August 15, 2022 Resonate Coop General Meeting
Ordinary Resolution
- For
- Against
0 voters
Agenda and Notes
Attendance: 12
@remst8, @richjensen, @brndnkng, @greg, @Hakanto, @karijoensen , @LLK @pcuellar, @peter, @psi, @Thom, @sganesh
- Rich: Mentioning that a General Meeting may be introduced by the Board
Call to Order and Welcome - Chair, brandon king
Motion to Approve Chair
- Seconded by Hakanto
- Approved, no objection
Approval of Agenda
- Seconded by Sunita
- Approved, no objection
Consideration of Ordinary Resolution:
“To Be Resolved: Thom Stewart 1 of Galway, Ireland is elected to the Resonate Board as a Director.”
Introduction - Rich Jensen
Overview of where we’re at and how we came to talk with Thom about joining our board
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We found that some of our auditing advice with compliance wasn’t substantial
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New auditor that is more rigorous and feels that there are important steps to help indicate that we’re a proper Irish organization
- This involves two factors: there’s legal requirement indicating having Irish citizens on board, but also a social mission with genuine connection to where we’re doing cooperative work, doing on the ground work with social justice movements within Ireland
- Around last October, I was impressed with an individual as well as original secretary Sam Toland and began to engage with communities that work with what we aspire to do
- Ireland as a people has a historic struggle with colonization
- We need to be connected with someone who has the technical expertise to create a good relationship with where we’re chartered
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Liabilities with the Irish Government
- We engaged a new auditor
- New auditor had a different interpretation regarding the obligations regarding payment to the Irish State Employment Fund
- We began to hit revenue volume as a service so we are hitting our VAT threshold
Thom Stewart
- Managed a collective art center Dublin for about 4-5 years
- Galway—Cooperative Mental Health Facility
- Dog lol
- Primary cooperative, used Resonate’s articles to incorporate a cooperative doing work with Irish Government Health Services
- On an ethical level, convinced that this form of organization is the only way to create change and move forward
- It’s a creative and artistic country
- See a lot of common ground between being someone who has set up art cooperatives and Resonate
- Artists can democratically manage our own economies
Discussion
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Hakanto: What are some of your own personal inspirations or dreams for the place?
- Slightly unpopular position (in general I don’t think that most cooperatives make economic sense)
- Through intercooperation amongst coops
- I dont think it’s much to say “we’ll have a not evil Spotify”
- It’s not sufficient, either on a level of values or economics
- Most interested in how we can actually bring around artists towards and ecological regeneration of the arts
- Employing festivals to do radical earth care
- Slightly unpopular position (in general I don’t think that most cooperatives make economic sense)
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brandon: I think a lot of this really aligns with us
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Rich: This highly unusual process for the first time we’ve had a general meeting, sort of having this interview situation
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Hakanto: Open to officer in the future
- At the moment focused on familiarity and stabilization
- One advantage is that because the genetics of the cooperatives are sufficiently similar, I see crossover, there’s an economic model there with secondary cooperatives
- I think it would be premature to jump into an officer role
- There’s lots of intricacies with the ecosystem in Ireland that requires an on the ground person here
- Let’s focus once again on stabilization and enterprise access
Motion to open member voting in the forum through 11:59pm August 22 (CET)
- Seconded by Rich
Announcements and General Discussion
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brandon: folks have different vantage points of the elephant, might help to pop around and chat
- Introduction and background, aligning with a lot of the stuff Thom is bringing up, cultural organizer, I DJ, starting school this fall, getting an MFA, former community lead at Resonate, build ecological balance, working with communities to repair, a lot of unlearning around white supremacy and colonization
- All of these things we’ve been taking steps towards
- There’s a lot of different containers of work, it’s been financially precarious, sometimes the money to do projects doesnt keep us on the path to doing the things we need to do
- The tension of not having the money/resources of not being able to do what we want to do
- One of the reasons I feel I was brought here was to help steer the ship, assess what we have
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Si: over the past week we unblocked Aug, able to do some major infrastructure work, it’s been overwhelming with the amount of options created
- Props to Aug and everyone on dev for holding it down
- There was a lot of excitement about finally being unblocked
- Any links that are wrong, anything that’s not working, please let us know
- Emotionally and Infrastructure wise it’s been a big deal!
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Hakanto: seconding that shout out to this space and everything coming together
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LLK: appreciate the community and that we have a community where we feel we can justify what we’re asking out of people, there were great last minute additions, this has been groundbreaking for us
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brandon: would be remiss not to mention Diane and Sam’s work around our membership drive
- Diane’s work around community team meetings and dismantling white culture meetings
- We’re able to build a deeper connection here with folks
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Rich: getting board meetings out there’s no intentional blockage, just have been focusing on family matters and getting stable
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Hakanto: working on a project, want to invite folks in the community to join, pitch for an organizational form for how we structure working groups, thinking to what brandon was saying with the elephant metaphor, I’ve had my own opportunity to view lots of different things since arriving as a volunteer, create a lineage of learning, so that they’re guaranteed to have other folks to learn fromacce
- Want to express gratitude to those on Mattermost, going to bring this proposal to the forum this week
- Working with Diane to host calls, looking forward to it
Motion to Adjourn
- Seconded by Sunita
