The Annual Business Meeting
January 9, 2010
January 9, 2010
Minutes from the 2010 Business Meeting
The meeting was called to order at 10:50 a.m. by President Bill Voetberg. He conveyed greetings to those assembled from Doug Oostdyk, who was not able to attend the meeting.
Those present were: George Bob, Tracey Cordes, Fred Deneke, Jim Eastman, Robert Guise, Jeff Henrickson, Troy Johnson, Jeff Kozminske, Van Maas, George Miller, Frank Minervini, David Morris, Louie Pham, Mark Sheeres, Madelyn Stella, Tim Straayer, Peter Van Dyken, Lou Vander Have, Bill Voetberg, Jim Whittaker, Jeff Wyckoff.
The minutes of the 2009 business meeting were distributed, and Bill asked if there was a motion to accept them. Luan Pham moved to accept, Mark Sheeres seconded, and the minutes were approved by a voice vote, without dissent.
Copies of the Treasurer’s report were distributed and reviewed. It was noted that the club had distributed $4,500.00 in proceeds from the Pride 5K held on May 31, 2009, and that our current bank balance is $914.68. Bill asked if anyone had any questions about the report; none being forthcoming, he asked if there was a motion to accept the report. David Morris moved to accept the report, Frank Minervini seconded, and it was accepted by a voice vote, without dissent.
Copies of a review of 2009 Front Runners events were distributed, and Bill briefly touched on some of the highlights:
• On April 9, the club was represented by Doug Oostdyk at an LGBT roundtable hosted by Grand Valley State University. Doug provided information about the upcoming Pride 5K.
• On June 30, the club voted to distribute $4,500.00 in proceeds from the Pride 5K to three recipient organizations (The Network, the Grand Rapids Red Project, and the West Michigan Gay Men’s Chorus), and this brought the total of distributions from the history of the race to $50,000.00 — something that we could all be proud of.
• On August 20, Between the Lines published an article about Grand Rapids Front Runners & Walkers focusing on the Club’s charitable contributions through the years.
• The 2009 membership drive, conducted during November, ended with 34 dues-paying members, a decrease from 42 in 2008.
Expanding on the drop in official membership during 2009, Bill noted that participation in the weekly walk/runs had also dropped significantly during the year, that runners rarely if ever participated anymore, and that the lack of runners made it very difficult to attract new people who were interested in running. He nonetheless noted that Grand Rapids Front Runners & Walkers still has a place in the heart of many of its members and former members.
Bill noted that the following individuals had agreed to serve as officers in 2010:
• President: Doug Oostdyk
• Secretary: Jeff Wyckoff
• Treasurer: Jim Whittaker
Bill opened the floor for additional nominations. None being forthcoming, he asked if there was a motion to accept the proposed slate of officers as a group. Frank Minervini moved to accept, George Bob seconded, and the candidates were elected to office by a voice vote, without dissent.
Bill asked if there were any additional old business. None was noted.
Bill asked if there were any new business. David Morris pointed out that the Gay Games are scheduled to take place in Cologne, Germany, from July 31 to August 7, 2010. He noted that he and Dan Van Meurs have already registered to attend and asked whether anyone else was interested. Tracey Cordes said that she is thinking about attending as a spectator if not as a participant, and she suggested that the club should consider promoting the formation of a team.
OPEN DISCUSSION OF THE FUTURE OF THE CLUB
THE PRIDE 5K
Bill initiated a discussion of the future of the club. He began by noting that the Pride 5K has long been a wonderful event that has celebrated fitness, helped to give the club real presence in the larger community, and served to raise $50,000 for worthy charitable groups over the course of its history. He distributed a sheet showing a breakdown of the race disbursements by recipient. He also noted that it has been getting harder in recent years to find people who are willing to do the work necessary to make the race a success. He questioned whether we had enough people willing to do the work this year.
Tracey asked how many people it would take. David estimated that it would take something on the order of 80 to 100 hours of volunteer time. Tracey wondered if five committed individuals could get the work done. David said he thought that five people might be able to do it. Bill noted that it would take slightly more effort to bring the race off this year for a few of reasons: (1) we do not have an individual with race experience who would be willing to serve as race chair; (2) we would be getting a later start this year, and it would be difficult to get everything done in time; and (3) we would probably need to raise additional seed money to cover upfront expenses.
