AHEC Meeting Minutes | August 7, 2017
AHEC Meeting Minutes
Monday, August 7, 2017, 8:30pm @ Crafts Lounge
Attendees: Deirdre Logan, Nicole Moody, Vishal Patil, Eric Alt, Aditya (proxy for Xueying Zhao)
Presided by Nicole Moody, Minutes by Abbas Ghandi
- Agenda
- [Vote] - Approval of Meeting Minutes
- [Update] - Operations Committee: Ashdown Lost Movies
- [Discussion] - MA Local Meals Tax
- [Discussion] - GSC Housing Survey/Town Hall
- [Discussion] - Ashdown Alumni Event
- Open Floor
- Approval of Meeting Minutes
- Operations Committee
- Ashdown Lost Movies: Automated email received on Sunday mornings about lost movies. The email has been coming for some time now (maybe since 2013). These are movies that have been lost maybe from several years back. One option is to remove these lost movies from the database.
- [Discussion]
- MA Local Meals Tax: One of the event officers paid for means tax for July 4th BBQ. The understanding is sometimes people pay sales tax, but officers are get reimbursed if they have paid out of their own pocket. The amount (6%) is significant for that event. Meals tax is just sales tax for meals in MA. Need to wait to receive the SAO response. It is a good idea to update the event wiki page that meals tax is the same as the sales tax to avoid confusion in future.
- GSC Housing Survey/Town Hall: Town hall event about GSC housing survey on Thursday this week. It is at the same time as the orientation event committee meeting. The event is open to everyone. We don't know the format of the town hall meeting. Have two volunteers to attend. Interested in knowing about the results of the survey. Mixing single and family graduate housing model. This may come up in the meeting. The survey had questions about the affordability of graduate housing. It seems that rents are increasing on a 3% based rate annually.
- Ashdown Alumni Event: Had discussed about establishing network Ashdown Alumni. Met with the association last week about the resources of the association. Talked about publicizing the Ashdown events to the association. Thirsty Ear is experimenting with an alumni social event. One idea is to have Alumni form local area to come and talk about their journey and transition to their careers. Event will be on Sept 20. We are interested in hosting such event in fall. The format will be informal. We are looking to have a group of three/four alumni come, introduce themselves and attend an informal gathering with the attendees. Association has leadership conference in fall every year to strength the relation with the university. Our goal is to have alumni who had lived in Ashdown. The bigger Alumni event is spring concert. Having this event in fall will prevent any confusion with the concert in spring. For the spring concert, the reaching to alumni is also through the association. Friday October 13 is a potential day for the event. Need to follow-up with the events committee for having their help for the logistics. A Saturday might be a better day instead of a Friday. We don't see this as a poster session. We see it as a social sort of thing. We can divide the room based on the industry. We could have it as a social wine and cheese event. SP has a wine and cheese event for grads. The one wine and cheese event we had was a success. We also need to check the budget. We may need to allocate some of AHEC budget for this. The new cycle starts on October 1. So we can also apply for budget. The application deadline is Sept 1. Need to figure out how much funding we may need.
- Open Floor
- Issue with a clock not working. Issues for common facilities should go to Denise.
- Email comes to the officers on Sunday about the mailing list. Need to figure this out.
- Ashdown website. Is there anything we could do better? The sub-committees interaction outside email. Like gardening committee. These could be put on the website. SP has a page on their interest groups. Also they have an easy way to sign-up on the mailing list. Putting pictures on Facebook page is easier to go through than on the Ashdown website.
Meeting adjourned.