Friday, May 15th we met at the Fort Wayne Dance Collective, hosted by Andy Welfle.
Andy’s topic of choice was our brand, particularly our web presence and the need for a domain of our own.
Paul Spoelhof, YLNI’s Get on Board Committee Chair spoke about the importance of participating in the Get on Board initiative. He encouraged our group to sign up for the event Wed, May 20th to learn more about Board fit and deciding if Board leadership is right for you. Learn more here.
After introductions, Andy opened the floor to our brand, noting that our web presence would be better under our own domain.
Along the same lines, Hilary Andersen would like to be able to handout NeXtGen business cards to refer people to our site.
Andrew Hoffman questioned the term “Digest” in our name.
Lettie Haver would like to see how the group would grow under other leadership or guidance.
We ran through some branding thoughts and generated a list of terms that describe how the group feels to us:
Organic, Supportive, Organized, Relationship-based and Silo-Breaking
We talked about What’s Working: Networking in a natural, supportive and non-soliciting way. We agree that we like the chance to sit down, build relationships, get out of our work space, and learn from each others experiences. We like the strong sense of support we get from showing up every month.
We like that when we can’t show up, we can keep up with the blog.
Next Steps?
We will form an Executive Committee that meets separately. We frequently spend too much time on our direction and first time attendees may feel like they don’t have enough information to make decisions. Watch the blog for information on signing up for the E.C.
We’d like to reach out to previous first-time attendees who haven’t made it back to a meeting and let them know the tangible shape we’ve taken. We’d like their feedback to know their needs.
We liked when our meetings had an overall topic and attendees shared conversation about that, guided by a host’s interests and handouts. We’ll return to Topic oriented meetings.
Aja Michael suggested that NeXtgen actively pursue racial diversity among its membership.
At Hilary’s suggestion, we’d like to skip tours, or at the very least move tours to the end of meetings. They consume a lot of our time.
We’re going to apply for the YNPN Chapter affiliation. Chapter affiliation makes sense at this point, as we are effectively operating like a chapter now. The Executive Committee will take this up. We’ll chair business cards and a web domain until this goes through, as our identity and website will effectively change.
Hilary updated the group on the Mentoring Program’s progress. We’re launching with a mentoring network luncheon June 23rd at the Community Foundation. Details will follow by email to those signed up (see Sign Up link top right) and will be posted on the blog shortly for the world.
Next meeting: June 19 at the YWCA, hosted by Hilary Andersen.
Stay tuned here for the promised updates on Mentoring and the Executive Committee. Did we miss anything?
