February 21, 2024 Breakfast Meeting Notes

 

Tony opened with New Hampshire Trivia, Spiritual Leaders and Communities in New Hampshire edition!

 

The 50/50 was won by Sharon.

 

Peggy won the chance to draw and she found the ace of spades. Her share of the prize will be about $250. Congratulations Peggy!

 

Greg announced that yesterday there was a meeting of the transition grant committee. They will be doing a trade day (“Trade Talk Tuesdays”) at Plymouth High School starting in March. They are looking for a woman who works in construction to talk about what their job entails and their job satisfaction. This will be for 9th-12th grade students. The hope is that they can get more students interested in the trades and ready to apply for a grant when they reach their senior year. 

 

Beth announced that if anyone has an April through June date where they are looking for speakers, the NH Children Trust would like to speak to us about child abuse prevention. Sharon volunteered her day in May.

 

We received an email from Plymouth Parks and Rec (from Kelsey) about a cruise night on July 31. They would like to us to provide burgers and drinks for this event. Consensus was that this was a good idea.

 

Regional training for officers will be held on Saturday March 2 in North Conway at the Gibson Center right in the middle of town. There will be a discussion about what clubs are doing and tips for secretaries, treasurers and other board members. 

 

Beth, Alicia, and Mike will be going to PETS in March.

 

Last Friday was a board meeting. A number of topics were discussed. The date to take down the Christmas decorations will be the afternoon of Wed March 6 from 12:30 to 3. Ladders will be needed. (Russ and Alex can bring these.) There will be 8-9 students and 2 teachers from the Holderness School to help with this job. The board also reviewed the budget. We have $1700 in the bank for club account. We discussed the grant application. We had decided on a $10,000 grant for this year but we will probably not spend it in this fiscal year as we are still working with the community to determine what the project would be.

 

Omer wanted to know if we could support the Grafton County Nursing Home for one month of resident birthdays per year. There are usually no more than 12 residents having a birthday in any given month. They provide a list of residents’ names to sponsoring groups and the group provides the cards (and puts a dollar or up to 5 dollars in the card). The sponsoring group also provides a cake. July through September are taken already but all other months are up for grabs. Residents would love it if club members would attend their party. We need a little more information on this before we can agree to do it. 

 

Budget review: Alicia (not present today) had prepared a budget for the Foundation that removed Common Man for Ukraine income and expenses so that club members could more clearly see what we have to work with. This budget was presented to the club. The original plan was for this year’s budget to be in the red, in order to spend down some of our accumulated funds. Penny sale tickets were down this year as well. 

 

We had hoped to bring in about $20,000 for the annual fund and so far we are at only $10,900. 

Overall there is a projected to be a $14,000 deficit but because we won’t be spending the $10,000 grant this year we will only be about $4000 in the red. 

 

We discussed ways to close this gap. Steve will be providing a list of organizations that have funded us in the past and have not yet done so this year so that we can start making phone calls. Scholarships will remain the same as before and will be done in April. Sharon suggested a call-a-thon to call past donors, perhaps in the spring. We can talk to prospective donors about the training grants and see if we can motivate them to sponsor a grant.  George suggested a $5-$7 per month annual sponsorship (GiveButter can easily set this up.  This would be a relatively painless way for community members to make recurring donations. Bill also suggested that we used to have a summer fundraiser. We would do a scratch ticket basket in the summer. We could sell the right to put donor names on the stones that are at the amphitheater. We could sell calendars with each a different sponsor for each day; we would profit from the calendars and purchasers would be hoping to win the prizes. We could also do a 50/50 raffle on cruise night as there will already be a lot of people there.

 

Happy dollars were shared by Mike and Sharon.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

Lora Miller, secretary