February 2007

MOTIONS THIS MONTH

• • Mike moved that we agree in principle to maintain our membership in ACMA, and to place an ad in the NJ Folk Festival program, so it needn't be discussed each year. This motion passed.

  • Lori moved that we starting in January 2008, we schedule Board meetings for the first Tuesday of each month but that we opt for a different date if the first Tuesday conflicts with major holidays, Election Day and the week of the Festival. The major holidays include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Independence Day (July 4th). The exceptions to the first Tuesday rule will be determined at the January meeting each year. The motion passed 10-4 with 5 abstentions.

OPENING CEREMONIES

We met at the home of Paul and Melanie Axel-Lute. The meeting was called to order at 8:02 pm on February 6, 2007. We did not have a quorum at that time, but acquired one shortly thereafter, prior to accepting the January minutes.

Roll Call

Present were Lois DeRitter, Bob Isaacs, Andy Koenig, Evelyn Maurer, Barbara Moo, Bobbie Rosengarten, Mark Schaffer and Jim West (Trustees), Mike Agranoff, Paul Axel-Lute, Lori Falco, Larry Flanigan, George Otto, Brad Pryor, Tom Pylant, Sandie Reilly, Chris Riemer, Pam Robinson, Pat Rolston, Bob Safranek, Jean Scully and Rivka Willick (Other Board Members) and Allan Kugel and Rick Thomas (Guests).

Absent were Jim King and Elizabeth Lachowicz.

Treasurer’s Report

We received our first report from QuickBooks (see attached). This was a Profit & Loss statement, which gives a picture of what happened last month. Next month we will start receiving balance sheets tells us what's changed each month. Next month, we'll take a close look at the Balance Sheet, which tells us where we stand at a given point in time. In the future, both will be distribued electronically in advance of the meeting. People have had an easy time logging into the system on-line. You can also send e-mails from QuickBooks.

Pat reported that we were obliged to file 1099 forms for two five performers for 2006. We need to do this for any performer that makes $600 or more from us over the course of a calendar year. Anyone involved in paying talent should be aware of this. Chris noted that we also need to solicit the performer’s SSN if we will be filing the 1099. You can download 1099 forms from the IRS website.

Secretary’s Report

The minutes for January were accepted with the following corrections:

• • Bobbie Rosengarten is incorrectly listed as being present; she was not at the meeting.

  • Under Special Concerts, the minutes say “Chris suggested that we add a “How to Get Booked” section to our website.” This should read, “Chris suggested that the Special Concerts committee add its own "how to get booked" page to the website, to parallel the content that's already online for Minstrel and Festival.

  • The Festival report reads as follows "We only lost $600 for the year, not the larger amount reported earlier. The committee has talked about how to draw more people and is considering increasing the performer budget by $2,000. This increases the risk of losing money, but we decided that this is the matter for the committee to decide – whether to do it and how to handle it. They will deal with it if they need to; they’re proposing taking money from principal if need be. Adding to the incentive to increase attendance, the camp has raised the minimum to 200, 170 must be adults. Please send e-mail suggestions to Ken for performers you would like to see at Festival." The corrected report should read "We only lost $600 for the year, not the larger amount reported earlier. The committee has talked about how to draw more people and is considering increasing the performer budget by $2000. The Agranoff Endowment currently allocates to the Festival Performer Budget a limited disbursement (1.5% of the principal or roughly $1300 per Festival) from the interest it generates. The Committee had planned increasing their budget by up to $2,000, with the thought of covering the possible loss by withdrawing additional funds from the principal of the Agranoff Endowment if need be." It was later revealed that the Festival Committee does not have the authority to tap into those funds for two reasons. 1) Under the terms of the Endowment, the formula for disbursement could not be changed for the first five years. We still have a year to go before the 5 year period is up. 2) The Festival Committee does not have the authority to remove funds from that endowment. That needs to be done by the Board as a whole, even though the current disbursement scheme is allocated solely to Festival. The Board felt that the Committee does have the power to increase the performer budget with the intent to draw more attendees and without needing to identify where funds would come from if it resulted in a loss. This is particularly true at a point where the Project's finances are healthy enough to absorb such a loss without danger of insolvency.

