Year 2025

Ballou (High School) camp 2025

Ballou Rumpus Bonfire at end of Ballou II

2025 Kitchen in Full Swing   Arson making cinnamon rolls!

Ballou Camp I   (High School) 2025

Unirondack in-person Board Meeting April 26, 2025

Saturday, 9:30 am – 5:00 pm

Attendance:

In-person:

Douglas Taylor

David Pynchon

Arson Allen

Sam Meister

Lauren Hunt

Caleb Seguin

Sujata Rege Konowitz

Elizabeth Bashur

Kelly Jennings

Lynne Theophanis

Online:

Kristen Fiore

Jesse D.

Kathleen Sheehy

Emily Patka

Agenda

Brief Check in

Approve of this agenda

Done

Approve of past minutes

Kelly motions to approve the Jan 25 and Feb 25, Lynne seconded

100% approval, Sheehy to add minutes to website

Budget review

Lauren: not a lot of our spending happens until next week when Camp opens.  We will figure out what needs to be fixed, if our utility usage rate changes.

Income is based off of what hits our bank, not the total registration

Statement of Financial Position/Statement of Activity:

Income is down 16% for primary programming.  Some of that is because we got paid this fiscal year for programming that happened last fiscal year.

Membership dues are on track.

Ultimately gross profit is down 5% compared to this time last year

Expenses-wise, things are pretty on-track.  

Accountant will start on May 1st and we will be able to work with them on financials.

Expenses: tried to do it based on estimated inflation and growth, insurance, utilities.  Expecting it to be higher than lower, want to be prepared to spend more money

Most risk in the budget will probably come from spending on capital expenditures and maintenance.  Camperships may also increase.

Everybody is getting squeezed, but people might also be inspired to donate to places like Camp, so that’s a toss-up.

Lauren: another UU camp was told by their insurance provider that they aren’t renewing their insurance.  That hasn’t happened to us, but this happened because the camp is in Texas and they said they won’t cover that geographical area.

Executive Team Reorganization proposal

Goal to describe why the executive team exists the way it does.  Show advantages and disadvantages of changing this.  Please take this in the context of the executive team by-laws.  This is less of a definitive “Here is why this is the right move” than an objective overview.

Main advantages of a hierarchical system are simplicity and familiarity.  When people interact with an organization, they are expecting to encounter a hierarchical system.  The classic, “Can I speak to your manager?”  There is also a simplicity to this.

The disadvantages of a hierarchical system are that Unirondack doesn’t function that way culturally, so to speak.  We function much more laterally.  Our Executive Director is very part time and pretty uninvolved in the day to day of camp, so the “familiarity” is sort of a bait and switch

In a non-hierarchical structure, each position should be labeled as “Director of [something]”

For example, Coordination Director would be a position to work primarily with Executive Director

Financial Director would be in charge of our accounts

All of this work is not new, but the creation of these positions is new.

Bylaws include hiring, termination, handling grievances, nonprofit executive representation (whose name do we put on grant applications), decision voting process & procedure

We need to adhere to these bylaws because we need clear expectations for people’s performance and what to do if someone steps out of the expectations

The budgeting will be done together (Camp finances by Sam and Arson, capital management by ED), people can present their portion of the financial work to the October meeting

ACTION ITEM: Make plans in future board meeting for board members to be present at October meeting to support Staff in their presentations.  (Add this it July agenda, most likely)

Executive Director Search

Jesse had short interviews with 6 applicants, sent his notes to Douglas.  Douglas then did recorded interviews with the 6 applicants and also had their resumes.  All 6 are ok, 3 in particular excited me.

The ED Search Team: Douglas, Jesse, Lauren, Caleb, Sam, and Arson, Kristen, Eliz

Goal to complete interviews and present candidates at next board meeting in May

- Lunch -

Reports from staff

—------------------------------

Executive Director

Lauren: Went through most of everything in the first half of today.

Douglas: Campership ad-hoc committee met to discuss camperships.  $15,000 previously allocated is not enough, we would like another $4,500.

Kelly: Motion to draw $4,500 from the endowment for campership funds.  Sujata seconds the motion.

Douglas: All in Favor?  100%

Motion passes

Camp Directors

Hiring is pretty much complete for every role.  

Looking to revitalize our marketing with a new Photographer+ position.  Vaishali offered the Photographer+ position, which is a little bit of camp counseling but mostly photography.

