Meeting Minutes: June 2018

Thanks again to our secretary Mark for putting these minutes together!

20180602 minutes

 

Meeting Minutes: February 18, 2018

Many thanks to our secretary Mark for putting these minutes together. 🙂

Pagan Collective of Victoria

Meeting Minutes 18/02/2018

Present: Josie, Nickole, Dorian, Elkie, Alex, Sarah, Mark, Ryan

Apologies: Seamus, Ang, Shaz, Dean

Meeting Location: The Last Jar, Melbourne

Meeting Open: 12.38 

1. President’s Report –

We are now back into things again after the Christmas break. The committee dinner was a great opportunity to get to know each other better and we will try and do these a few times a year to help strengthen our bond as a team. Patreon is up and posting more to come later in the meeting.

2. Secretary’s Report –

There isn’t a lot of new news on this front at present, we are overhauling the membership sign-up process and database to make things more efficient.

3. Treasurer’s Report –

We currently have about $17 in the account, the first of the Patreon payments won’t come through until the start of the next month.

4. Meet-up Reports
   Hills

The Hills ritual went really well and they are hoping to be able to do something like this again in the future. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

CBD
The numbers continue to go well for the city meetup, with a good regular attendance, there is going to be a slight change to the discussion format as it moves forward this year. They are contemplating doing a Facebook live at a future event.
Ballarat
Ballarat meet-ups are still in discussion with the possibility of running four a year on the table at present.
Frankston
These meet-ups are still continuing on and are going well with some regular faces as well as new faces turning up each meeting.

 

Swinburn

The first Swinburn pagan event will be coming up soon, it is very exciting.

5. Morris Report
The side is still continuing on in 2018, working on getting the skills up ready to be performance ready. They are attending English Ale in May. They have begun learning a second dance (Dilwyn) and are practicing processionals.

6. Patreon

Patreon is now live and posting. Thank-you to everyone that has supported, contributed to and worked on getting it live. Also a big thank-you to everyone that has become a backer, or been helping share it around.

7. Website
The overhaul is well underway and now blog posts immediately post to the Facebook as well. The site is getting anywhere from 50 – 200 hits a day. That is frankly amazing.

 

8. Facebook
   The stats are up really well, so please continue to share and interact with it to help keep this up.
9. Membership
   We are updating the form so that when a member signs up it sends it straight to our database (which is being overhauled) We will be contacting members to confirm their details and to ensure they know their membership number.
10. Community Safety Month

Have a lot of articles lined up ready to go throughout March so that our social media will be posting something every day designed to provide the community with access to information that will educate and inform in a variety of aspects of safe community.

 

11. Spiral Dance
    Yes they are still coming to Melbourne, no we don’t have the date yet but will be posting more about it when we do. This will be branded as a PCV presents event.

    12. Pagan Pride Day
    The date has been selected as April 7^th.
    Sarah will be drawing up a list of speakers and presenters for the various traditions and paths in Victoria as well as the various groups currently running events open to the public.

It has been proposed that we have a Druids v Witches Kubb game on the day, it will be a light-hearted thing, designed to be entertaining.

13. Seasonal Celebrations
Yule – this was to be organised by Dean? We will need to clarify

Autumn Equinox – we currently don’t have someone running the equinox now that Pagan Pride Day is in April.

14. Instagram
    We now have an Instagram that is being run by Dorian at present. It can be found by looking for pagancollectivevic.
15. Workshops
    It would be great if we can start announcing some of the dates for workshops, so could the committee members who have volunteered to run workshops please start trying to work out the dates for their workshop. These will probably be 1 – 2 hours in length and $10 – $15 for non-Patreon backers.

    16. Chat Bots
    Ryan is investigating chat bots with involves direct engagement content with users. He is currently learning about how to use them and will run it when this gets off the ground.

 

17. Inclusive Language

It was raised that we should consider changing some of the language on our website and social media to make it more inclusive. It can sometimes come across as slightly Wicca or eclectic witchcraft centric and it would be a shame if that made people from other paths feel left out.