  • Under Community Affairs, there’s a mention of sending a card to Brad who is recuperating from surgery. That should have read "knee replacement surgery."

  • Under Archive Management there was a line, “Bobbie noted that we still have some questions about copyright law with regard to the skits.” That should read,” The idea of donating DVDs of ‘other performances’ is still pending legal review. We can't donate things that we don't really own, and while this is PROBABLY not a problem with skits (although it could be), it might very well be a problem if someone has recorded a professional's performance. Barbara has taken this as a transitional item.”

  • Under Good of the Order, Jean's new house is in Asbury Park, not Asbury.

The minutes were accepted as corrected.

We discussed how the correction of the minutes should be handled on a monthly basis. We decided that Lori should apply the corrections to a copy of the minutes for the prior month and keep that copy on file. Lori plans to keep both an uncorrected and corrected copy. Mike asked that she send the corrected copies to him.

BUSINESS ITEMS

NJ Folk Festival Ad & Solicitation for Help

Each year we usually take an ad for the NJ Folk Festival and the Champlain Valley Folk Festival and renew our membership in ACMA. We discussed doing this on an automatic basis each year, without the need for Board approval each time. Mike felt that we shouldn’t do Champlain Valley on an automatic basis because of the distance. We don’t usually get the request for an ad from the NJ Folk Fest until late February or early March. Usually we approve it – the cost has been running about $200.

Mike moved that renewing ACMA membership and taking out an ad in the NJ Folk Festival program become an ongoing, automatic responsibility. However, whoever is in charge of taking care of this should report to the Board when it has been done. This motion passed.

Proposal to Move Board Meetings to Second Tuesday

Lori had a proposal to change the standing date of the Board meeting, effective January 2008, from the first Tuesday of each month to the Tuesday following the *second* Monday of each month. Her rationale was that the November meeting almost always conflicts with Election Day and the May and October meetings are usually held the same week as our Festival. Besides making it somewhat harder for Board members to vote, the Election Day conflict means a conflict if Board members want to do volunteer work on Election Day or enjoy being home to watch the returns. On the week of Festival, Board members may have a lot of other responsibilities involved with getting ready for Festival, making it a very hectic week.

There was a lot of discussion and points pro and con. Brad has a standing conflict with another group on the second Tuesday of the month. Lois saw some advantages in that there are some things that we need to discuss immediately after the Festivals. We also discussed keeping it on the first Tuesday but moving it for these conflicts and possibly others. Chris felt we should just pick a standing date and not move it.

Taking the discussion into account, Lori decided not to make a formal motion from her original proposal, but instead made the motion specified below. This differs from our current policy in that it dictates certain times when we must move the meeting instead of moving it on a case by case basis as we do today.

Lori moved that effective January 2008 we schedule Board meetings for the first Tuesday of each month. However, we must move the meeting if it conflicts with major holidays, Election Day and week of Festival. The major holidays include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Independence Day (July 4th). The exceptions to the first Tuesday rule will be determined at the January meeting each year. The motion passed 10-4 with 5 abstentions.

REPORTS OF THE STANDING COMMITTEES

Minstrel Booking

January attendance at the Minstrel was disappointing, considering the talent of the acts. We averaged 83.3 in attendance, 68 if you count Open Stage. Last January the numbers were 141 and 113.5 with Open Stage.

We only had 57 people for the Nields; last time we had over 100. We haven’t changed policies or publicity or anything else, so this is puzzling. We have started a policy of giving free return passes to first time attendees. Mike invites the Open Stage performers to the Evening of Music when he confirms their time slot. Sandie will print cards for people to give to guests. Bob noted that our grant money could offset these losses, but Barbara said that if you use the grant money you have to acknowledge ACMA. Mike would prefer to keep it separate.

