Meeting Minutes, November 2016

Thankyou to our intrepid secretary Mark for putting these together!

PCV Committee Meeting 26^th 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
18^th 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

Meeting Minutes – May 2015

Pagan Collective of Victoria

Meeting Minutes 9/5/2015

 

Present: Ryan, Josie, Mei, Mark, Ben, Lucas, Seline

Apologies: Cosette, Hawthorn, Nickole, Sarah, Seumas

Absent: Rosanne, Allison, River, Bret, Brett

Meeting Location: Portland Hotel, Melbourne CBD

Meeting Open: 1.15PM

1. President’s Report – The coffee meetups have continued to go strong and is still experiencing new members turning up.
   The first Ballarat meetup/Pagans in the Pub is scheduled to happen and there has been some interest which is exciting.
   The Collective now has a bank account with the Bendigo Bank, more in the Treasurer’s report.
   The Yule Dinner is approaching and the ticket sales are now live.

2. Secretary’s Report – Currently we are approaching businesses to ask about being PCV friendly and those that are for website friendly graphics so that we can get them up on the website.

3. Treasurer’s Report – The new Bendigo Bank account has been set up with Josie and Mark being the current signatories. Bendigo is happy to add more signatories as needed with appropriate minuting provided by us. They also offer the use of the community EFTPOS machine for events.
   Tickets for the Yule Dinner are now selling, to avoid too many transaction fees the money will stay in PayPal for now.

4. Memberships – 15 new memberships approved this meeting, this decrease is probably due to the fact that we are pushing events both for the Collective and other groups more than memberships at the moment.

5. Newsletter – Samhain Newsletter is late due to articles being slow to be submitted. Will be out soon.
   It is possibly worth looking at either getting a newsletter person in the future or more people sharing the job.
   It is proposed that we consider doing a series of intro articles, introducing readers to different pagan paths.

6. Coffee Meet Ups – The Upwey meetup is still getting bigger and seeing a lot of new faces.
   The CBD meetup still needs a venue for the meetup to take place but the potential first date will be June 3^rd, to be confirmed once a venue is found.
   Ballarat is having its first meetup up at Irish Murphey’s in Ballarat, which is the location meetups used to happen in Ballarat. Hopefully using the same location will make it easier. There has been some interested parties in the meetup, which will be held quarterly. The meetup will be on the 23^rd at 12.30.

7. Yule Dinner 2015 – The ticket sales shut off will be the 1^st June, we are self-imposing a minimum of 30 ticket sales to make it worthwhile for the venue. If we don’t get the numbers by the 1^st we will have to consider calling off the event.
   To help make sure we do well on ticket sales we need to share the event as much as possible not just on the PCV page but on other pages as well as our personal walls. All help to share it will be appreciated. Mei kindly made a flyer for the event, with the digital file being available on the Committee page, feel free to share it around.
   Prizes are being sorted for the awards as well as the raffle. It should hopefully make for a good addition to the night.

8. Members Survey – The questions are all ready and Mark will e-mail them to Mei so that the Survey Monkey can be set up with the Members Survey. Hopefully this will produce some interesting results for the Collective and its members.

9. AGM – The AGM is going to be held at Stuzzi in Northcote with nominations for it closing two weeks before the AGM both for named positions and the General Committee positions.

10. Proposed Membership Fees for 2016 – So far the collective has run as a free organisation, however running the organisation has costs and these have been getting covered by Josie and Ryan.
    The proposed fees that the Collective move to will be:

– $15 Student/Concession

– $25 General

– $40 Family (3 – 4 adults all residing at the same address is a family for the purposes of membership fees.)

11. Insurance – So after some hunting around the estimates for Insurance for the PCV is looking to be somewhere between $1,200 – $1,500. Josie is going to hunt around a little more and see if there is a better policy/deal to be had.

12. Imbolc Ritual 2015 – We cannot really discuss the Imbolc Ritual without the organisers present, more details will be shared as it becomes available.

