February 8, 1998

Minutes from the nineteenth meeting of Tri-State Chapter held on February 8, 1998

Members Present

Bean
Dmitri Donskoy
Sam Liebowitz
Edward Nash
Steve Kostes
Edward Desplaines
William Gale (via conference call)

Meeting preliminaries

The meeting started off by all of us introducing ourselves for the benefit of the two newest members to join our chapter: Edward Desplaines and Steve Kostes. We all took turns mentioning some things which excite us about the First Millennial Foundation (FMF).

After looking over the agenda for the meeting, we proceeded to assign our group process roles to assist us in running our meeting more smoothly. Sam Liebowitz was asked to be Facilitator, Dmitri Donskoy volunteered to be Note Taker, Bean was the Time Keeper, and Steve Kostes agreed to be the Vibes Watcher.

Updates From Rifle

We began the discussion on updates from Rifle. Gale joined in with us on a conference call from his home in Maplewood New Jersey. Gale explained that an email discussion list was created for the members of the board of directors. It was explained that membership on the email list was only open to the members of the board of directors. The purpose of this discussion list is to allow the board members to discuss various topics in private without having to all get on a conference call on the telephone.

Sam explained that there was talk of starting a scholarship fund to raise money specifically to pay annual membership dues to the First Millennial Foundation for those that want to join but can not afford to.

Someone by the name of Skipper suggested building platforms on ocean sea mounts in order to get a head start on living on the ocean. It was proposed that 10 platforms could be erected each having an area of 100 square meters. Some of the activities of these platforms would be oceanic research, tax free havens for businesses to run on, and many other options as well.

SEE Update

Gale was in touch with several lawyers recently who suggested making some minor changes to the Bylaws and Lease for the intentional community which is currently in the planning stages at this point. The time is steadily approaching for the initial settlers to move out to Bastrop County and begin ground breaking on the purchased plot of land.

One of the lawyers suggested that Gale have an accountant look over the bylaws and especially the lease to make sure that it would be workable from their perspective.

Chapter Projects

The current ongoing project which we are working on as a chapter other than SEE is getting some remaindered copies of The Millennial Project out to local libraries. We decided to do this as an outreach project because overwhelmingly the most common story you hear when asking a Core or Cladding member how they learned about the FMF is: "I was browsing through the book store and TMP jumped out at me and it has changed my life". If we can get copies of the book into libraries, there are more chances for the book to get into more people's hands. This way it won't be sitting dormant on someone's dusty private bookshelf.

Future FMF Colonies

Over the past few chapter meetings, we have been exploring different types of colonies the FMF might one day build and where the colonies might be located. We decided to continue adding to the growing list of topics over the course of this month and compare ideas at next month's meeting.

When we finish this project, we will move onto discussion of different businesses which can be run at the various locations we've come up with.

Business Basics

For this month's business basics, we asked everyone in attendance to participate by sharing important knowledge gained from personal business experiences.
  • Ed Nash - Start up money is very important to have because in general, any business you start will be losing money for the first couple of years.
  • Sam Liebowitz - A supportive working environment is critical to business success since coworkers must get along and in order to make your employees feel needed.
  • Ed Desplaines - You can sell just about anything to the right person if you know how to make the right sales pitch.
  • Dmitri Donskoy - It is important to keep other businesses in mind since you will be doing business with many other organizations. It is important to have good relations with both your suppliers and your clients.
  • Bean - Enjoy your work. Having fun at the job will make you look forward to coming back in to work the next day and will make you more productive.

Outreach

We plan on rotating our chapter meetings again in the hopes of enticing membership growth from other states. We will be trying to hold a meeting in Connecticut at a public place so that we can let the public know what our organization is all about. We also plan on holding a meeting at Ed Nash's place on Long Island.

WE NEED MORE WOMEN!! We should try to target some women's centers.

The next meetings are tentatively scheduled for:

March 15
April 12
contact the author of this home page: Dmitri Donskoy
Last modified: Tuesday, February 10, 1998

Home