Meeting End: 1.50 PM

 

Meeting Minutes – January 2018

Pagan Collective of Victoria

 

Meeting Minutes 14/01/2018

 

Present: Josie, Ryan, Elkie, Alex, Mark, Sarah, Elkie, Shaz, Ang, Fran, Seumas

 

Apologies: Nickole, Dean, Dorian

 

Meeting Location: Earthly Pleasures, Belgrave

Meeting Open: 11.07 AM

 

 

1. President’s Report –

It was a really great year. The PCV ran 57 events last year which is unbelievably good, especially considering we have come from a small hard to locate community to a well networked community where it is very easy for people to find other like minded pagans, whether it is at a PCV event or one of the other events run by other individuals and groups who advertise on our community calendar.

 

2. Secretary’s Report –

The memberships have been slow recently, not surprising given the time of year it is, however the social media has continued to have a lot of interaction and messages which means that people are still engaging with us. The database overhaul is a slow process due to lack of time but will continue to be worked on in 2018.

 

3. Presentation of Accounts (Treasurer) –

We’ve not spent or earned any money in the time since we last met, largely this is because we don’t charge for events and we try to keep the overheads low. We’ll be linking the Patreon to our bank account soon so will have more to report from now on.

 

4. Meet-up Reports
   Hills

The Hills are amazing and vibrant, the meetup for today had 54 people RSVP’d and the events are frequently larger than can be contained by the venue. The event will evolve to suit this as we progress. The Hills weeknight dinners will resume again soon too, they’ve been popular in their own way and a great event. The writers are still meeting too ostensibly under the Hills banner and seem to be having a good time, how this event will evolve we don’t know but it will continue on into 2018.

CBD
The CBD meet-ups continue to be one of our larger regular meet-ups and are going to continue on into 2018 under the custodianship of Ryan. The first one for 2018 will be Sat 20^th of Jan.
Ballarat
The Central Vic meet-ups have continued to have fresh faces turn up (two to three new people most meets), they’ve been small and enjoyable. Ballarat meet-ups will continue on in 2018, possibly under a new direction.

Frankston
Unfortunately Dorian isn’t here to discuss the Frankston meet-ups but from what people have heard they seem to be doing well.

Swinburne

Swinburne now have a Pagan group thanks to the efforts of Alex and are having their first meet-ups this year.

 

Druid Coffee

Druid coffee is looking to improve its attendance this year and are getting some advice on running social media to help to this end. We will continue to advertise for them of course and help in any other way that we can.

 

On the topic of meet-ups this year can we please make sure that the name of every PCV run event has PCV in the name and preferably the month too. This will do two important things, first it will help people tell the difference between the events we run and those we advertise for people. Second it will make it a lot easier for the event wrap-up writer to find all the events each month and make sure that they are covered in the wrap-up.

5. Morris Report
Oak, Smash & Thorn are continuing into 2018 as a side and are planning to travel to South Australia again, in May this time. They’ve been learning to do dark Morris and are going to be learning new dances and sticking this year too.

6. Patreon

Patreon will be launching in a few weeks, the campaign having been previously outlined before. It will be linked to the PCV bank account and the campaign clearly outlines what the money can/will be used for. We are currently looking at how to effectively capture audio of workshops for Patreon.

7. Workshops
The PCV is going to be running six workshops in 2018, they will cost little ($5 – $10) for the public and will be free to patreon backers. To stop there being pagan burnout for organizers they will be tacked onto meet-up days, running before the meet-up and so that people can leave when it is over or stay for a meal and socialize with others as they choose.

 

The dates for the workshops will be worked out in the committee group.

 

The volunteers to run a workshop are      – The Hills (topic to be decided)

– Silver Birch Grove (Ogham)

– Linda (Charms)

– Ryan (Divination/Incense)

– Josie (topic to be decided)

It was thought Dorian was interested in running a workshop but we will need to confirm with him before proceeding down that line any further.