13. Annual Ball – We cannot really discuss the Annual Ball without the organisers present, more details will be shared as it becomes available.

14. Skill Sharing Across the Pagan Community – Nothing new to discuss yet for this.

15. PCV Crafts – The pennants/bunting idea is still being considered and the materials to start making the blanks for members to decorate will be acquired soon.

16. The PCV at Mount Franklin – We should consider doing a $5 off membership drive at Mount Franklin to help kick off the paid memberships for the first year.

Misc. – The next meetings that have been set are:

– The AGM on the 18^th of July to be held at Stuzzi in Northcote followed by a normal meeting at the same location

– 12^th of September and is marked down as a rural meet-up to be held at a rural location that will be advised closer to the date

– 12^th of December and is set to be a Upwey event at the Magpie Café

The website needs a change to fix a broken link, the Consumer Affairs have changed the model rules and as a result the link to them on our website is not working at present.

It is probably worth considering that committee members have or acquire a Working with Children Check for the purposes of ensuring that we are not open to problems at public events that we run/help out with.

As a matter of courtesy to everyone it would be really appreciated if you cannot make it to a meeting that you try to give 48 hours notice. Some of the members travel a long way and it would be terrible for them to do that and we do not have the numbers for quorum. It is also a kindness to the other members who could change their plans if the meeting is cancelled.

Pagan Expo
Seline pitched the idea of running a two day expo that has an evening maskerade ball that we could invite Spiral Dance to attend. The proposed time would be October 2016 to allow all the necessary preparation time. Seline would need a dedicated sub-committee to help her make this a success, they would be needed especially in the intense three month period prior to the event. If the PCV has insurance that can cover it by then we will lend that to the expo as well as any help that we can. Seline has a venue in mind, that will be included in a later information update.

 

Meeting End: 2.51 PM

A September Update…

As the winter retreats for another year and things swing into action for Spring, we thought we would give you a quick run-down on what’s been going on in the PCV!

An oak forest near Creswick, Central Victoria, starts to awake from its Winter slumber. Photo taken by Ryan M.

After a few design and supply hiccups, we are pleased to announce that our membership cards have finally been ordered and are on the way! This means that our membership packs are almost complete and ready to be sent out to PCV members. We thank everyone for their patience while we got these sorted!

The first issue of our newsletter, Spokes of the Wheel, is almost complete, and members can expect to see this in their inboxes later this week. It is choc-full of Ostara-themed articles and musings, including a bonza gardening column by Mel and some information about an upcoming letters section, “Dear Hawthorn”.

Remember that membership to the PCV is free in 2014 and 2015. If you would like to receive our newsletter, you can join us by clicking here.

We have also had the go-ahead from our friends over at the Mount Franklin Pagan Gathering to run a children’s maypole at this year’s Gathering. If you are a PCV member attending the Gathering and are interested in helping us out with this (you will need to have a Working With Children card), we would love to hear from you!

In other news, we are still on the lookout for businesses to be included in our list of Pagan-Friendly businesses, who offer a discount to PCV members in exchange for advertising on our website and in our newsletter. If you are interested in joining us in this (or if you know of a business that is), please let us know.

That’s all from us for now… The springtime weather is glorious and the garden beckons…

Get involved!

Since our launch a few days ago we’ve been overwhelmed with your kind words of support.

A few of you have asked how you can help. So, here’s some things you can do to get involved!

* If you’re a Pagan living in Victoria, sign up! It’s free and the best way you can keep in touch with what’s happening in the local community.

* Share our page and website on Facebook.

* Run a local event or group? Get in contact with us! We can add your events to our calendar on our website and newsletter. Let us know what’s been happening by sending us a write up to include in our newsletter.

*Run a Pagan friendly business and want some free advertising? Find out how you can get involved here: http://www.pagancollective.org/links/

We’ll also be having our first committee meeting in August and all members are welcome to attend. We’ll email detials to members in the coming weeks.