David noted another challenge to putting on the race: there has been a steady shift through the years away from corporate sponsorships toward more dependence on individual contributions, and, given the bad economy, we would probably have a harder time raising funds this year than we did last year. Bill cited an example of difficulty in the corporate environment (23 out of 25 building contractors seeking services from a local kitchen cabinet maker had filed for bankruptcy during the past year), and Madelyn Stella noted that individuals are having a harder time now, too.
Peter Van Dyken asked whether the Pride 5K was the only source of the Club’s charitable giving. Tim Straayer noted that this year the club had given funds to match members’ donations to the West Michigan AIDS Walk, and in the past we had contributed to the GRACE Hunger Walk and had raised over $1,600 for the Reeds Lake Trail extension project. Frank asked if we should not think of alternatives to the Pride 5K to sustain our legacy of charitable giving. Madelyn suggested that a race or walk might not be the best thing, since there are so many other races and walks taking place throughout the year.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Tracey voiced some concern that the group was getting stuck on thinking about whether it could keep doing what it had done in the past. She suggested that what we needed to do was to think outside that box, to look at restructuring and rebuilding the club. Grand Rapids really needs Front Runners, she said, noting that when she moved here from Oregon, she found Front Runners to be a standout among the local LGBT groups, a kind of gay Welcome Wagon. Among the things she loves about the group is that it’s fitness-oriented, it’s not tied to bar life, it offers pleasant social activities, and it’s committed to building community and charitable giving. Other organizations find new ways of doing things in order to survive, she said. If the club can’t sustain a viable core of runners anymore, what can we do? Golf? Bowling? We need to rebrand ourselves, she suggested, and then market ourselves to attract others. There was a general enthusiasm for the points she was making.
Tracey moved that we assemble a committee to explore possible fundraising alternatives and community service projects. Jeff Wyckoff seconded, and the motion was passed by voice vote, without dissent.
Bill affirmed the vote but suggested that we should not end the meeting until we had specifically dealt with the issue of whether we were going to attempt to stage a Pride 5K in June of 2010.
Luan noted that if we wanted to do the Pride 5K in June, we would have to make work of reserving Riverside Park immediately. David said he believed that it was simply too late to put together a Pride 5K by June, though an autumn race might be doable. Jeff Wyckoff noted that if we moved the race to the fall, it would lose its value as the kickoff event for the Pride celebration, and he said that it sounded to him as though it would involve a lot of work whenever it was scheduled. Madelyn agreed that 80 to 100 hours of volunteer time sounded like a lot for the club to take on. Tim noted that this was especially the case in light of the fact that the club now had a smaller number of active members from which to draw on for race volunteers. He suggested that some of the people at the meeting who were not participating in the regularly scheduled walks might not have a good sense of the levels to which active participation had fallen during the past year. The average number of walkers on any given Tuesday or Saturday was now around six or fewer even in good weather, he pointed out, and the numbers were trending down, not up.
Van Maas urged the members to be realistic about the large amount of work that it takes to bring off a Pride 5K. If it turned out that there were not enough people to get the job done properly, we could end up tarnishing the reputation of the club and the race. He argued that we should not commit ourselves to staging a June race or any other event until we were certain that we had the resources to do a good job of it.
Tracey suggested that we should devote the year to restructuring and rebuilding the club in a fashion that better suited the needs and goals of the membership. If that went well, then we might be ready to put together some event later in the year. George Miller agreed, saying that he thought June was too soon for whatever event we might plan. He suggested that we might do better to look at an event later in the year, such as a National Coming Out Day Run or a Halloween race — something more lighthearted and less competition-level.
Bill said that it sounded to him as though a consensus was building that we should not stage a Pride 5K this year. There was general assent to this and no registered disagreement. He said that it also sounded to him as though people wanted to explore alternatives to the race as a club activity and he asked if anyone had an idea about how they wanted to proceed toward that goal.
