Minutes of KWPeace New Year’s Potluck Planning Meeting, 19 January 2017

Event announcement: KWPeace New Year’s Potluck Planning Meeting

KW Peace Meeting Minutes January 19th, 2017

  • Present: Jim, Ellen, Sharon, Dwyer, Bob, Laura, Mo, Esther, Isaiah, Sue, Matt, Jenelle
    • Welcome to Jim and Ellen, joining us for the first time to represent Council of Canadians, and also to Jenelle.
  • Events
  • Activities for Peace
  • Updates
    • Esther was here in place of Rochelle to represent CPT, as Rochelle is currently in Columbia for a 4 week training. Esther is then going to Cuba for a Humanitarian Aid trip
    • Food Not Bombs is shifting focus from just serving to also include action against poverty. If you want to have info on a table during one of their servings you can do so. They serve 1:30-3:30 on Saturday in front of City hall. Any leftovers go to House of Friendship
    • Another group called Vegan Lunch Bag gives out a vegan lunch bag and warm clothes
    • Soup for the Soul – a local chef gives out soup near Frederick and King (61 King St E) one day a month. Next one is January 27th from 4-5pm
    • Sue is doing a training with the Alternatives to Nonviolence project January 20, 21, and 22 at Grand Valley. The training was developed in upstate NY because inmates wanted training on how to solve conflicts nonviolently. The goal is to foster connections and use transforming power of nonviolence.
    • Sharon says there’s lots going on with FairVote and electoral reform. At the September 14th town hall it was clear that there is support for changes to the electoral system that include some kind of proportional representation, but if you read the report, you don’t get the sense of strong support and they use confusing language
      • Apparently Raj Saini told someone that only 1 person had come to him in support of proportional representation electoral reform, which is clearly false. At the very least he’s been met by 1/2 dozen people about this issue.
      • Getting the sense that the Liberals are studying it until it goes away, and making the claim that there isn’t support or a broad consensus
      • If you want to act, you can write to the new minister and CC Justin Trudeau and Raj Saini with a physical letter (apparently emails don’t count)
      • FairVote is gathering evidence, so if you met or contacted Raj about this issue, please send them the date and time and method of contact (Also if you met with Bardish Chaggar). They will use this information to then confront Raj.
      • May pass Alternative Vote in February so that they can say they passed electoral reform, but it’s not the same as proportional representation
    • Isaiah has developed an *educational game* that explores and makes accessible the complex relationship between environmental limits, climate change and various conflicts within and between societies. He’s happy to present this game to a group, it’s good for 5-10 people. Contact him if interested.
      • It’s being presented to KW Awesome next week to get funding to develop the game further
    • Eco Schools Ontario is a program funded by the government to get schools and individuals to participate in making their schools more sustainable. They can get certified if they get enough points, or can just do actions.
    • Water event at the Laurier Seminary on Monday that deals with indigenous rights and water for catholic High School teachers. If any teachers are interested connect with Laura
    • KOALA is working on banning fur farms that are subsidized by the government
    • KOALA is advocating to add “Meatless Mondays” to school lunches. Amarak is the provider of food for the schools in the area and is accommodating of social justice concerns – cooperated with the fair trade campus initiative at Laurier.
    • KW Animal Save is starting a climate change chapter. Many people ask what they can do to impact climate change, and two main actions that have an impact are taking political action and eating less meat.
    • Council of Canadians now has a chapter in Waterloo. They meet the 3rd Wednesday of every month at Bread and Roses.
      • Their first action was giving information about boycotting Nestle products at the Kitchener Market before Christmas
    • Social Action Group of the Unitarian Church buys beans every year and donate them to the food bank. They are expecting to get 10,000lbs of beans!
      • The beans are Romano beans grown in Ontario and are non-GMO
      • Did you know that Canada provides 30% of pulses (legumes, beans, etc) to the world?
    • Citizens for Public Justice are advocating “Give it up for Lent,” which asks Christians to give up things that have a negative environmental or sustainability impact
      • Maybe a launch should be planned for April 1st? Laura and Isaiah are talking about it
    • Esther is leading a delegation from October 24-28 to Palestine. There are 4 delegates on the trip who went last year. It’s open to all, and will include bearing witness during the olive harvest, when Palestinian people are harassed when harvesting olives, and need to get permits to harvest their olives. This is co-led by Robert Holmes.
  • Website
    • Few people upload to the site. Mostly it’s automatically uploaded or Bob adds events.
    • CCJ Clearline, the provider of our web services, is no longer offering web hosting because it’s no longer profitable. We will have to find a new host.
    • There are some VPS (Virtual Private Server) services that are $5/month. However we don’t know if that will be enough bandwidth or storage, so we’ll start with that and see how it goes. We may need to go with the next level up at $10/month
    • Probably will go with Data Mantle, as it’s a local company
    • A VPS requires more work on our end. Bob will continue managing but would like help. Emily will help but if anyone else feels computer savvy and would like to be involved please let us know! The work needed to be done is maintain the systems and do backup.
    • This will mean we can get an HTTPS, or security certificate, for our site
    • We will likely set up the VPS site in mid-February. The website will look the same from the user perspective
    • Bob estimates he spends an average of 20min/day for the blog/calendar currently, this might increase to 1hr or 1/2 hr per day when we switch
    • Several people gave donations towards the website, so we have funds to continue for a while more, depending on which service we end up using. Some of those funds are also going towards renewing the domain name, which we will continue to renew through CCJ Clearline
    • Other options mentioned were Execulink, which is far too expensive at $200/month
    • Bravehost.net isn’t great because you can’t aggregate calendars and it’s not easy to access data
  • Next KW Peace Potluck meeting is likely April 6th at 6pm. Sue will confirm that Stirling is available.

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