The URL can be used to link to this page

Home My WebLink About2011-06-17 - MinutesFFEAC Council Meeting Notes Meeting Facilitator Mark Larmoyeux Meeting Scribe Mikel Lolley, Mark Larmoyeux Meeting Date June 17, 2011 Meeting Start Time 9:OOam Location Fayetteville Public Library Meeting End Time 10:30am Attending Marianne Hauser, Pattie Williams, Steve Clark, Julie McQuade, Phil Stafford, Mikel Lolle , Mark Larmoyeux Topics Lead by... Action Group Reporting Inclusion — Pattie Williams • Inclusion Group has increased by 3 people in the last 2 months. • New initiative — A yet to be named project using the 'Box' used during Earth days. The initiative is to take the box on the road, with the first event to be at the Fest-of-All, on September 1, 2011. o New ideas for where to take "The Box'. The box theme is about inclusion and diversity. A name for the project will be determined by the next FFEAC meeting. • Farmer's Market • Public Library • Good for Children's events • Wilson Park Pool • International week at the Fayetteville High School • Terra Studios Children's festival on Oct 1, 2011 1 • New initiative — Julie McQuade, as an Inclusion Group member, is Mark Larmoyeux representing the Inclusion Group in working with the Fest-of-All, which is Sept 1s'. Julie is working to get participating partners for the event. The University, the Chamber, and the Inclusion group are all current participating partners. • New initiative — a UARK professor who work with aging would like to work with the Inclusion Group on researching how Fayetteville is, or could be conducive to healthy aging. The professor would like the Inclusion Group to work on the research, and the professor will get students to assist with the research. • New initiative — The inclusion Group is doing a digital project to record and archive examples of inclusion within the Northwest Arkansas region. Shelley from the Visitor's Bureau is leading this effort. The goal is to find a web site solution where the archive can be stored. FFEAC Council Meeting Notes Green Economy - Mikel Lolley • The Green Economy Group has been recognized by the Citizen's First Congress, with an invitation to attend a luncheon on June 25th, in Little Rock to receive the recognition. • Green Economy is continuing work on the Energy Economic Development, and has meetings set up in Little Rock prior to June 25 to lay the ground work for future legislation. Meetings will be with key legislators, bill authors, Arkansas Energy Office, and Arkansas Economic Development office. The goal is to follow the Colorado strategy of continuing to put forth the bills and continuing to educate and promote the bill's initiatives with the legislators. City of Fayetteville - Julie McQuade • Julie informed the group the mayor is attending the National Mayor's Conference, which is why he is not at the meeting. Chamber of Commerce - Steve Clark • The Fayetteville COC is involved with a working group called the Chambers for Clean Energy, which fits within the Chambers work on Green Economic Development efforts. The CCE is in the process of becoming a more formal entity, and the Fayetteville COC will be on the steering committee for the this new organization, with the steering committee members to be comprised of 5 chambers across the country. The organization has received a $300,000 grant to get the organization off the ground and to get a formal structure, and they are hopeful of receiving another $300,000 grant in the future to support the organization. CCE will most likely operate out of Chapel Hill, NC. • Steve mentioned to Mikel this new organization would be very interested in learning more about the legislation they are working on, and they may be able to bring national resources to assist with their efforts in Arkansas. Steve also mentioned the best time to have the legislative strategy in place is during the election cycle and immediately after. Council Topics and Discussion Julie Topic # 1 McQuade Julie McQuade has developed a web site called CommunityLink as a social networking site for all things Fayetteville, especially around volunteering and connection on common topics of interest by Fayetteville citizens. The URL is; 2 http://fayettevilleforward.org/ Julie has designed the site to provide all citizens a way to connect, and links are also available between the site and Facebook and Twitter. Julie is promoting the use of the site for FFEAC as well, explaining each group will be able to set up and customize their a custom web page for each group. The site is built using WordPress, and therefore pretty much any plug -ins available to WordPress will be available the individual groups. FFEAC Council Meeting Notes The site is chiefly a blog experience with the ability to receive notifications when the blog site is updated. Julie has volunteered to give in-depth training to any group who would like to receive training. Julie will also be available to assist any group with any technical issues in using or setting up the site. Julie can give admin permissions to any person for an Action Group site. The CommunityLink site is active and online. Julie concluded the demo of the new site with a request to the group leaders to think about how their groups could create their own pages and become integrated into the larger Fayetteville Forward efforts of the city. Topic # 2 Success Committee Review and Action. This is an excellent opportunity for the council to collaborate and work together on a project. One of the goals of this project is to create a collaborative process whereby all the FFEAC members can work together to implement. Brainstorming on additional ideas on what can we do with the collected successes. • Newspaper