CT AMC Conservation Committee

Meeting Minutes for October 12, 2005
Attendees: Jim O’Rourke, John Crist, Andrew May, Birge Dayton, Aimee Santeler, Keith Santeler, Mindy Gates

Nov 5th Annual Meeting

The Committee will do a break out session workshop entitled “Fighting for Connecticut’s Environment”. There will be a panel of speakers who will each have about 5 minutes to present on current conservation issues. There will be some discussion of ways to advocate and time for Q&A from the audience. Jim and Andrew will finalize presenters and ask them for 3-5 slides of pictures or words to use to create a slideshow presentations. John will follow up to confirm the time of the workshop and see if there is a laptop and project we can use. 
Possible presenters for the panel discussion are:
· Patty Pendergast, CFPA lobbyist (confirmed)
· Betty McLaughlin, Sierra Club (Jim to follow up)
· Roger Smith, Clean Water Action (Jim to follow up)
· Laurie Brown, CT League of Conservation Voters (confirmed)
· Kristine Sykes, AMC Highlands Advocate (Andrew to follow up)
· Nicole from AMC to discuss White Mtn. Advocacy efforts (Andrew to follow up)
· Someone to talk about the Maine Woods Initiative (Andrew to follow up)

For the Display for Nov 5th, Aimee will bring pictures from the September Clean up and John will bring photos from the Conservation hike to add to the display. If there are any pieces of info. from the presenters that might be good, we could add those to the display.

Privy Clean up on Saturday, Oct 15th
- Aimee and Keith will be attending
- Birge stated to meet at 9am at the Railroad Station in West Cornwall and explained a little on the process

October 22nd Clean up at Hammonassett 9am-1pm
- Keith will get the clean up posted on the main AMC website 
- Mindy will get the clean up listed on the Activities listserv
- Andrew will do a press release
- Currently there are 3 Pratt people plus four committee members signed up to attend
- Aimee will do lunch again, but keep the receipt to be reimbursed J 
- Aimee will get info out to those who will attend on directions and where to meet

November 5th Clean up at Bigelow Hollow 9am-1pm
- Aimee will get a key to gain us access to the area and send out directions to those signed up to attend
- We’ll need to promote this event the same as the Oct 22nd clean up listed above


Winter Conservation Workshop

The title will be “Fighting for Connecticut’s Environment” It will be an AMC-CT Chapter Conservation Committee sponsored workshop - a day long event with a possible social at the end of the day. It was decided the event will be held at CFPA on Saturday, February 4th. Birge will look into getting us a snow date at CFPA. We should be able to pay for a light breakfast (coffee and bagels) and a lunch for those who attend. (John will look into this) We will need to get RSVPs from people who plan to participate so we can get enough food and set up the room accordingly.

Promotion: Mindy will do a postcard “Save the Date” to hand out at the Annual meeting and also distribute in the community. We’ll need to get it listed in Outdoors, do press releases and promote it in other ways as it gets closer.

Ideas for presenters and an agenda for the workshop were discussed:
- Find out who is available and what their specialty is – Andrew and others to talk to prospective presenters
- Joy Street may be able to send a presenter such as Faith, Mindy will follow up
- Use list of guest speakers from past Conservation Committee meetings for presenter ideas
- Use presenters from the Annual meeting – ask them to do a more in depth presentation on Feb 4th
- The agenda from a previous training was distributed for review and generated ideas on the format for the training
o Do a “walk and talk” in the back of CFPA 
o Organize the presenters around a theme such as regional, state and local conservation issues
The follow up work will be done before and during the Annual meeting and plans can be tossed out by email to the group for discussion. 

Speakers for upcoming meetings
Birge will speak in January and will prepare pictures and materials by then.
Andrew will work on getting speakers from February through May which will attract possible new members to the committee. We plan to do a pamphlet with the list of presenters to distribute that will promote the Committee as well.

Other items:
- John will be sure our volunteer hours are in by Saturday; Jim will submit the Committee update/overview for the Annual meeting
- Aimee asked about how people get the VizVols because someone at the New Members Day was interested and Andrew agreed to look into this and find out if we can get some more to distribute from our committee

Next meeting:
The group decided there will not be a November meeting because the Annual meeting is on November 5th, so if we have quick business we can discuss it there. We will meet the second Wednesday in December to discuss plans for the Winter Workshop.