The Board of Directors’ next meeting will be held over Zoom on Monday, January 10 at 7:00pm.
The meeting is open to the public. Please email president@dark-clouds.com to request access to the online meeting.
Dark Clouds Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
Tuesday, December 14th, 2021
7:00pm
Zoom
Board Members Present: Sam Solberg, Alicia Pedersen, Andrew Bruski, Meagan Weber, Nick Moore, David Zeller, Jack McFarland, Andy Wattenhofer, Maggi Heyer
Absent: Andy Kahl, Shaun Sapala
I. Call to Order
7:08 p.m.
II. Approval of Minutes
Alicia motion to approve, Zeller seconds. No discussion. Motion carries.
III. Reports of Officers and Committees
a. Treasurer’s Report
- Looks like we’ll come out pretty good overall for the year. Still need to make donation to Avenues before the end of the year-Andy needs the specific dollar amount and he can get that off to them. WW Finance Committee is still working on tracking how the money gets distributed.
- Finalize Budgets
- Andy will submit to WW
- A portion of our standalone memberships funds will be donated to the charity of our choice-Andy will follow up with committee to make sure we can announce in newsletter
b. Committee Updates
Merch
- Currently selling hoodies; will probably double order to have extras on hand. Working on slogans for new scarf; might not have them ready by Feb event.
Matchday
- No big updates; WW Matchday budget request has new banners for each SG, so we will need a new design. Maggi will reach out to Ty.
Mar/Com/Social
- No update from Andy K; new person doing Instagram for us, Haley and she really helped out during the EOY party/auction.
- Newsletter going out on Thursday. Charitable donation roundup, EOY award winners, and last day for hoodie.
Silver Lining (Shaun shared on Slack prior to meeting)
- FB4K
- We had a good turnout and were able to touch 125 bikes at various points of the process. Cleaning, Prepping, and Fixing.
- Pryes was very easy to work with and everything went great there. We tried to tag them in post as much as possible, and sent them an email thank you w/ some pictures.
- SL Shirts
- Poll has been sent out to choose between 2 designs for the new shirt.
- Shaun needs to talk with Bruski about t-shirt printers and costs. Single vs. Dual Sided. We would like to use the same base t-shirt brand/style as the current shirts.
- Rich said he has previously used Chux? Who do we use currently?
- Want to place an order soon, so we can have them in-hand by Vol. Party.
- Bruski is in contact with Shaun and already has a shirt vendor in mind. Will get a quote this week. Shirts by mid January should be no problem.
- Vol. Appreciation Party
- Will be held 2/22/22 6-8 pm @ La Dona, food details are being worked out.
- Will hand out a Volunteer of the Year award, based on hours worked.
- TSF Gala for Goals – 2/26/22 @ St. Paul Rivercenter
- Same day as MNUFC season opener in Philly
- Are DC’s purchasing a table? If so SL would like to request 3 seats. We would like to give the Volunteer of the Year winner (with a +1) an option of going, as well as a member of the SL committee to act as a bridge to larger DC/WW contingent. Thoughts?-Maggi will bring to WW; we can decide what we want to do re: tables once we know if they want to join or not.
Membership
- 3 events for the offseason
- 01/06/22 HH at BlackStack (need to finalize details);
- 01/29/22, Ninth Street Soccer tourney, we’ll get signup link to Andy K; Como HS wants to field a team and hoping to get Pryes on board to sponsor the event (also provide non-alcoholic options);
- 02/18/22 HH at La Dona (working on figuring out logistics with Sergio).
- Individual memberships hopefully will be posted in the shop soon.
Partnerships
- Jack is in contact with Sergio from La Dona re: rental fee ask for space for membership event; we think he thinks it’s a bigger event than it is. Contact at BlackStack moved on to a new brewery, but Ben KG provided a new contact to Jack and he is in the process of reaching out re: January event.
- Reached out to Pryes for Ninth Street to see if they still want to help with that event (they recently sponsored the FB4K SL event).
- Pryes wants the partnership with DC to be more visible than just a matchday deal. Give money directly for initiatives-merch collab or sponsor a bus, donate a keg, or something along those lines. Jack is planning a meeting to get more details on this.
- Partnership meeting soon to divide up list of partners and re-establish those connections, figure out how to go forward, etc.
Tifo
- Nothing to report
Party Planning Committee
- End of Year Party Wrap-up discussion-over $6500 raised. Auction item pick-up went really well; currently only 5 things to mail.
- Bidding site was great; need to have that button to donate money open throughout the whole thing and possibly a little bit after the event to raise some extra money.
- Awards went great and holding back POY didn’t get any pushback from folks.
IV. Old Business
- Update on Action Items from November
- None
- Other Old Business
- Covid/Vaccination Requirement in stadium discussion (Nick)
- Board should regroup and figure out what our stance is for the upcoming season. Have a focused discussion so we are all on the same page and know how we want to approach the team.
- Capos? Don’t know enough right now with the new variant to really answer that. We may still have a volunteer issue for next year-might need to do a push for new volunteers. We can keep discussing next month.
- Covid/Vaccination Requirement in stadium discussion (Nick)
V. New Business
- Alex Kidd, she is a lot of the supporters rep. She’s taken a lot of crap because of the vaccine request. Can we do something to thank/recognize her? (Nick)
- Discussion held. We will take care of this-Sam will make sure it gets done.
- Review bylaws regarding treasurer – making it appointed instead of elected (Jack)
- Open up discussion as to what happens if the Treasurer is not re-elected or decides not to re-run and we do not elect someone with this skill set?
- We could change the bylaws and have it be an appointed position, but Sam raised the question as to how much financial knowledge our DC Treasurer actually needs to have since WW is the money manager for the SGs.
- Andy W provided some insight that the Treasurer role for WW is one that is still being defined, but each SG would have a person who can sit on the WW Finance Committee and bring back the reports to their SG. Might be more important to have a succession plan in place (i.e. bringing in someone else who can do the job if they move on).
- Jack wanted to bring it up since our board members are elected as at-large members and then appointed to their officer positions.
- Extra photography support from Matt Johnson; Evan Wintersteen-hype videos (Sam/Jack)
- Matt Johnson reached out, and has been a TNE photog, but they have a lot so he wanted to see if we were interested. Nick will reach out to discuss; Andy adding a budget line item in MCS.
- Has anyone heard from Evan Wintersteen? Nick reached out before the PDX trip and wasn’t able to reach him. If not, should we look for another person to handle this?
- List of nonprofits to donate to/that we have donated to (Alicia)
- Compile a list of places we want to donate to, categories, etc; and list of places we have donated to in the past.
- Eventually work this into a charitable giving plan for the year
VI. Open to Board
- Elections-we should put this on our radar and find a date (Meagan)-Slack discussion
- There will be several WW Board positions open this next year, including some DCs. Let’s keep this in mind.
VI. Open to Public
- No public present
VII. Set Date for Next Meeting
- Meagan will do this; will be looking at or around the week of the 10th