September 18, 2024
Attendance: Sebastien Bigorre, Lanie Plueddemann, Dave Derosier, Jed Goldstone, Liz Maloney
#1 Beach Clean-up Shore Lab - Monthly – We need Volunteers to join the leaders! on the first Thursday of each month at noon. Meet at Gate by Shore Lab. Gloves and trash pickers available.
- September 5: picked up lots of bottles, cigarette butts, clothing (post Labor Day)
- October 3: Alan will lead
- November 7: Looking for a leader
For now, Seb has the gloves and trash picker-uppers with him and will pass them off to Alan for the next cleanup. After that, he has identified a couple locations that they could be stored and we’ll just need to decide what makes the most sense. Clark South Highbay, ESL, or Shore Lab (which probably isn’t open often, so might not be the best option).
#2 Lunch and Learns:
Reaching out for potential speakers (K. Sidhartha, S. Madsen, M. Kasprzyk, M. Amsler)
Seb reached out to Kumara Sidhartha who is just back from India and January seems like a good fit.
Liz reached out to Stephanie Madsen at the town who is very busy at the moment, but would be happy to do one in a few months. So maybe Jan/Feb would make sense. She’d like to know what we want to hear about. Something specific? Or a broader update on what projects she has going on in town?
Jed also mentioned that Alan Robinson from the Falmouth Solid Waste Committee could be a good future Lunch n Learn guest.
#3 List of past STF achievements and future projects:
STF members can provide input to draft list .
Based on the list, Facilities will evaluate budget for funding events and salary support.
We are also exploring an independent funding opportunity through the employee resource group (ERG) under the DEI umbrella. This route would provide funding for events, but not salary support. There are also yearly guidelines that we’d need to abide by to receive this support. They all seemed reasonable and manageable.
Members can provide feedback about each opportunity. Dave and Liz will look through the Google Doc before the next meeting and try to categorize things in a way that might be helpful to match funding sources. Let’s try to have a final list with categories by the end of November, which would work for budgeting purposes.
#4 Garden update
- Seb met with Rick and Tiger for beautifying meadow area near LOSOS. There are constraints from Cape Cod commission (keep natural, native plants). Could use new area behind Redfield as template. Would be nice to create a space that people wanted to spend time in. There’s no outdoor gathering space in that part of campus. Perhaps some sort of open-air gazebo could be included (East Falmouth Elementary has a good example of this). Having functions planned there could remind people about the space. It’s possible that some of the funding to renovate Clark to be dedicated to this project.
- Did Oyster pond garden install go through ? Yes, the JP student garden was approved. Not sure exactly how far they’ve gotten, but it’s in the works.
It could be fun to have a social event around pickling/preserving and/or sharing recipes from the garden plots.
#5 New Business -
Yard Sale: Alex contacted property management office and IS. Property management guidelines seem manageable. There’s a $5K threshold that dictates how equipment can be transferred (over $5K any proceeds need to be shared with the gov’t entity that funded it originally). But maybe it’s just a swap and we don’t worry about payment. Seb contacted IS and their concern is security issues like erasing info on hard drives in laptops before disposing of them. Could be good to give labs a deadline for cleanups. There’s a small-scale version of this that is ongoing in Redfield (a pile of things that are up for grabs). Would be good to have a way to share equipment that’s available so that useful things aren’t just sitting around not getting used. Could also be helpful for incoming scientists who could save money for other things if they could find equipment already at WHOI.