First Patreon Goal Reached

We just met our first funding goal on Patreon!

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us in this way. Your support means we can keep our memberships free and still cover essential running costs.

www.patreon.com/pagancollective

You can support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month to help us bring future projects to life, such as:

– Website hosting/maintenance fees.
– Guest speakers for our meetups.
– PCV Merchandise.
– A podcast showcasing viewpoints and issues in contemporary Australian Paganism
– Concerts with Pagan acts (*cough* Spiral Dance Melbourne Concert *cough*)
– An annual Pagan art exhibition.
– Venue hire for events such as rituals, community dinners/potlucks, film nights, workshop days, markets, etc.

The PCV is Now on Patreon!

The PCV is now on Patreon!

Help support us for as little as $1 (US) per month and get rewards such as patron-only content, priority sale to ticketed events and free entry to our workshops.

Membership to the PCV is free, and we want to keep it that way. We don’t believe access to one’s local community and the potential support network and friends therein should be put behind a paywall and limited to those who can afford it.

With that said, as the Collective has grown in popularity so too have our costs. When we first started out, costs were covered by a small group of founding members. Now that we have grown much larger, we’re hoping that our community can help us out with some of these costs via a small monthly contribution, and maybe help to fund some exciting future projects, too!

become_a_patron_button@2x

Meeting Minutes, November 2016

Thankyou to our intrepid secretary Mark for putting these together!

PCV Committee Meeting 26th November 2016

Meeting Start: 1.32

Attending: Ryan, Nickole, Josie, Seamus, Dean, Alex, Mark, Shaz, Ang, Lucas and Fran Apologies: River, Fi, Dorian
Absent:

President’s Report
The PCV has put on over 30 events this year, which is a lot, 25 – 26 of these were coffee and pub meetups. In addition to this we had some public rituals as well as pagans in the park. There is a heap of stuff cooking up for next year which is really exciting.

Secretary’s Report
Memberships keep rolling in, up to about 209 membership now as well as over 900 likes on Facebook.

Treasurer’s Report
Nothing new to report, money in the bank is the same as the last few meetings, the PCV has not been running events that make money.

Meet-Ups
CBD Moot
This moot is getting really busy, with 2-3 new people pretty much every time that have not been met before, it is exciting to see lots of new faces. The moot is changing venues to the Last Jar for next year to accommodate the fact that we need more seats for the events. Should be slightly more disability friendly with a bathroom on the same floor, however there are still the steps at the front and a narrow door. For 2017 the moots will be running monthly but taking a break for September.

Central Vic
The Central Victoria Pagans in the Café had four meets this year, with an average of 4 – 8 attendees at them. For 2017 the Pagans in the Café and the Central Vic Heathens will be combining the coffee meets and aiming for quarterly coffee meets.

Central Vic Heathens
The Central Vic Heathens in addition to combining with the Pagans in the Café are looking at trying to run some different events next year beyond coffee meets. More to be announced as they come.

Hills Meets
These meets are going from strength to strength, running in a lovely new venue (Earthly Pleasures), getting about 10+ attendees at each meet, people attending are happy with the format, these meets will be running monthly for 2017.
Two other meet ups in the works – Hamilton, which is trying to get up and running with some support from us and will hopefully start running next year. Also Frankston which Dorian has kindly volunteered to get going next year, at this stage it will probably be bi-monthly in the Frankston area. More will be confirmed as it is organised. 
ACTION: Need to get a start date sorted with Dorian for 2017
ACTION: Need to make sure that the meets that are near each other don’t conflict with each other, PCV or otherwise so as to not make it too hard for attendees to choose what to go to.

Memberships
Seven new memberships have been received since last meeting, no objections to the members were raised, so all new people were approved.