 

8. Social Media/Blog
   Moving forward into 2018 we are adding the following people to our FB admin team: Alex. We are also adding the following to our Blog/Webpage admin team: Alex and Sarah.

For the monthly meet-up wrap-ups we are looking at moving to a photo based wrap-up with minimal text for ease of publication.

Committee reads may be going to a bi-monthly format with a change to being committee reviews and using themes. Sarah is going to let us know what direction she wants to go when she has had a chance to look at it.

 

We are adding a new piece to the blog probably titled ‘Walking the Walk.’ which will be focusing on what people are doing to connect more with nature, their path, etc. Mark and Josie will be contributing their Gold Fields Walks to this and when the Hills get their 2018 sorted will be contributing some articles too.

9. WWC
We are still waiting on some WWC checks for some people. We will be discussing some other WWC stuff when we get to community safety.

10. Samhain

Need to check in with Seline to see if she is still happy to run Samhain 2018 or whether her other contributions are going to make this too hard.

 

11. Social Media/Blog
    The blog is continuing to be a great asset to the PCV along with the calendar and as mentioned the duties have been divvied up so that it can continue to run smoothly and not over-whelm anyone.12. Midsumma
    We will be looking at whether or not we can/will run a stall at 2019 Midsumma with the Queer Pagan Men Australia group and what will be needed etc. for that.
12. WoZ Movie Night
    It was decided that with everything already on the table that this might not be something we continue to pursue at this point.
13. Spiral Dance
    
    Coming again in 2018 sponsored by the PCV, no dates have been set in stone yet but it will probably be April-ish at this stage. It won’t be run the same day as Pagan Pride Day this year because it was deemed overall too much for people.
14. Redbubble
    Still planning to get this running in 2018 now that the crazy December January period is coming to an end and the annual PCV hiatus for the committee is over.16. OBOD Summer Solstice 2018
    The Melbourne Grove are excited and nervous to run this ritual, it is going to be a first for them. The date for it will be Sunday the 23^rd of December and they will let us know if they need any kind of assistance from us.

 

The Sunday Druid Coffee clashes with this date so Silver Birch are going to cancel so that there is no conflict with them.

 

17. Pagan Pride Day 2018

The date previously discussed was not working out well clashing with other events. The date therefore is being moved to April the 7^th. Due to how far from the equinox that puts it we won’t be hosting an equinox ritual as part of the day but instead will be hosting a welcoming ritual designed to appeal to people of all paths.

 

18. Pagan Census/Survey

It has been a few years since we last did a survey to try and get a clear picture of the Victorian community and their needs so we will be conducting another one in 2018, with people’s identities being anonymous again, so we can hopefully get an honest response. Once again we will publish final results for people to view. We ended up with some great data last time. This will also provide people a chance to provide feedback.

 

The questions will be vetted in the committee group before it goes up. Josie, Ryan and Mark will be conducting this.

 

19. Mental Health Support Group Advertisement

We’ve been contacted by a person wanting to advertise a pagan mental health support group that they have set up. We are going to discuss what questions we have in the private committee group and send them to them as soon as possible. They will cover topics like ‘emergency response plans’, format etc.

 

If we are happy to go ahead and advertise this we are going to need a well written disclaimer since they are a third party that we don’t have representation on there to make sure it is all running ok.

 

Fran is also going to get us the details for a legally/professionally sanctioned peer support group to let people know about as well.

 

While we are on the topic of this it is probably worth considering putting together some resources in a easy to digest format such as lifeline etc, for people to access if they are in distress.

 

It is also worth considering having a list of pagan friendly professionals available too, lawyers, psychologists, etc.

 

Community Safety

In 2018 we will be requiring all events we advertise that claim a family friendly status to prove that they have Working with Children checks (current) for all people running the event, workshop, etc. If they refuse to provide this proof or can’t then their events will not be shared by the PCV and will be deleted from any groups we moderate because there is no way to make sure that they are ok otherwise.

