Meeting Minutes 12/1/99

Sister Parish Committee meetings are held the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 7 pm. in the school. Newcomers are always welcome. If you have questions, please contact any of the members of the committee.

What follows are the minutes of the Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999 meeting.

On a secretarial note from the secretary(of course), this is the first minutes that will be read completely electronically, either by email or our website. Our letter mailing has gradually dwindled down to zero. So our committee and interested persons are all wired! We currently have 33 people plus the TNII committee receiving our minutes at 28 separate email addresses. We have lost a few interested minute readers over the last few months. I anticipate we will get a few hits at the minutes on our website from others once the traffic on the SJA site picks up. That traffic should pick up gradually as more other organizations develop pages like we have. But it's nice not to have to shuffle paper, envelopes, and stamps to everyone. Besides we save a few sheckles.

On business notes: Mindy informed us that Janet Brown, preschool coordinator, is having the preschool kids create Christmas greetings for TNII.

We will be creating a banner to send to TNII with our committee's Christmas greetings Saturday at Vickie's party. The party is at 7 pm, BYOB and one item to share. Vickie's address is 3659 Major Ave. N.; Robbinsdale, 612.529.0958. If you have a picture to paste on to the banner or other memorabilia, bring it. Otherwise, we will write on the banner with markers. We will be sending the banner along with one of those Minnesota scenery photo books that you see everywhere. Joel will purchase that.

Tim and Mary Beth will send a letter to TNII with details of the candle sale as well as other information about what we have been doing. They also have some questions to ask TNII. We have no new news from TNII. They still have not replied regarding the dates for the next delegation. Tim and Mary Beth will pose some of those same questions in the letter.

Speaking of the candle/card sale, we grossed $5219 with many candles and cards left over. This compares to about $4400 gross last year. Our profits are down, of course, because of the cost of the cards this year($2200), but we have many more that we can sell into the future. We asked Joel/Louise to give 100 cards to Fr. George to use in his correspondence. We seemed to agree that there was slightly less interest in the candles this year by our parishioners. This makes sense as it is our 3rd year. We can save the remaining candles and cards and discuss how we wish to deal with this next year. Joel did ask Jeff to put up a order form on the webpage for anyone interested in buying candles/cards and agreed to service any requests. We agreed that there probably would be few if any requests but Jeff will do it because Joel brought wine to the newsletter stuffing session.(just kidding) The webpage for the candle card sales is at http://www.stjoan.com/sp/sales.htm .

Speaking of stuffing of the non Thanksgiving variety, we will meet next Wednesday the 8th in the Eagan Room at 6:30 pm to stuff cards for SP Inc. We agreed to fund and labor the card creation/assembly for the Richard Fenske tribute request. SP Inc ordered about 5000 cards like ours from Joel with their address, etc on the back. The total cost for this will be about $2200. This expense/effort on our part will be in lieu of our previous agreement to donate 20% of Mission Sunday funds to SP Inc. The money works out to be about the same, we just get the added benefit of increased carpal tunnel syndrome. Please join us, many hands make light work. Bring friends, bring wine.

As an added incentive to attend the card stuffing session next Wednesday the 8th at 6:30 pm in the Eagan Room, Louise called off the scheduled December 15th committee meeting. We also agreed to continue meeting on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month so our next meeting will be on January 5th, Y2K allowing. The full meeting schedule is on the website under Upcoming Events, http://www.pconline.com/~sja/ue.html

Our winter retreat will be sometime in March but will not be at Tim and Mary Beth's cabin. They hope to attend the retreat but cannot commit to taking caring of more than one immature human being at a time. Louise will check into Wilder and ask Vickie to check into the ARC. Any other ideas, contact Louise at 651.645.6821.

The 2nd Northern Advisory Board meeting for SP Inc. will be held in Bloomington, Indiana on Martin Luther King weekend(Jan. 14-16). This is the new group that anyone in a linkage is invited to join. Their mission is to share stories of hermanamientos and create a future plan for SP Inc. Louise is going for sure. If anyone else is interested in joining her, contact her at 651.645.6821.

Bob will write a letter of support for Linda Mashburn, the treasurer of SP Inc who was arrested in the SOA protest. He will bring it to sign at Vickie's party. He also brought up the idea of possibly investigating helping fund her legal situation. We chose not to deal with that at this time since nothing of that sort has happened and sometimes doesn't.

Our next meeting will spend a portion of the session discussing where we think SP Inc. should go next. Each Sister Parish has been asked to contribute to that idea.