Minstrel Staffing

Managing the volunteer list via e-mail is easiest for Sandie. She doesn’t keep the website updated. Volunteers can contact Sandie via email at any time.

Swingin’ Tern

Our first three dances of the year have been well attended, with 92 at the Anniversary dance Jan.6th, 85 on the "new talent" night Jan.20th, and 82 this past Saturday Feb.3rd. All had net revenue, helped along by having volunteer callers at the Anniversary dance and three-person bands at the other two dances--the net would still have been positive, though small, without those factors.

Cumulative net for those three dances was $305. The first half of the Feb.3rd dance was filmed by Cablevision; we will be notified of when it will air, and they will give us a DVD. Our next special event, on April 21st, will be the Rock 'n' Reel, following the same format as the Harvest Hoot but with rock and roll instead of swing; Mark Schaffer will be leading the bands for that event, and the caller will be Christine Hale.

Horses Sing None of It

Sandie hosted the 2 shows taped 1/18. Due to a graphics error, the credit roll did not get onto either tape. Also, the Rowan Bros. did an Everly Bros tune; apparently they weren't aware of our prohibition of covers of copyrighted tunes without written gratis permission of the owner, despite having signed the release to that effect. We set up an editing date with Cablevision on Wed. night 2/28 to correct these problems. We weren't able to schedule a taping in February due to recent enforcement of Cablevsion's Public Access rule limiting scheduled taping dates to 4.

Taped in January: Dust Poets, Rowan Brothers, Eco Del Sur and Sean Harkness. Upcoming: 3/27/07 Pamela Wyn Shannon & Lisa Gutkin, 3/27/06 Little Toby Walker, 4/23/07 Michael Young.

Special Concerts

Pam spoke with the Kadie Dempsey, the ACMA-Dodge Partnership Grant contact. She is okay with our program no longer being primarily Celtic. She likes that we are going to continue with many of the other items in the grant application such as workshops, community outreach, and house concerts.

The grant covers the period of time from October 2006 through May 2007, which means that the Cherish the Ladies concert presented in December was covered by the grant.

The committee is excited to announce our first concert is in the works for Friday, March 16th featuring Tommy Sands at the MUUF. (Replacing an Open Stage, thanks Mike.) We are all working like crazy to put this event on in such a short time. It is coming together nicely. Our break-even point based on projected expenses is 115 tickets at $20.00 per ticket. We are expecting that we should be able to come very close to selling out, because Mr. Sands' will not be performing anywhere else in our area. Mr. Sands is known in FP circles for the song “There were Roses”. Pete Seeger considers Mr. Sands to have “achieved that difficult but wonderful balance between knowing and loving the traditions of his home and being concerned with the future of the whole world....”

In May, we are also presenting a guitar workshop with Jack Williams (details to follow next month), and we are starting to book a house concert in October. (With the assistance of the Storytelling Committee.) Per Chris's comment at the last meeting, the Committee has decided that it does not want a “booking” page on the FP website. We prefer to choose performers and go out to them.

Festival

We have booked Aztec Two-Step for Fall Festival and are scrambling around for two more acts after Christine Lavin said no. Spring festival in on track and registration will start in March!

Storytelling

The first flyers are out for the September festival and Rivka passed them around for us to admire. Rick will take them to the Minstrel to put out on the literature table.

Membership

Pat thanked Barbara for the labels for January. We have our new membership flyer. Barbara said everyone should take some and pass them around to friends. We printed 2000 total. Mark has the original artwork. Mike suggested that we write on the boxes where the artwork is and that Mark should keep a note on the artwork saying where the boxes are.

Chris asked if the cost of the flyers should be under publicity or membership. After asking if anyone objected, Barbara said it’s the Treasurer’s choice.

