Minutes of Peace and Social Concerns,  4/3/18

Present: Dan G, George M, Roger C, Ken H, Beth A, Mary Ellen C, Frank G.

We opened the meeting with a time of silence.

1. Mary Ellen brought ideas about letter-writing, inspired by the FCNL advocacy group in Northampton of which she is a member.  She passed out Information from FCNL about best practices for letter writing.  She has agreed to handle letter writing this month.  She will get 30 postcards and stamps and will announce the topic.

2. Ken had earlier sent us some concerns about the way we have been managing the “Friends Concerns: Other Organizations” part of the budget and reviewed these concerns in the meeting.  In the discussion it became clear that we should agree on wording specifying the criteria used for proposing organizations. Ken and Roger agreed to write up a draft set of criteria and to circulate it for comments by the committee.  It will be on next month’s agenda of our committee. The draft will also propose whether a person may be an advocate for more than one organization.  We hope that advocates will be passionate about the organizations they represent.

3. Beth reminded us of Pat Hynes’ talk here on April 12. ”The Polluter Does Not Pay.”  Beth will publicize it within our meeting.

4. Frank mentioned the possibility of having a group of MtToby people get trained in filming videos, so as  to be available for filming local events for media presentation.

5. By an email received earlier, Ka reported that there were 12 responses to our request for people to suggest FCNL priorities.  She sent a summary report of them and the categories they seemed to fall in.  Beth offered to get together with Ka to work out a synthesis of these suggestions which can be sent to FCNL by April 13.

We ended with a time of silence.