Tracey suggested that interested individuals might want to form a committee to kick around ideas, make recommendations, and work with the officers to implement them. She suggested that it would take a group of about five or so people.
Tim noted that it had not always been easy to get people to volunteer to do such things in the past — that some club members had not been able or willing to do specific tasks associated with preparation for the Pride 5K, for instance, and a small number of people had ended up doing most of the work. He asked whether there were five people in the room who would be willing to commit to serving on such a committee. After some discussion, seven people volunteered: Tracey Cordes, Jeff Kosminske, Madelyn Stella, Van Maas, David Morris, Peter Van Dyken, and Frank Minervini. Tracey agreed to set up an initial meeting and coordinate with the new
officers.
Bill suggested that we move on to the remaining points on the agenda. He noted that since we had elected a full slate of officers and were talking about the possibility of staging another race, it would be important for us to maintain our status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to maintain our membership in the Road Runners Club of America in order to be eligible for liability insurance, and to maintain our membership in the International Front Runners organization. There was general assent to these points and no registered disagreement.
ARE WE STILL A RUNNING CLUB?
Bill then addressed an issue previously raised by several of the members, about whether we should continue to represent ourselves as a running group when we had virtually no active members who still ran. He pointed out a couple of the difficulties that this produced: (1) he noted that he himself had been reluctant to join Front Runners because the name made him think that it was at least principally a running group, and (2) he noted that during the past year a handful of runners had expressed an interest in joining the club but that none of them had stayed after
finding that there was no one else in the club that they could run with. He asked if anyone had any views on how best to confront these difficulties.
David asked for a show of hands from all those present who still considered themselves to be runners. Jeff Kosminske, Robert Guise, and George Miller raised their hands. David asked them how they felt about the issue.
Jeff Kosminske said that he didn’t like the idea of dropping the word “runners” from the club name. George Miller said that since he had joined the group he had never found anyone among the small number of runners that he could keep pace with anyway, and that it would probably be easier for an occasional runner to associate with a walking group than it would be for prospective walkers to associate with a running group.
David suggested that we should look to other groups to see how they were branding themselves. He noted that the Palms Springs Front Runners group consists primarily of walkers.
Frank suggested that we might want to emphasize the idea of fitness rather then either walking or running. Robert Guise agreed that it would be better to represent ourselves as a fitness group rather than solely as a walking group. David wondered if it would be helpful to promote just one meeting per week — probably Saturday — for runners. George Miller wondered whether it would be helpful to make the starting time on Saturday later than 9:00 a.m. Bill pointed out that the starting time used to be 9:30, but members had decided to push it back to 9:00 because they had so many chores to do later in the day.
Tracey asserted that the challenge facing the new officers was to expand the focus of the group beyond just walking. Jim Eastman noted that the social aspects of the group are important to many of the members, especially the older ones. George Miller noted that younger people tended not to be interested in joining gay-identified groups anyway. Bill underscored that point, noting that several gay runners train with the group that meets in front of the East Grand Rapids Library at the same we gather for our Tuesday night walks during the summer and that these people are simply more interested in affiliating with a group dedicated to serious training for races than they are in affiliating with a specifically gay organization. Given these facts, Van asked whether the group would be better off focusing on trying to meet the needs and expectations of prospective younger people or on trying to meet the needs and expectations of its current membership.
Bill said that it looked as though we were not going to come up with an answer to these questions at this meeting and suggested that Tracey’s proposed committee could look at them some more and work with the officers to continue the discussion over time.
ADDENDA
Bill asked if there were any remaining issues that people wanted to discuss.
David said that he would work with Jim Whittaker on those aspects of his role as treasurer that involved working with Quicken.
Tim asked whether the members felt it was essential to maintain the Front Runners web site, noting that it would take effort on several fronts to do so: we would need a new web host and web master, and we would have to renew a couple of accounts that are set to expire in February. Luan volunteered to serve as web master and work on taking care of the other issues.
No other matters being mentioned, Bill expressed his thanks to Jeff Henrickson for hosting the meeting in his beautiful new home, and the rest of the group joined in thanking him.
Van then urged all present to express their thanks to the outgoing officers for their efforts over the past year, and the members gave up another round of applause.
