February 14, 2024
Attendance: Alex Kinsella, Liz Maloney, Kai Srisirikul, Claire Anacreon, Dina Pandya
#1 Beach cleanups (first Thursday of the month at noon)
• February was a very successful cleanup because of Jan storms!
• Liz will lead March 7
#2 Energy Master Plan — Dave Derosier will give a presentation at our meeting next month
• Plan for around 20 minutes. Alex will publicize to the STF list for all who are interested.
#3 Lunch and Learns
• Beekeeping
• Looks like either Wed, 2/28 or Wed, 3/6 at noon (waiting for confirmation from Ellen Bailey).
Maybe at Carriage House?
• Kai will be in touch with Ellen
• Farming Falmouth
• An April event would be good timing just before the planting season. Perhaps we could do a
workshop at our tree grove outside Clark. And we could send some volunteers to one of their
events.
• Alex will follow up
• Data library/herbarium
• Claire was in touch with Pam Polloni about an herbarium tour. Our contact at the data library
recently left WHOI, but hopefully Pam knows who would be the right person to talk to.
#4 Carpooling: Link to spreadsheet for carpooling organization:
• Liz will send the link out to the STF list
#5 Garden updates
• It’s getting close to planting season! Liz will send an email to the STF list to schedule an
initial meeting with those interested.
• It might be useful to have set days for weeding this year so that it doesn’t all fall on a small
number of people.
#6 Named rooms tour
• Dina has been on a committee to spruce up several meeting rooms on Quissett campus and rename
them after historical WHOI people from underrepresented backgrounds.
• F could co-sponsor, which means spreading
the word
and helping with the success of the event. DEI will provide the funding.
• A good time might be Thursday, April 25 at 4 pm. This could potentially be followed by a TGIT
event.
#7 Funding proposal brainstorm
• Alex, Seb, and Liz met with Dave Derosier and Bryan Urquhart about the potential for providing
STF with some budget for events and salary support. He would like us to collect some of the STF
accomplishments that we are most proud of from recent years as a justification for the budget.
Brainstorm ideas:
• Advocating for the EMP
• Community events: lunch and learns, walks, games. We are one of the only groups that hosts
events like this to build community across the institution.
• Energy reduction competition
• Beach cleanups
• Community garden
• Partnering with other organizations outside WHOI (T3C, others)
• Solar program
• Car chargers
• Bike loaner program
• Alex will write a draft proposal with this content and send to others to review.
• If you have more ideas, email them to Alex!
#8 Other ideas/discussion
• Claire proposed a group singing event to build community. This would be particularly nice near
Earth Day. The fee for the leader would be ~$150. Issue right now is that we don’t have budget yet
for events.
• Is there other Earth Day programming planned? None yet this year that we know of. We could
coordinate with WHOI communications.
• Last year, we had a group hike around Quissett Campus and a short feature in Oceanus. We could
do something similar this year.
• Maybe a larger cleanup event? We could partner with other science institutions, T3C, or others.
• Are we getting electric shuttles? No, they don’t have enough range for a full day right now, so
we’d need two.
• Bike racks on Quissett campus. The main
entrance of Clark is one location that is low on bike parking. Liz and Kai will follow up.