Newsletter

Tom thanked Chris and Andy for help with his formatting issues. “We’re not perfect, but we’re getting better each time.” He would like some material from the Storytelling committee since they are not well represented in the newsletter.

Evelyn said that the Washington Business Improvement group is looking for performers and gave Tom information for the newsletter. This should also go to Elizabeth. Barbara said that there should be a note in the newsletter explaining that the small font is not intentional, since people have asked her about it.

Webmaster

George has many duties that he performs monthly, quarterly, etc. In February many of these cycles came due at the same time. He distributed a list of these (see attached). He reminded us that if you see a link that is no good on the website, please let him know. There is a new printer-friendly registration form for the Festival.

Our MySpace site is doing well. The friends count has jumped from about 20 to more than 69. The number of profile views has climbed from 100 to over 397. If you have a MySpace page, put us in your top friends.

George has developed an e-mail list (fullboard@folkproject.org) for sending mail to the entire Board. We discussed who should be on this list and determined it should be only Board members and those identified as receiving courtesy copies.

George also noted that the publicity requirements for the Minstrel have changed and we now need electronic copy only, no paper photos. However, we are still mailing out paper for our press releases.

The number of web hits are up, which is surprising given that attendance has fallen. Andy: “If you can read it on the net, there’s no need to go.”

Merchandising

Brad will look into acquiring mugs for the Spring Festival. There will be no new T-shirts for Fest and all we have left are size Large.

Internal Affairs

The upcoming Valentine’s show looks very exciting. Almost all of the 2007 Evenings of Music have been booked. Our new workshops will start in March with Andy Goessling. They will run from 6:30 – 7:30 pm on the same night as the Evening of Music. We are not paying Andy for this – he is volunteering his time. Chris suggested that we could use money from our grant to give the workshop leaders an honorarium.

Mike said that Nancy Dugan of Dugan’s Hooligans is willing to host something – perhaps she could host the holiday party? Brad said that Diane Semling indicated she’d be willing to host. She lives in Greenbrook. Jean will look into it.

Community Affairs

The NJ Folk Festival is usually the last Saturday in April, so at the March or April meetings Elizabeth will be looking for volunteers to sign up to help staff the booth.

Regarding the Members Resource list, she will send George her current spreadsheet sometime before the March meeting so that he can get familiar with the data that she has. She's also putting together a notice to go into the March newsletter to request that people send her updates to include themselves in the list. She notes that there are lots of folks that she knows are performers but who haven't signed up in the Members Resource list.

Her newsletter blurb will include the fact that we are planning to put the Resource list on the web, which may make people more interested in signing up. Of course, there may be some who don't want to be on the web in which case they will need to ask her to remove their names. Elizabeth also requests that board members talk up the Members Resource list so that our performers know it's there and participate in it. In particular, she suggests that at Open Stage and other Minstrel events it'd be good to mention that it exists and to direct folks to the upcoming March newsletter.

Sound Reinforcement

The new sound board and case for Swingin' Tern has been purchased and is in use. The old sound board is now in my care. He is looking for input in regards of what to do with it. Offer for sale to Members? Offer to other dances or coffeehouses? Keep as a spare (if so, WHERE will it be kept!)?

Due to a busy schedule, the next sound training workshop will be attempted in the Fall (after festival/Vacation season).

REPORTS OF AD HOC COMMITTEES AND SPECIAL WORK GROUPS

Grant Allocation

The committee has not yet met; a meeting is planned for late February.

Archive Management

Bobbie has completed the transfer to Rutgers of all the existing paperwork she was given and will forward copies of the festival skits when she receives them. Due to copyright considerations, we will not archive copies of concerts or other FP activities. As we look to the future, there will be a steady stream of documents to be sent to the archives. Bobbie has volunteered to act as an on-going liaison to Rutgers. The archive process will be part of our Document Retention activity as described below.