Dates for 2017

Committee Meetings CBD Meet-Ups Hills Meet-Ups Sabbats Other
  15th January 8th January    
26th Feb (attach to Druid Coffee, Northcote) 19th February 5th February 5th February Lughnassa (Silver Birch)  
  19th March 5th March 25th March Mabon (Wiccans) Pagan Pride Day 18th March Pagan Concert 18th March
8th April (Central Victoria) 16th April (needs to be changed) 2nd April    
  21st May 7th May Samhain (May date TBC)  
4th June (attach to Hills Meetup, Belgrave) 18th June 4th June Yule Dinner 24th June  
  16th July 2nd July    
20th August AGM (attach to CBD meet-up) 20th August 6th Aug    
  17th September (needs to be changed) 3rd Sept 24th September Ostara (Silver Birch/Heathens)  
14th October (Central Victoria) 15th October 1st October    
  19th November 5th November    
3rd December (attach to Hills Meet-Up, Belgrave)   3rd December    
PCV Hiatus 24th Dec – 7th Jan        

Imbolc – *stare at Reclaiming and Lucas*

Pagans in the Park/Pagan Pride Day
18th of March is the proposed date for the event. Some of the concepts discussed were – having stalls, a festival feel and less picnic feel, showcase for traditions (someone gets up and talks about each tradition and talks about what they do and who is good to talk to if you want to go further) Need to get the ideas, for location, format etc. then scale back.

ACTION: Shaz will talk to her contacts/arch-druid to get some ideas for running it and what resources are available, possibly Fitzroy/Treasury gardens for the location, if so we need to make sure to follow all the protocols with paperwork etc. for running in such a public location
ACTION: The working group need to have a meeting for this, a date will be set.

Yule Dinner
Going to run as the same format as the 2014 one, it was ritzy, nice and well catered, Ryan is hoping to get the prices down to about $35 – 40
ACTION: Ryan is going to look for a venue and nut out a menu in the next few weeks. Going to see about getting Casey over for it again to do the entertainment.

PCV Businesses/Relationships
Is it possible to get us thinking about our kind of relationships with the businesses, loyalty programs, advertising, think of a way to have a financial exchange, perhaps have a charge for being listed on the website?, or the donation of raffle prizes for things like Yule dinner in exchange for a write-up for them in the newsletter, listings for actual health practitioners for pagan friendly businesses (mental health, physical health etc.), hire a pagan (pagan friendly employers) [Get Witch Quick]
ACTION: receipt book

Newsletter
Due to a number of issues the newsletter has become untenable; a lot of work, hard to get content in and on time from contributors and the amount of time needed to format all the content.
As part of the overhaul we would like to move to a more online format, have it set with schedule of posts hosted on a blog, still have articles and stuff that come on, keep it accessible, drive traffic up more, part of making our resources even more accessible and easy to find.
Action: Josie – make a schedule of posts etc. to try and get the format roughly laid out. Volunteers for articles and content will be organised by the committee.

Calendar
Josie has made a master document for the calendar, if you give Jo an e-mail to sign up, you can then go in and add your events and change them as need be to help with keeping our calendar as current and accurate as possible.

Julie Brett’s Book Tour
Action – Start a conversation on the PCV committee page for locations etc. for the book tour, Sooki Lounge – Hills, Norcote – Druid Coffee, Central Vic/Ballarat as well as seeing if people would be willing to play host to her while she is over to assist in making it a successful venture for her.

Samhain 2017
Seline has asked if she can run it again in 2017 – don’t have a date yet, hopefully not actual Samhain, more will be released as it is known.

PCV Concert
Spiral Dance and Kacey Guy concert at bar 303 on the evening of Pagan Pride day $25 normal entry or $20 concession. Ryan is setting up an Eventbrite, and we are thinking of running a tin around at events prior to get donations to help get this to happen (it will cover essentials for the performers such as fuel/flights, accommodation, etc.) Adrienne is making poster designs, the posters should hopefully be available for January

PCV Morris Side
We now have a Morris Side, who are planning to do their first thing at Mt Franklin, dancing the sun up at Mt Franklin on the Sunday. Any committee members wanting to join let Josie, Sarah or Mark know so they can be added to the planning group.
ACTION: Alex has now joined the Morris Side

New Committee Members
ACTION: Alex, Dean and Lucas are now committee members for the current period.

Working with Children Checks
Action – Can committee members please send copies of your WWC to us so we can make sure that we have a database of proof for legal reasons. They can be e-mailed to the official Collective Gmail account, all details will be kept confidential. Other Business Fundraising – sell the tickets prior to spiral dance and then do the draw and give out at the concert, advertise it well and it will help raise funds for the PCV, potential idea is a pagan hamper with items donated (shirt from Silver Birch and Mt Franklin) items made by committee members etc.

Grants – are there grants that we can get access to as the PCV? Fran is going to look into the grants situation as a friend of the PCV (non-committee member)

Meeting Closed: 3.02