DNC Board Meeting
Thursday February 2nd, 2012
Jacobs Well, 5pm
Attendance: Tami, Harold, Paul, Roland, Herb, Wendy, Ann-Marie, Jada, Kelvin, Dave Hamm, Jamie, Ivan, Jen, Louie, Yvonne, Joe, Richard
Minute Taker: Jada
Agenda Scriber: Wendy
Tami:
- Protocol
- Cleaner-upers: Kelvin, Dave Hamm,
- Suggests that we clean our own plates
Kelvin
- Acknowledgements
Paul
- Reads constitution
Tami
- Goes over the Agenda
- Meeting proposed to end 7:15pm
GENERAL MEETING
Wendy
- Louie is bringing coffee
- Craig is bringing cream and sugar and cups
- We need an extension cord
Yvonne
- Im couch surfing
- Im stressed, I need to use a recreation pass
Wendy
- We'll add it to the agenda
- You should go to the shelters committee meetings on Monday night
- Who is going to prepare food? Craig is willing to support
Yvonne
- I can see if my sister can make bannick
- I can make chile, I can cook
Paul
- Salary board members can pay for pizza
Louie
- At AFD we have a women who cooks for us for free
- Whatever you give her she'll cook it and deliver it, are you up for it?
Kelvin
- She'll cook up to 200 people, if it gets larger then that then we need to find a place large enough for her to cook
?
- We need to ask for donations from the neighbourhood. Save-on-Meats, and restaurants, the new pastry shop, time to ask them
Wendy
- If somebody wants to be a backup, we need volunteers
Tami
- We need a food committee or something
Paul
- Mark from Save-on-Foods, he's got the kitchen upstairs, cooking for all these supportive housing (through contract)
- Ask him to give up his kitchen
Tami
- We didn't check-in, protocol issue
Ivan
- Fraser use to bottom-line it, we need a new person
Dave H
- Vandu had a presentation put on Saturday, people will be fed well there at the presentation
Wendy
- If there were people here to make food, I'll be willing to organize a costco run for us to create a sandwich assembly line
Tami
- Will go shopping at Costco, pick up the food
Wendy
- We need people there are 2pm to put it together
- Need petty cash
Roland
- We have $2800 in the bank
Paul
- Thought we decided it was Dave Murray
Herb
- Specifically for the market though?
Tami
- I don't recall that
Tami
- Motion to have Roland bottom-line the petty cash and details, give a report every week
- Carried unanimously
Tami
- Motion to spend $60 to buy costco food
- 1 abstained, Motion carried.
Wendy
- Phone Calls - Jada first 3 pages
- Distributing phone sheets
- Motion to spend $100 on Roland to robo-phone the DNC phone lists
- 4 against, 9 for. It passes.
- Discussion: Ivan says he doesn't like how impersonal it is. Jada says that residents aren't able to ask questions to board members if they have it.
Wendy
- Any other logistics?
- Postering is done
- Agenda needs to be worked on, by the presidents
- Can be a combination of presidents and other board members
Dave
- Should we ask our members if they want to be called by a machine or a person
Wendy
- Who wants to do the board report? A summary?
- Paul?
Paul
- Do we need robophone to be ratified?
- Sure.
Wendy
- Any other board type committee reports that need to be presented at the GM?
Harold
- DT East editorial meet tomorrow, might be useful to report where we are with that
Wendy
- Which reports are we doing at the GM?
Roland
- We invited a lot of First United people at the meeting as well
- Will that be a break-out groups or present to the entire audience?
Ivan
- What we've learned is that we're able to only have one meaningful discussion at every meeting
- The rest aren't really engaging. There is no space to make any comments
- If we break into small groups, what should they be?
- LAPP, Homeless/Shelters, Street Market, Tenant Union, Policing
Wendy
- Does anything need to be ratified?
Tami
- Chance for people to talk
Herb
- Add Cop Watch
Paul
- We made a decision about what our bottom-line if we would go ahead with the LAPP
Ivan
- Then it should be a full group discussion
Richard
- Policing, we should, lots of stuff is going on here
- Ominus bill
- Getting pretty bad down here, lots of harassment by the police
- It should be a part of the GM
Ivan
- Gentrification discussion for the first 45 minutes of the meeting
- Then have the LAPP follow straight afterwards
Harold
- My concern is that there's not a lot of room, and it's thrown together, not really clear what people are being asked
- We need to be clear on what the situation is
- We need to figure out what stage we're at
- I do think there will be some key decisions coming up
Ivan
- We have a meeting tomorrow
- Uneven amount of knowledge about the LAPP, put this off until the LAPP meeting discussion
- Full meeting discussion: report of gentrification, possibly the LAPP, board reports (treasurer, president report), then break out to committees, then new business
STREET MARKET 50/50 DRAW
Wendy
- Roland has the key for the box, and he will come in to do the draw and handle the money
- Cigarette money?