Bill asked if there was a motion to adjourn the meeting. David moved to adjourn, Frank seconded the motion, and by popular assent the meeting concluded at 12:00 noon.
Those present were: George Bob, Tracey Cordes, Fred Deneke, Jim Eastman, Robert Guise, Jeff Henrickson, Troy Johnson, Jeff Kozminske, Van Maas, George Miller, Frank Minervini, David Morris, Louie Pham, Mark Sheeres, Madelyn Stella, Tim Straayer, Peter Van Dyken, Lou Vander Have, Bill Voetberg, Jim Whittaker, Jeff Wyckoff.
The minutes of the 2009 business meeting were distributed, and Bill asked if there was a motion to accept them. Luan Pham moved to accept, Mark Sheeres seconded, and the minutes were approved by a voice vote, without dissent.
Copies of the Treasurer’s report were distributed and reviewed. It was noted that the club had distributed $4,500.00 in proceeds from the Pride 5K held on May 31, 2009, and that our current bank balance is $914.68. Bill asked if anyone had any questions about the report; none being forthcoming, he asked if there was a motion to accept the report. David Morris moved to accept the report, Frank Minervini seconded, and it was accepted by a voice vote, without dissent.
Copies of a review of 2009 Front Runners events were distributed, and Bill briefly touched on some of the highlights:
• On April 9, the club was represented by Doug Oostdyk at an LGBT roundtable hosted by Grand Valley State University. Doug provided information about the upcoming Pride 5K.
• On June 30, the club voted to distribute $4,500.00 in proceeds from the Pride 5K to three recipient organizations (The Network, the Grand Rapids Red Project, and the West Michigan Gay Men’s Chorus), and this brought the total of distributions from the history of the race to $50,000.00 — something that we could all be proud of.
• On August 20, Between the Lines published an article about Grand Rapids Front Runners & Walkers focusing on the Club’s charitable contributions through the years.
• The 2009 membership drive, conducted during November, ended with 34 dues-paying members, a decrease from 42 in 2008.
Expanding on the drop in official membership during 2009, Bill noted that participation in the weekly walk/runs had also dropped significantly during the year, that runners rarely if ever participated anymore, and that the lack of runners made it very difficult to attract new people who were interested in running. He nonetheless noted that Grand Rapids Front Runners & Walkers still has a place in the heart of many of its members and former members.
Bill noted that the following individuals had agreed to serve as officers in 2010:
• President: Doug Oostdyk
• Secretary: Jeff Wyckoff
• Treasurer: Jim Whittaker
Bill opened the floor for additional nominations. None being forthcoming, he asked if there was a motion to accept the proposed slate of officers as a group. Frank Minervini moved to accept, George Bob seconded, and the candidates were elected to office by a voice vote, without dissent.
Bill asked if there were any additional old business. None was noted.
Bill asked if there were any new business. David Morris pointed out that the Gay Games are scheduled to take place in Cologne, Germany, from July 31 to August 7, 2010. He noted that he and Dan Van Meurs have already registered to attend and asked whether anyone else was interested. Tracey Cordes said that she is thinking about attending as a spectator if not as a participant, and she suggested that the club should consider promoting the formation of a team.
OPEN DISCUSSION OF THE FUTURE OF THE CLUB
THE PRIDE 5K
Bill initiated a discussion of the future of the club. He began by noting that the Pride 5K has long been a wonderful event that has celebrated fitness, helped to give the club real presence in the larger community, and served to raise $50,000 for worthy charitable groups over the course of its history. He distributed a sheet showing a breakdown of the race disbursements by recipient. He also noted that it has been getting harder in recent years to find people who are willing to do the work necessary to make the race a success. He questioned whether we had enough people willing to do the work this year.
Tracey asked how many people it would take. David estimated that it would take something on the order of 80 to 100 hours of volunteer time. Tracey wondered if five committed individuals could get the work done. David said he thought that five people might be able to do it. Bill noted that it would take slightly more effort to bring the race off this year for a few of reasons: (1) we do not have an individual with race experience who would be willing to serve as race chair; (2) we would be getting a later start this year, and it would be difficult to get everything done in time; and (3) we would probably need to raise additional seed money to cover upfront expenses.
