Minstrel Staffing

Dear Board,

My deepest apologies for not making tonight's meeting, between my mother visiting from Florida and the chaos of the first day of school I completely forgot about the meeting until moments ago. Being nearly an hour and a half away from Highland Park it makes no sense to attempt to come in.

We have seen great success in asking from the stage for help cleaning up from break. It gets new people involved in volunteering by testing the waters without having to commit for the entire night. If you remember that we used to ask people to stack the chairs in the old venue, you'll remember that many people got their volunteer start dong just that and became faithful supporters of FP from there. It helped build and grow our community and my hopes are that this return to on the spot volunteering will do much the same.

A few glitches have shown up by people not knowing where things should go will be addressed by labeling on each item, diagrams for placement on the inside lids of the boxes and a reminder by the day's kitchen staff to look for those signs and labels as the items are put away. In addition, I am working on an abbreviated cheat sheet version of the volunteer handbook pages for kitchen procedure because the handbook is unwieldy and never consulted. This cheat sheet will be laminated and accessible in the box at the front desk with a copy on the inside lid of the main kitchen box.

MUF had a new wireless system put in the week after spring festival and I've asked minister Allison a few times since then, for permission to use the line. She explained that she did not know the codes and would see about getting us access. Mike contacted her on his own so with a little luck, we'll get the okay to use it. In the meantime, I now have an iphone and can access the online, up to date volunteer calendar from MUF. It is not ideal because I have a minimal data plan, the phone screen is small and I'm not sure the edit function doesn't have a glitch that will erase the record if I access a page, but it is better than nothing and is available to anyone whenever I am at MUF. It is also accessible to anyone at anytime who is in our minstrelvolunteer group who can get internet on their phone. They can not edit the pages directly, but they can email us from that phone and from that page and Amy and I will edit and confirm as we are able. I will test on a dummy page shortly and see if I can edit from my phone without erasing data.