- Anyone else want to participate in this discussion on Friday?
Dave
- Call it a Vendor Raffle
Paul
- Cops are trying to push people out of the area
- Between Carrall Street and Gore, 15 cops harassing left right and centre
Richard
- They do 50/50's at sports events
Paul
- Get the City to donate the permit
Jada
- Forgive the permit
LAPP STRATEGY
Wendy
- Committee is struck, 2 empty seats: ALIVE and SRA
- First meeting is happening on February 15th
- BIAs have filled all the seats
- City has dumped us a work plan, headache.
- Planner who is doing it didn't incorporate the terms of reference in the planning framework and left out all the actors and didn't explain what the committees roles would be
- Hopefully we'll get another edit
- Trying to hold everyone to the terms of reference
- Delightful surprise. This is a work plan that will go as an appendix for a report to Council. In the back of this work plan, interim rezoning policy for the entire area
- Tom is going to push for no rezoning during the entire LAPP
- Mike harcourt supports
Jada
- Will the recent canning of the Director of Planning influence this LAPP in a good or bad way?
Harold
- People will be meeting with the city manager tomorrow, we're going to get a sense of which way the wind is going
- Discussion on how far we want to push this
- If we got the no rezoning during the LAPP, would be good, some of us want to go further than this
- How do we deal with new stores? We need to figure out a formulation that works
- Question of incentives of proactive development
- People would really like to stop all new development, whether we get support on that or not, those are the types of questions
- We're going to do a presentation and push as hard as we can
- Potential issues with the timing of the LAPP, the City is under pressure from developers etc so they want to streamline the process
Dave H.
- The petition for the street market, do we have it so we have our logo on it?
- It will be part of the newspaper, DT East
Wendy
- Maybe the way to deal with the LAPP is get someone to do a presentation, talk about our strategy with the LAPP and the correlation with the condo development
Jada
- Show the correlation between the LAPP and the condo development projects, the connection between the two
Herb
- Work Program needs to have some wiggle room, not set in stone
- Look at incentives of the hipster joints and cafes, facades etc.
Ivan
- The LAPP meetings have been dominating by Tom talking and Ray Spaxm, its a bad sign
- It means that they are setting the pace and the terms of the discussion, and the framework of the discussion, and we're just responding to it
- He responds with anger to our criticism
- He makes over 100 grand a year, probably $100 per hour to meet with us, he should listen
- This is not going to be a easy to get this interim zoning
- Going at this pace takes a toll on us
Wendy
- We are not going to slow this train down
- We want this interim zoning
Harold
- There is tension around this
- It's up to the LAPP committee to deal with the pace of the process
Ivan
- We're going to half to push back
Wendy
- We want a moratorium on all new development
Herb
- We're slogging through this 30 page document, makes us do busy work
Tami
- I appreciate all the information
- Got my email of acceptance letter
Jada
- I got my rejection letter!
Tami
- Logo thing in the email, with City of Vancouver, BCS and DNC logos all together
Yvonne
- I talked to a guy who was in a car accident
- Seen the conditions of his place
- The city took it away, now he's in a room in gastown
- I want to get a lawyer for him
- 9th and Kingsway
- He was upset, crying, his head was stitched up, he was hit by a drunk driver, it was his place
- Who can I get to help him?
Kelvin
- Listening as an elder, what I would suggest is to introduce him and put him in the end so he's not taking up all the time with just him
- As we've seen, people with "degrees", just so that the whole meeting is not hearing just long-winded, blowing hot air, we need to worry about our people to blow hot air back
Wendy
- Willing to talk to Tom and Ray, people are picking up on this
- They called this the partners meeting, weekly partners meeting, it has to be a sharing between all the partners
- I can talk to them on the side
Tami
- I don't think adding him at the end would be the last word
Harold
- We'll have to have the facilitator guide around this is
Paul
- Do we have a short-list on the facilitators?
