Attendance
Present: Laura (recording minutes), Celia, Jen, Kevin and Joe (new recruit!)
Absent: Katey, Ginny, Paula
Recruitment
After discussing Joe's potential membership (more below), we talked about recruitment more generally; given the co-op's current use patterns, we think it would be healthier if more people joined and seek to renew our recruitment efforts.
We will schedule a playground meetup once we have a few nibbles. Celia already has one; Jen is thinking of another. Everyone should be on the looked out for stressed out parents who need a sitter! We discussed our geographical restricts in terms of where we get new members from, and basically it comes down to an ad-hoc "well, what works for us?" case by case basis.
Incidentally, we talked about doing a social media blitz in an effort to get new members—which is scary, because we know that there are members of communities real and virtual who would like to join, but who we don't want to join. Talk fizzled out at that point. In the meantime, please send out the link to our brochure site (http://babysittingcoopinfo.blogspot.com) to interested potential members, and if you would like to throw a few flyers in strategic locations, here is one. By the way, the language in both of these recruitment tools is a couple of years old, so if you see something that needs to be edited, it probably does. Let Kevin or me know and we will make the changes.
Sit offers
At the last meeting we talked about changing procedures so that sitters could offer up potential sits. Laura's one sit offer had no takers, but we agreed to keep trying them out. The group basically OK'd any manner of sit requests, but for recordkeeping, we should continue to track sit offers on 30boxes (even if it is in parallel with some other system, like doodle) as we may include offering sits in the criteria for what determines non-use.
Non-use
It has been pretty high! Let's use us! Relatedly, Kate is going to reach out to Paula to see if she is still interested in being in the co-op.
Voting
Technically, we need unanimous approval to admit a new member, but meeting attendance has not made this possible in over a year. Yes, we need to vote on Joe/Brooke joining the co-op, but we may need to consider modifying the unanimity rule, given our collectively low meeting attendance of late. Katey, Ginny, Paula, do you trust the rest of us to vote in your best interest? Or would you prefer to hold off til the next meeting or social meet up to meet him and his family?
Next Meeting
Our next meeting is on September 16. We are also trying to organize a recruitment/social meetup for late August/ early September.