 

We are going to start sharing and reminding people of our community safety policies (and others) since it is a new year, we will be doing this a little at a time so people aren’t getting overwhelmed.

 

In March we are planning to share a resource a day around community safety and be gearing our discussion topics to focus on this as well.

 

We would like to have a chance for the community to have their say too as part of this initiative and will be working on that in the near future.

 

Changes to Committee

As we move forward into 2018 we are saying goodbye to one of our committee members Carrie. We would like to thank her for her time and effort on the committee and hope to continue to see her at pagan events.

 

Committee Intro/Bios

It has been suggested that currently the PCV could be perceived as being a shadowy organisation due to our emphasis on community and events and not highlighting who the committee are and where they are from (so to speak).

 

We will be updating the webpage with bio’s, something short is fine, just so that people have an idea of who we are.

 

It was suggested everyone check out the Tasmanian Pagan Alliance website for their committee bios and personal bios for inspiration because they are apparently well done.

 

Other Business

Young People – Safe Spaces

It was raised that we really need to find better ways to communicate with younger pagans to ensure that they are finding their ways into safe places in the community and aren’t being groomed by shady or dodgy people.

 

Ballarat Meet-ups

Ryan is going to be running four Ballarat meet-ups in 2018, dates to be discussed in the private committee group.

 

Pagan Alliance of South Australia

By now everyone has probably seen the announcements by the Pagan Alliance of South Australia.

What can we do to help? Financially if everyone signed up for their newsletter (It is $10 a year) that would help and we can encourage other Victorians to do so too.

Contact has also been made asking them if anything else can be done by PCV to help them, so far nothing has been suggested in this regard but we will help them however we can because it would be a shame to see our South Australian friends lose such an important resource.

 

Meeting End: 12.07 PM

 

Meeting Minutes: August 2017

Pagan Collective of Victoria

 

Meeting Minutes 20/8/2017

 

Present: Josie, Ryan, Carrie, Nickole, Geoff, Elkie, Dean, Alex, Fran, Mark, Dorian, Lucas, Sarah, Seamus

 

Apologies: Shaz, Ang

 

Meeting Location: The Last Jar, Melbourne

Meeting Open: 1.05 PM

 

 

1. President’s Report –

It’s been another great year, the meetups have really flourished and grown, the calendar is our most visited page on the website and the feedback has been really positive overall. We are now moving into our fourth year as a successful not-for-profit and it is exciting to see it continue to grow and flourish.

 

2. Vice-Presidents Report

It has been an exciting year full of challenges. We have faced them head on, made hard decisions and come out stronger and better off for having dealt with these challenges head on. Very happy to see the PCV continuing on to new and better things.

 

3. Secretary’s Report –

Memberships have continued to climb in a fairly even fashion over the year, we now have over 340 registered members out there and over a thousand Facebook likes. Pretty exciting, some of the members are even from other states and countries.

 

4. Presentation of Accounts (Treasurer) –

Apart from the Spiral Dance/Kc Guy concert there was not really any financial activity, at least on the income front. We still have the usual costs of website, annual fees to consumer affairs etc. which are covered by donation from committee members (Josie and Ryan). Currently we have $142.70 in the bank.

 

5. Meet-up Reports

It is worth noting that the PCV has done around 100 free events (just PCV and affiliates alone) in the last 12 months. In addition to this we advertise even more events on our calendar (paid and free) from non-affiliates.
We have had a lot of interest in how we do things in The Pagan Collective of Victoria from across the globe, apparently we run a model that other people think works really well.

Hills

The Hills as usual continues to grow, amaze and flourish. It has a really warm open atmosphere that encourages people of all walks to attend. It is currently a victim of it’s own success. For the colder months advertising of the event has had to stop because more attendee’s than the venue can handle are turning up. In the warmer months they will be able to expand out into the front garden and comfortably accommodate the numbers they have been getting.
The possibility of having a new Hills event that takes place mid-week has been raised and will be explored further if there is sufficient interest to attend/run it.