David noted another challenge to putting on the race: there has been a steady shift through the years away from corporate sponsorships toward more dependence on individual contributions, and, given the bad economy, we would probably have a harder time raising funds this year than we did last year. Bill cited an example of difficulty in the corporate environment (23 out of 25 building contractors seeking services from a local kitchen cabinet maker had filed for bankruptcy during the past year), and Madelyn Stella noted that individuals are having a harder time now, too.
Peter Van Dyken asked whether the Pride 5K was the only source of the Club’s charitable giving. Tim Straayer noted that this year the club had given funds to match members’ donations to the West Michigan AIDS Walk, and in the past we had contributed to the GRACE Hunger Walk and had raised over $1,600 for the Reeds Lake Trail extension project. Frank asked if we should not think of alternatives to the Pride 5K to sustain our legacy of charitable giving. Madelyn suggested that a race or walk might not be the best thing, since there are so many other races and walks taking place throughout the year.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Tracey voiced some concern that the group was getting stuck on thinking about whether it could keep doing what it had done in the past. She suggested that what we needed to do was to think outside that box, to look at restructuring and rebuilding the club. Grand Rapids really needs Front Runners, she said, noting that when she moved here from Oregon, she found Front Runners to be a standout among the local LGBT groups, a kind of gay Welcome Wagon. Among the things she loves about the group is that it’s fitness-oriented, it’s not tied to bar life, it offers pleasant social activities, and it’s committed to building community and charitable giving. Other organizations find new ways of doing things in order to survive, she said. If the club can’t sustain a viable core of runners anymore, what can we do? Golf? Bowling? We need to rebrand ourselves, she suggested, and then market ourselves to attract others. There was a general enthusiasm for the points she was making.
Tracey moved that we assemble a committee to explore possible fundraising alternatives and community service projects. Jeff Wyckoff seconded, and the motion was passed by voice vote, without dissent.
Bill affirmed the vote but suggested that we should not end the meeting until we had specifically dealt with the issue of whether we were going to attempt to stage a Pride 5K in June of 2010.
Luan noted that if we wanted to do the Pride 5K in June, we would have to make work of reserving Riverside Park immediately. David said he believed that it was simply too late to put together a Pride 5K by June, though an autumn race might be doable. Jeff Wyckoff noted that if we moved the race to the fall, it would lose its value as the kickoff event for the Pride celebration, and he said that it sounded to him as though it would involve a lot of work whenever it was scheduled. Madelyn agreed that 80 to 100 hours of volunteer time sounded like a lot for the club to take on. Tim noted that this was especially the case in light of the fact that the club now had a smaller number of active members from which to draw on for race volunteers. He suggested that some of the people at the meeting who were not participating in the regularly scheduled walks might not have a good sense of the levels to which active participation had fallen during the past year. The average number of walkers on any given Tuesday or Saturday was now around six or fewer even in good weather, he pointed out, and the numbers were trending down, not up.
Van Maas urged the members to be realistic about the large amount of work that it takes to bring off a Pride 5K. If it turned out that there were not enough people to get the job done properly, we could end up tarnishing the reputation of the club and the race. He argued that we should not commit ourselves to staging a June race or any other event until we were certain that we had the resources to do a good job of it.
Tracey suggested that we should devote the year to restructuring and rebuilding the club in a fashion that better suited the needs and goals of the membership. If that went well, then we might be ready to put together some event later in the year. George Miller agreed, saying that he thought June was too soon for whatever event we might plan. He suggested that we might do better to look at an event later in the year, such as a National Coming Out Day Run or a Halloween race — something more lighthearted and less competition-level.
Bill said that it sounded to him as though a consensus was building that we should not stage a Pride 5K this year. There was general assent to this and no registered disagreement. He said that it also sounded to him as though people wanted to explore alternatives to the race as a club activity and he asked if anyone had an idea about how they wanted to proceed toward that goal.
Tracey suggested that interested individuals might want to form a committee to kick around ideas, make recommendations, and work with the officers to implement them. She suggested that it would take a group of about five or so people.