Wendy
- No. The agreement is that the DNC, BCS and CoV will facilitate
- We're not ready for a facilitator, we'll chair different sections, take-turn on presenting
Paul
- I don't think Tom should be a co-chair in the first meeting, especially if he's dominating
Wendy
- I disagree, we need to work with him
- The 3 groups need to work together to produce this plan, in partnership, we need all 3
- They are the planners that are suppose to help us make this plan
Paul
- I'm concerned about Tom dominating
Wendy
- Partly the way he speaks
Yvonne
- What if we could write a letter to address that people aren't happy with him, go above him, not talking directly to him
Ivan
- He's terrified of being fired
- We don't know what we'd get if Tom was out, someone could be worse
- We need to put some pressure on him
- If he doesn't respond well then we'll try to fire him
THANK YOU LETTERS
Ivan
- Write one to Jacob's Well for using their space
- Write a letter to UBC Social Justice Committee
- Give a letter with $100 to Jacobs Well (one time $100)
- Wrote a proposal for another $1,500
- Write a letter to Craig for bringing us food and money for tenant organizing
Paul
- When we write these letters, we should have DNC letterheads
Ivan
- We have those
- Motion to write these 3 letters plus a gift to Jacob's Well
- 2 against, motion carries.
FEED THE ROOTS
Ivan
- 8 week workshop
- We want them to go to a board meeting with a sample workshop so we can understand whats going on
- They are not available to do it Thursdays. They can do it on Mondays
- Lets do it at 5pm Monday, an hour before the Shelter Committee Meeting
- Who's interested in attending the workshop?
- I'll give them the go ahead to come here on Monday
- The workshop won't be a big meeting
SHELTERS
Roland
- We had a meeting at Vandu today with First United residents, about 30 showed up
- Unanimous that residents want the shelters to stay open
- Consensus of residents continuing to get together and talk about issues
- Meeting again in 2 weeks
- Already big difference in how the shelters are operating from a few months ago
- They shrunk First United by 40 beds, slowly turning people away
- We need to have a resolution for the shelter to stay open at a certain size and get the City to replace the beds
- March 31st their funding runs out
- Shelters can continue to shrink, doesn't mean they're housing anyone
- Lineups are getting longer
- Motion to support the will of residents and be ready to issue a letter to BC Housing (either replacing beds, or providing more low-barrier shelter space that is being reducing).
- Committee to draft a letter, present to board for approval
Wendy
- Maybe encourage BC Housing to have smaller low-barrier shelters
Roland
- You're right
Ivan
- There is also New Fountain
Roland
- That will continue, it's not new though
Ivan
- It is a low-barrier shelter
- I'm concerned about supporting First United Shelter because what is there already and because of having a logic track with that
- Push for safe spaces for everyone. 250 spaces is not a safe and humane space for vulnerable people
- It's going to take more than one meeting than 30 residents in that space in order to come up with a vision for what that space should look like
- There is no reason to hurry to make a statement this week because the closing date isn't set for another 2 months
Paul
- We should support First United stay open upon meeting with everyone, if they are willing to adhere to a certain set of rules of operation
- We need to write up that Bill of Rights
- There are a lot of tricky things in that
- I support First United stay open, but not as it exists
Roland
- I agree we don't need to rush with the statement
- There's a meeting on 7th with people from BC Housing coming. Is there something we can tell them that the community feels? And that the reduction of low-barrier beds is an issue?
- It's about the general beds. It can come anywhere or go anywhere, but we need them.
Joe
- It's going to change, it's in transition right now
- It won't be what it was, too much negative press, it's a sensitive issue
- We have to protect our sisters more than we do right now
Tami
- Supporting First United is really tricky
Ivan
- We should not be shy about expressing our vision
- There should not be a sanctuary that provides risks to people
- We should put that forward with our discussions with BC Housing
- Champion those safe models, like RainCity Housing with 30/40 people per building
- We want housing!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Tami
- Roland will bring the cheque book to board meetings so we're organized
Kelvin
- February 14th Annual Women's Memorial March
Dave H.
- February 8th Beyond Prohibition at the Carnegie Centre 7-9pm
Herb
- February 17th is my birthday!
Dave H.
- Gord, he was so verbally abusive to Lorna on Sunday
- Cat and mouse game with the cops
- Losing perspective, personal attacks on people
- Going to have a security volunteer
- Alcoholism is really affecting him
Kelvin
- Nisga'a new year Friday at the PNE!
Meeting Closed.
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