Monday's Volunteer Assn Meeting

Hi Everyone,

As I'm sure everyone remembers, we had a Volunteer Association meeting Monday evening at Station 2. Click on "Read more ..." below to view the highlights of the meeting.1) Angela Adams resigned her position as Secretary of the VA Board because there are only so many hours in a day to be excellent. She didn't feel she could do the job justice given all the other demands on her time.

2) David Heffernan was elected to the position of Secretary of the VA Board. Sorry, David, I don't mean to step on your toes by writing this email instead of relying on the meeting minutes I know you're drafting! Congratulations to David for being nominated and elected!

3) We spent quite a while talking about fund-raising at the meeting. There were many excellent ideas thrown out for discussion. A motion (of sorts) was made and passed to form a fund-raising committee. The committee members are (if I remember correctly) Jason Davis, Richard Oelkers, Kevin Davis, and Kris Chandler. Anyone with good fundraising ideas should see one of these people.

4) A decision was made to move on generating revenue via T-Shirt production and sales. The fundraising committee is going to look at various methods to sell the shirts including setting up booths at Fred Meyers/Sams Club/etc, selling directly to gift shops, and internet sales. Carolyn Sheehy is coordinating the artwork and design of the t-shirts. Anyone having ideas should pass them on to Carolyn by March 15th or so. Fully developed ideas aren't required - Carolyn is willing dress them up if needed. We would like to print the shirts early next month and have the out for sale soon afterwards.

5) I need help with the CGFR web page. We need to keep the current web site updated with volunteer of the month, the training and event calendar, and other interesting tidbits. The current http://www.cgfr.com is more a website that is more of interest to the volunteers than to anyone else. We need a separate web site dedicated to telling about CGFR - something that talks about our mission, apparatus, stations, volunteers, etc. We should also have a Volunteer Association web page. Bryan Pherson volunteered to start looking at the new web pages - Phil Hoffman offered to help him. Is anyone else interested? We really need someone to keep the current web updated with new info - it is not a technically difficult job, it would just take an hour or two a week, max, and the right password for just about anyone in the department to do the job. Any takers?

6) We spent some time going over ways to spend the 10's of thousands of dollars we're going to make on t-shirt sales. There were lots of good ideas, but until we actually start producing income, it's premature to start spending.

7) The spring recruit class will be starting up soon. We need to get out and do some recruiting. No plan was developed, though, so let's help out the chief in any way we can!

8) The Volunteer Association will now have regularly scheduled meetings the first Monday of every month at 7:00pm. We will evaluate the scheduling if it is inconvenient for many people.

I'm sure I've missed something critically important ... hopefully someone else who attended the meeting will fill in the blanks!

Paul