Tim noted that it had not always been easy to get people to volunteer to do such things in the past — that some club members had not been able or willing to do specific tasks associated with preparation for the Pride 5K, for instance, and a small number of people had ended up doing most of the work. He asked whether there were five people in the room who would be willing to commit to serving on such a committee. After some discussion, seven people volunteered: Tracey Cordes, Jeff Kosminske, Madelyn Stella, Van Maas, David Morris, Peter Van Dyken, and Frank Minervini. Tracey agreed to set up an initial meeting and coordinate with the new
officers.
Bill suggested that we move on to the remaining points on the agenda. He noted that since we had elected a full slate of officers and were talking about the possibility of staging another race, it would be important for us to maintain our status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to maintain our membership in the Road Runners Club of America in order to be eligible for liability insurance, and to maintain our membership in the International Front Runners organization. There was general assent to these points and no registered disagreement.
ARE WE STILL A RUNNING CLUB?
Bill then addressed an issue previously raised by several of the members, about whether we should continue to represent ourselves as a running group when we had virtually no active members who still ran. He pointed out a couple of the difficulties that this produced: (1) he noted that he himself had been reluctant to join Front Runners because the name made him think that it was at least principally a running group, and (2) he noted that during the past year a handful of runners had expressed an interest in joining the club but that none of them had stayed after
finding that there was no one else in the club that they could run with. He asked if anyone had any views on how best to confront these difficulties.
David asked for a show of hands from all those present who still considered themselves to be runners. Jeff Kosminske, Robert Guise, and George Miller raised their hands. David asked them how they felt about the issue.
Jeff Kosminske said that he didn’t like the idea of dropping the word “runners” from the club name. George Miller said that since he had joined the group he had never found anyone among the small number of runners that he could keep pace with anyway, and that it would probably be easier for an occasional runner to associate with a walking group than it would be for prospective walkers to associate with a running group.
David suggested that we should look to other groups to see how they were branding themselves. He noted that the Palms Springs Front Runners group consists primarily of walkers.
Frank suggested that we might want to emphasize the idea of fitness rather then either walking or running. Robert Guise agreed that it would be better to represent ourselves as a fitness group rather than solely as a walking group. David wondered if it would be helpful to promote just one meeting per week — probably Saturday — for runners. George Miller wondered whether it would be helpful to make the starting time on Saturday later than 9:00 a.m. Bill pointed out that the starting time used to be 9:30, but members had decided to push it back to 9:00 because they had so many chores to do later in the day.
Tracey asserted that the challenge facing the new officers was to expand the focus of the group beyond just walking. Jim Eastman noted that the social aspects of the group are important to many of the members, especially the older ones. George Miller noted that younger people tended not to be interested in joining gay-identified groups anyway. Bill underscored that point, noting that several gay runners train with the group that meets in front of the East Grand Rapids Library at the same we gather for our Tuesday night walks during the summer and that these people are simply more interested in affiliating with a group dedicated to serious training for races than they are in affiliating with a specifically gay organization. Given these facts, Van asked whether the group would be better off focusing on trying to meet the needs and expectations of prospective younger people or on trying to meet the needs and expectations of its current membership.
Bill said that it looked as though we were not going to come up with an answer to these questions at this meeting and suggested that Tracey’s proposed committee could look at them some more and work with the officers to continue the discussion over time.
ADDENDA
Bill asked if there were any remaining issues that people wanted to discuss.
David said that he would work with Jim Whittaker on those aspects of his role as treasurer that involved working with Quicken.
Tim asked whether the members felt it was essential to maintain the Front Runners web site, noting that it would take effort on several fronts to do so: we would need a new web host and web master, and we would have to renew a couple of accounts that are set to expire in February. Luan volunteered to serve as web master and work on taking care of the other issues.
No other matters being mentioned, Bill expressed his thanks to Jeff Henrickson for hosting the meeting in his beautiful new home, and the rest of the group joined in thanking him.
Van then urged all present to express their thanks to the outgoing officers for their efforts over the past year, and the members gave up another round of applause.
Bill asked if there was a motion to adjourn the meeting. David moved to adjourn, Frank seconded the motion, and by popular assent the meeting concluded at 12:00 noon.