Officer's Meeting - January 13, 2020

In attendance. Woody Matthews, Colton Knight, Alton Palmore, Randall Crosby, Georgia Kellogg, Jim Perry, Cathy Graham, Mike Wells, and Kathy Warth.

Woody and Colton worked on the podcast which is coming together. Some google e-mail groups have been set up to communicate separately with officers and members. They are Rsvf-officers@googlegroups.com and Rsvf-members@googlegroups.com.

No questions were asked.

There are no changes in the financial report. Woody has spent money personally to get things set up & would like to be reimbursed. He said his costs came to a couple hundred dollars.

Our treasury balance was reported at $2,775.02 minus $40 as a reimbursement to Todd Bowen for a raffle purchase and $202 to FCB for dues. $183 will go to RSVA in February at Sagebrush.

Dues are a wash because we pay them to include FCB and ACB. We still have to pay RSVA $10 per year per person. There are some lifetime members which helped reduce the cost.

Woody was asked why he didn’t use our expense account for things he has done. He explained we can only spend by check which requires 2 signatures. The current signers are Woody and Mike Wells.

Colton, Alton, and Jim Warth will be attending Sagebrush. Colton received a scholarship as a first-time attendee. The BBE pays registration fees only.

Everyone at this meeting heard the first podcast. There was a total of 104 listeners so far. The podcast was open to BBE staff and 120 operators.

RSVA is pleased that we’ve done the podcast and they are impressed. They are really looking at Florida right now and how far we’ve come in such a short time to reestablish our group.

Some FSVF future goals include doing interviews and blind merchant media. Our BBE committee meetings are a part of that. In addition, reaching out to other types of blind business entrepreneurs. Alton has come on board offering assistance with the podcast and media projects.

Randall went to FSDB to do a presentation about BBE for school age blind students.

Woody spoke with Robert Doyle in November at the FCB board meeting. Florida is seeing a growth in school age blind children. Leon County has approximately 60 to 70 blind students. This doesn’t include FSDB or the increase in other counties.

Florida has a 70% unemployment rate for visually impaired people. We need to do more to decrease that percentage.

Woody thanked the RSVF officers and volunteers for their time in getting the word out about our program.

Woody stated he is running out of personal funds for travel. He needs to stay connected to various national organizations so we can remain successful with our goals. We need to do more fundraising. The current goal is to earn $17,000 per year for secondary education and travel. There was a lot of discussion regarding the different events, sales, raffles, webpage donation, etc. to earn fundraising dollars. Mitzi, Colton, and Debbie are on the fundraising subcommittee.

We need to put together a presentation panel to explain what our program is about for FCB in May. FCB is from the 14th to the 17th in Maitland. Randall will be one of the speakers. We will get a table at no expense and an area to conduct the presentation.

Randall and Woody agreed we need at least one corporate sponsor in the future to increase our fundraising abilities. A wine tasting event is one example. The goal is to earn at least $17,000 a year.

Our website is up. Rsvf.org is the address. We will be able to accept donations and membership dues through paypal on the site. Keith Flowers is helping with design & accessibility. The site looks like the DBS design, but it’s not accessible yet.

We have an RSVF facebook private group page. Invites should go out so members can join. You can request to join if you didn’t receive the invite. Rules should be established to avoid too much political conversations.

The floor was open for discussion or questions.

Our RSVF meeting during FCB will be help on Saturday May 16th.

Colton will do interviews at sagebrush.

Kathy Warth made a motion to sell visors at FCB. Jim Perry 2nd. The visor will say RSVF and the approved expense cannot exceed $500. No one opposed the vote.

Meeting concluded.

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