Column - city news reporter. Have a feature story. • Orchestrate an event that highlights the FFEAC successes. • The city has a volunteer event on Sept 1, on the square. Event Ideas • Tie it to something significant, such as the second year of the forming of FFEAC, or some event with the city that celebrates success in other areas, or the mayor's State of the City speech. • The event should be about success, even if in conjunction with another event. People are attracted • It should be something that people can see, feel, hear, sense, photograph it, in order to learn more about Fayetteville Forward. Something that is hand's on. It has to be an experience. People participating together. • An event which can annualized. • Tied to Earth Day? Help promote the idea of people working together. • Success Day that is tied into Earth Day (the 14 day events) • An event allows FFEAC to accomplish all of it's stated goals for the success committee. Topic # 3 Discussion on how FFEAC Action Groups are created, and how to retire Action Groups. Situation: A group is not attending the council meetings, and/or their group is not meeting, and/or they do not have any projects they are currently working on. Question: How do the FFEAC council members feel we should handle these FFEAC Council situations? Responses: Meeting Notes • It is hard to imagine that there are not any projects or things to be worked on in any of the groups. It may be there are not the right people in the room, or the right time, or the level of energy to work on community issues, but there is always plenty to work on. • There is not a process that has been formalized. In the absence of any structure on how a group is created or retired, a lot of energy is burned up in trying to maintain and continually trying to energize groups that are ready to retire, or should retire. • There is a feeling that some groups are critical and should not be allowed to retire. An example was given of the Historical Heritage, which is felt to be critical to the community. • It was felt it would be better to focus on the creation of groups instead of on the retirement of groups. An example was given of the Genesis Technology Incubator. With Genesis, an application is filled out by the company, and there is a process defined to assist the business in being successful. A kind of "Model for Success'. The FFEAC groups could be formed in such a way that they would have a Model of Success. There should be elements of group sustainability in the model, as well as outlining some of the pitfalls. The model would help us establish the success factors right up front. • The model should include the concept of "graduation" for a group as well. There should be the idea a group is looking to graduate to a self - running, highly active, group which is able to manage itself without the assistance from the council. It should be a goal for any group to be self- sustaining, and they are able to get their message out to the community of their work and to engage the community. • The model should have a way to help groups during the transition of leadership. • There is not currently a process where we can deal with group leaders who are continuing to meet with their groups, but are not coming to the meetings. How do we deal with this? It was suggested we develop some working agreements. • For groups that are meeting but not attending the FFEAC meetings, perhaps we invite them to be the key presenter at a council meeting, to catch us up and to re-engage them. • A scenario was suggested for input from the council. What if there is a person or group of people who wish to do a single project which has a definitive timeline and end date. Would it be okay to allow this group to form an Action Group in FFEAC for a limited period of time. o A response was this is okay, but there should still be some guidelines for the group to work within. The key being we do FFEAC Council Meeting Notes not want to waste energy continuing to find out where the group is after their project is completed. o There should be a group process. It is felt we are not in a good place right now to handle this type of scenario. o A consideration would have to be the impact on the council. Is this group desiring to have the other groups participate? Would this impact work the council is already doing? • It was brought up that since Economic Development is a core part of what we do, it would make sense to include this in the Model of Success template. • It was brought up that groups that form around a single project tend to have a harder time sustaining themselves over the long term. Groups that form on general concepts, and then go in search of projects tend to do better over the long term. • Is there an idea of core groups? Could individual projects somehow be incorporated into existing core groups, thereby also enhancing the core groups and their successes? Early vetting via the Model of Success could help determine if a new idea would fit into an existing core group. Action Items Mark • FFEAC council agreed to do an event which celebrates the successes of Larmoyeux FFEAC. o Most likely tied to another event. 3 o Most likely will occur in 2012 to allow adequate time for planning, although some smaller efforts may be possible during 2011. • Phil Stafford is to work on a framework, or template based upon the discussion during this meeting for the Model of Success. Mikel also joined Phil to work on this effort. They are to report at the next council meeting. Agenda for next Council meeting Mark • Reports Larmoyeux 4 • Inclusion Group is to bring box to the next meeting • Work on Event Agenda • Review template or initial work on Action Group Model of Success