Key Dates, Archives, and Document Retention

Pam, Bobbie, and Barbara met on January 21 to try to complete the three ad-hoc committee activities: Key Dates Index, Archive Management, and Document Retention. At this point we believe the Archive and Key Dates activities are completed and we expect to finish the Document Retention activity in March.

Bobbie received key dates from several of the committees. Thanks to everyone who responded! We hope the process of formalizing dates was useful for those committees that responded and that they’ll similarly track their dates within their committees. From these responses we extracted those dates that seemed to have a sufficient project-wide impact that the Board should monitor them. Those dates are:

The board will track completion of these items by having the president include a related item in the agenda for the appropriate month(s). Bobbie asks that anyone who has additional dates that they think the board should monitor send them to the president who will incorporate them into the key date process.

Document Retention Developments

We reviewed Pam’s latest list of documents that, as a corporation, we are required to maintain. Pam is in the process of producing a list of documents, retention period, and officer or committee that is responsible for each type of document.

Pam hopes to have this list complete in time for the next board meeting. At that time, we’ll also propose a process for maintaining these documents. Briefly, that process will rely upon the appropriate officer or committee holding the current year’s documents. At the end of the year documents will be transferred to Bobbie who will hold them until the retention period is complete. When we no longer need to hold the documents Bobbie will forward them to Rutgers.

THE IN BOX

NJ History Fair and Yale Choir

GOOD OF THE ORDER

Chris discovered that there is a Folk Project entry in the Wikipedia, apparently started by Liz Pagan. Pam reported that Amy Ksir and Tom Rhoads of Broadside Electric became first-time parents on January 30. She also said that Scott Sheldon is engaged. Mark’s daughter Rebecca broke her leg playing flag football with co-workers; she was the only woman in the game. Mark’s wife, Robin, got an offer to work in Thailand or London, but she chose Secaucus, “so I’ll still be on the board for a while.” This will be Andy’s first time singing with the chorus at the Valentine’s Day Extravaganza. He also arranged a song for the group. Mike facetiously announced, “As of September, I will be a full-time folksinger.” In truth, his firm is closing their NJ office and he is considering becoming a consultant. Brad thanked all who helped him during his recuperation from knee replacement surgery. “I’m walking and I’m bionic like Evelyn,” he said. “Thank you, everybody.” Sandie’s daughter needs to sell 100 boxes of Girl Scout cookies and so far sales have fallen short. “So reserve yours now.” Her son was accepted into DePaul. It was quite an honor, but at $10K/yr they will have to decline. Evelyn started a part-time job teaching LPN students. Barbara attended the rehearsal of the Boogie Woogie band for the Valentine’s show and said, “Be there. It’s going to be fabulous!” [And it was]. Bobbie saw an interesting exhibit at the NJ Historical Society highlighting stories from people in the community. Melanie Axel-Lute’s name was included on a plaque thanking those who had worked on the exhibit. Bobbie also said that Karyn Grunwald performed Gershwin tunes in Roosevelt last month and was the hit of the show. Larry is closing his store for a week to visit his parents in Key Largo. He plans on fishing, drinking margaritas and perhaps taking in an Arlo Guthrie concert down the street. Jean’s house in Asbury Park is coming along, but she is learning the meaning of the term “Money Pit”. A contractor’s number on her phone makes her “blood run cold." But it will be beautiful when it’s done.” Jean’s daughter, Siobhan, recently attended an orientation for High School, reminding us how quickly time flies.

ADJOURNMENT

In closing remarks, Barbara asked us to think about how we use the Board meetings, what we like, what we don’t and what we should spend our time on. She also asked us to consider how to make time in the meeting for things we want to talk about.

Sadly, your Secretary neglected to record the time that we adjourned. I believe it was about 10 pm. The next meeting will be held on March 6 at the home of Rick and Cathy Thomas.

Respectfully submitted,

Lori Falco

Secretary