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January 15, 2025

Attendance: Fadime Stemmer, Dina Pandya, 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.

·         February 6: Fadime

·         March 6: Stephanie Murphy

We stored the 2 trash grabbers and the box of gloves in the small recreation storage shed just outside of CRL (overlooking the ballfield).  So leaders will just need to bring garbage bags.  The combo to the shed is 2211.

Stephanie Murphy will lead the March walk and will add some trash collection buckets to the shed, so people don’t need to bring/use trash bags.

 

#2  Lunch and Learns:

We have scheduled a Lunch and Learn at noon on Thursday, January 23 with Stephanie Madsen and Mary Ryther from the Town of Falmouth to discuss projects they’ve been working on.  It will be hybrid.  Carriage House and Zoom: https://whoi-edu.zoom.us/j/99143537768

There will be snacks and drinks for those who come in person thanks to our new funding through the Natalie Nevarez and the ERG program. It would be great if people could post posters. Ask Liz if you need a copy.

We hope to do a potluck version of a Lunch and Learn (probably later in the day) with Dr Kumara in the spring about healthy, sustainable eating.

 

#3 Plans for future projects:

Alex Kinsella plans a couple of plant and/or bird walks around campus.  Bird walks in the morning in spring or summer, and plant walk in the afternoon later in the summer.

Alex also plans to continue the invasive plant removal in the fall.

Fadime offered to take the lead on organizing a Repair Café, maybe shooting for late winter/early spring.  Let her know if you are a good “fixer” and would be willing to volunteer your skills.

We also talked about doing a clothing-related Repair Café.  Maybe in the fall?  Would probably draw on a different crowd of fixers and might be nice to do before the winter season.

A Bike Repair event was also mentioned.  Maybe in conjunction with the Humans of WHOI event in the spring if that’s happening again this year?  We’d definitely need to run this idea by the Humans of WHOI organizers, to see if they thought the events would mesh.

Maybe we should take a poll of STF members to see if anyone has any areas of interest or expertise that they’d want to share with the group (like Alex’s bird and plant walks, or the foraging walk that a couple of JP students led last year).  Will Poirier, who led a few Mindfulness Meditation walks two summers ago, is back working for The 300 Committee again and maybe he’d be interested in doing more of those.

Now that we have funding, we can supply snacks for these which might help draw people!

Any ideas for projects for CEC interns this coming summer?  We didn’t plan ahead early enough last year so we didn’t get to take advantage of their help.  Let us know if you think of any projects that would benefit from their input.

 

#4 Garden update:

We didn’t really spend time to put the STF village garden to bed this fall, so it will take a little extra prep in the spring.  And we haven’t planted garlic yet, but we plan to if we have a window of less cold weather when the soil is workable again.

Fadime reports that the new garden over at the Oyster Pond Dorm has been built.  They’ve started discussing plans for the spring and will reach out soon to see if anyone else wants to join in the planning and planting.

 

#5 New Business:

It was suggested that it might be helpful to have an STF calendar.  We could try to post an annual schedule so we could have things planned in advance and get into a routine of what happens throughout the year. We’d need to think about what format would work best, so reach out if you have ideas.