The Meeting was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco from 1:00 until 3:30.
There were about a dozen attendees and we each introduced ourselves. If I missed someone, then please accept my apologies. The meeting was chaired by Roger Eaton for the first half and then by Bob Flax, who has a good way of keeping a bubbling meeting such as we had under good control.
Mahwish Aslam new COO office manager
Sandra Chaves, UNA-SF member
Cathy Corcoran of AAUW
Elizabeth Cormier of UU-UNO
Larry Danos of UU-UNO
Roger Eaton, COO Chair
Bob Flax President of Democratic World Federalists
Jill Huinder, UNA-SF Student member and COO volunteer
Roger Kotila VP of Democratic World Federalists
Karen Melander-Magoon
Mary Jane Mikuriya from Servas
Nate Paluga, UNA SF GenUN member
Trilight Tom Ray, COO volunteer
Mahwish Aslam introduced herself as our new office manager. She will also be office manager for UNA-SF and the Gender Crosstalk project.
We approved Physicians for Social Responsibility Bay Area as a member organization. Thank you Bob Gould for giving us the thumbs up on that.
We are looking forward to an application for membership by Peter Dumont's Star Alliance at our next meeting.
The group understood and accepted our position as both a coalition and a UNA-SF committee. Roger reported: 1) We have a bank account with $235 in it for the exclusive use of the COO. However, if the COO should ever wish to separate from UNA-SF, the COO cannot count on taking the money from this bank account with it. 2) The Chair of the COO needs to be the Chair of the UNA-SF COO Committee, currently Roger Eaton. However, Roger will be termed out as a UNA-SF Board member in 2016, so at some point we need to begin thinking about a new Chair. and 3) importantly we need to make sure we dovetail our programs with that of UNA-SF. This will be particularly important when it comes to UN 70th planning - we don’t want to have competing events.
We began a discussion of the Gender Crosstalk and Roger Eaton gave a short presentation about the Crosstalk. His proposal was that each COO meeting we discuss the latest messages from the Women and the Men, both for the SF Bay Area and globally. There was concern expressed about dividing the world into two genders. Roger Eaton promised to give some thought to this - we will return to the topic next meeting
[After consideration, my proposal is that we will add “Simply Human” as a third choice for gender in addition to Male and Female. At the same time, the results of the Gender Crosstalk will be expanded to include the message rated highest overall by all participants under the heading “Voice of Humanity as One”. This will be implemented in the Crosstalk technology directly after we implement the global/national/local geographic slider. Comments welcome. -- Roger Eaton]
Discuss UN 70th plans:
With the help of Bob Flax, who took the helm and restored order to our enthusiastic crew, we came up with the following list of (approved) possibilities for UN 70th:
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Public Education
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Celebration
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Connection with students
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Tie in with Gender Crosstalk
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Sustainable Development Goals
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“Birthplace of the UN” plaque for the the War Memorial if UNA-SF doesn’t want to handle it - possibly for UN 71st since time is so short
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Intergenerational Variety Show
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Repeat UN 69th at the UU Church
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Philosophers Way Hike in June led by Nate Paluga
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Have several events, not just one - Trilight offered to handle the calendar
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Encourage organizations each to do their own event or exhibition
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Event at UN Plaza
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Involve the City of San Francisco
For a UN 70th theme we had “The UN, Past, Present and Future”.
Criteria: Meaningful, Manageable, Affordable, Educational.
New information: UNA-SF will be participating in a musical celebration of the signing of the UN Charter on Saturday June 27 from 1 to 5 pm, so our potential Philosophers Way Hike needs to be either in the morning on June 27, or in the afternoon of June 28.
For the next step, we designated a volunteer UN 70th Committee: Mahwish Aslam, Jill Huinder, Karen Melander-Magoon and Roger Eaton. They will meet and prepare a more concrete UN 70th agenda for our next meeting, which will be in early May.
Our UN 70th Committee is currently deliberating whether to propose at the upcoming UNA-SF Members Meeting, Saturday, Feb 28, that UNA-SF and the COO work together on a UN 70th student event. Any thoughts, considerations? This would need a final OK at the May COO meeting, to be sure, but if we can put it together, it would seem to match several of the criteria we developed at our Feb 21, 2015 meeting.
Good meeting! Thanks to all. Help spread the word so our next meeting is bigger.