CBD
There are a lot of people attending every month, the venue is dealing well with the numbers (on average 14 – 20). This meet continues to follow the same model it has of general chatter, then once all anticipated attendees are there a discussion topic is presented and everyone has a chance to have their say. This continues to run for 11 months of the year.

Creswick
Continuing to have attendees that haven’t come before attend them, it seems to be growing quietly, still on a quarterly basis. It has been heartening to meet so many different pagans from around Central Victoria.

Frankston
These meets continue on with some growing interest, Dorian is happy to keep hosting these events quarterly.

6. Redbubble

Redbubble has been discussed previously as a potential place to sell merchandise for the PCV and it’s meet-ups.
Sarah has kindly offered to design merchandise and is in the process of adapting the logo etc. for use on the Redbubble account once it is set up.
For the new members – the reason the Redbubble was suggested over another form of merch was that there is little to no outlay that would have to come out of donations from the committee and people are able to just order what they want from our store.
Dorian is also offering up some of his artwork for use on items in the Redbubble.
The aim is for January next year to the time that we go live with the Redbubble store, allowing time to set everything up correctly so it runs smoothly.

7. Mount Franklin

It would be great to have a display this year at the Gathering with flyers etc. advertising the groups, probably similar to the one from Pagan Pride Day. Also to have the PAN community safety flyers.

The PCV has been asked to run the children’s May Pole this year, our intrepid committee member Alex has offered his services for this job.

A core group from the Hills are running the ritual this year and may need some assistance at some points prior to the Gathering which we will happily provide.

8. Midsummer

This event is going to be a family friendly event held at Fairy Park in Anakie, attendees will need to buy a ticket from Fairy Park to get in, however apart from that it is running as a free event.
The event is on FaceBook already with details on there for people interested.
According to the staff at Fairy Park the venue is accessible for people with mobility issues but they may need some assistance.
The event will be BYO own food and drinks (non-alchoholic only!)
The date is the 25^th of November

9. Witches of Oz Movie Night

The proposed venue at present is the Tin Shed in Belgrave, however this event still needs more research which Fran has kindly offered to do. The proposed movie is Practical Magic.

10. Patreon

It has been suggested that the PCV run a Patreon as a way to cover some of the costs that it incurs annually, without having to become a organisation that charges its members fees every year.
To this end the proposal at this point is that we consider starting a Patreon that only has a $1 reward (this doesn’t stop people from donating more). It is of course completely voluntary for our members to support us or not as they chose.
Some reward needs to be offered for supporters, after all everything we do now is free anyway, to this end it is suggested that some backer content be made, proposed ideas are a free workshop for backers and some live video etc. content only available to backers.

Action – Josie will put together and present a proposed Patreon, and appropriate rewards etc. at the next committee meeting and this can be voted on then.

11. Trivia Night

This could be a really fun way to get a variety of members and non-members together for an evening of fun and games. It could be a great night.

Action – Nickole to come up with a plan, possible date, venue and other details to be presented at the next meeting.

12. Ostara

Will be held on Sunday the 24^th of September under the Silver Birch Grove banner. It is going to have a Heathen tone and will be organised via FB.

13. 2018 Planning

Next meeting will be the meeting to set a great deal of the dates for next year so please bring your dates, diaries etc. so we can get the plans rolling.

14. Blog/Social Media

People are welcome to help with both of these things. Read that as please help committee!

15. Other Business

Swinburn Uni Student Pagans Group – contact has been made with Swinburn by Alex and discussion is ongoing with the possibility that they will get some club funding/space to run their gatherings etc in.

A history of Druidry project is underway, Elkie has been sending out questionnaires etc. to people and is compiling a history of Druidry in Australia with some assistance. We may be able to help in some small way as and when is needed.
Closing Remarks

Thank-you all and welcome to the new committee!

 

Meeting End: 1.45 PM