Elena is coming back to be our mental health and wellness specialist, which is great.

Racial Justice Manager will mostly be working remotely with the Camp staff this summer on training.

Marketing Strategy - we have a community member who is finishing her masters in marketing and will work for free on a marketing strategy for Camp as part of her coursework. 

The biggest takeaway is that we need to be producing so much more content.  It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist because the algorithm rewards consistent publishing.

Kristen: I’ve been talking to Buffalo/Toronto public media because the person who works for them found us because they are a Queer person who climbs.  Buffalo/Toronto is associated with NPR and PBS.  Their demographics are our demographics.  They’re going to send Kristen an advertising deck with a list of options that we can choose from.  They do a lot of the creation and production themselves after we provide the ingredients (images and videos we send them).  This person has said they just want to make it work for us.

Kristen: The “How to Operate Camp” document is almost done.  Potentially add “Who are our Neighbors?” section, but that can be added later.  Want to send a draft out to the Board for review.

Camp Managers

Winter Rental at camp in February.  Some difficulty in getting power working throughout Camp.  Sam and Arson checked last week and it was working, so the theory is that something was not working in the winter and it was now fixed.

New rental offerings: 1 is a small family rental and the other is from Camp Cleetus.  

Fixing the archway

Installation of a small wood stove for the back room of the lodge

Leining upper bathroom floor not replaced yet, but will start in the next two weeks.  Dave to perform this work.

Head Cook will be working his last year while training a new cook.  Looking for different food options now that things have gotten so expensive, such as eggs.  Previously were $0.20/egg, now they are $0.80/egg

Unfortunately if we were to have chickens on camp, we would not be cleared to serve their eggs to the campers (USDA rule violation)

Looking into getting things from Costco (farther away) compared to Cisco.  Costco is much farther away, so that would be an all-day trip.

Reports from Committees

—-----------------------------------

Building and Grounds

Work on the shower house is the main priority.  Sam: even if one side of the shower house is still under construction when the summer opens, we can handle that.  The goal is of course to have this work done before the summer starts, but we have a backup plan just in case.

Community Engagement/DEI

If your committee is working on something that seems Community-Engagement related, please reach out to us about it

Sujata: I’ve been meeting with the BIPOC retreat meeting committee and it’s going really well.

Douglas: I ran into a former BIPOC staff/board member who was very interested in hearing about Unirondack.

Caleb: That former staff/board member was very vocal about making Unirondack more racially inclusive.  We should reach out to them to share how things have progressed over the years

Finance

Emily: Not much to add based on the extensive Finance discussion at the start of the meeting

Fundraising

Grants

Our NYUUC grant was accepted! We received $6,000 for the QYAR retreat - many thanks to Caleb and Kristen for their help getting the application out the door. This is an organization that I believe we are well positioned to get money from every year and also think there is potential for bigger amounts if we can position the ask in a way that might entice

Donations

We have had $1,050 worth of online donations since our last meeting

Current work

We have taken a step back from the capital campaign to focus instead on an annual giving plan. You can find details about that here. This has been largely guided by Susan who has a lot of experience in this area.

Data work

We are continuing to populate our donor database with donations not captured there and potential donors from lists we have (Registrants, families, email lists, past staff lists ect)

Erik H is coming on the team to assist with this work.

Upcoming

We are in the early stages of putting together a pre-camp donation appeal that will likely be a quick video with an ask.

We are going to be sending out a survey question to all of this year's registrants to try to understand their “why unirondack”.

Thank you a thon

We are planning to call and thank every donor from the past 12 months to check in and begin building better donor relationships

Major Donor Calls

We have identified our major donors and we are beginning a call cadence to keep these folks engaged.

Ask to the Board: We have these pretty simple and fun phone calls to previous donors to ask how they’re doing.  These aren’t to ask for money, but they are to keep in touch so that they can potentially donate or just keep in touch with us

HAGS campaign moved to the Fall and is targeted at former staff

Push the calendar campaign to early 2026

Remember to sell the campership raffle tickets at check-out table during the summer

Governance

David: After the motion tracker is complete, we’re going to create a policy tracker.  This will allow us to have a more full picture of things

—----------------------------------

Next meeting: Wednesday, May 28, 7:00 – 8:30pm; virtual – on zoom