adult who is there if the Leos are there, or any young children, ALL adults (band, etc.) have to be fingerprinted. So, basically, we are still looking for a venue.
Silicon Valley Fall Festival: John thinks we need a VP of Public Relations to keep track of the events, do we have someone who could oversee this kind of job on the board?
Project Linus: Amy is working with Leslye to get this going in October. It’s a great event and some potential members are looking forward to it and we have money budgeted for it.