Highlights from September Chapter Meeting
The Announcements
The full set of August Announcements is attached. https://ntmn.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Septembert_2019_All_Announcements_V2.pdf
Highlights of a few of the things we are working on:
- Urban Wildlife Conference that Sam presented August 15 at the Richardson Convention Center was a great success. Sam’s colleagues from TPWD provided a very worthwhile program for the urban park professionals as well as a interesting perspective for both the general public and master naturalists (there were several Dallas area chapters represented). We look forward to presenting a similar program again in August 2020, The reviews from attendees were positive and they expressed a desire to attend a similar program next year.
- Planning of the field excursions that will be offered at the Texas Master Naturalist 2019 Annual Conference in October is complete. The Getting Outside Guide covers the activities from Wednesday evening until Sunday afternoon.
- The Full Agenda includes both indoor lectures and field trips and is in chronological order. There are many activities led by North Texas Master Naturalists.
- The Agenda Matrix shows the entire conference in a spreadsheet matrix so you can plan your time.
Details about these activities are in the announcements.
Silent Auction
We are in the process of finalizing the process that we want to use to post donations for the Silent Auction at the Annual Conference. The auction is in only 43 days; we aren’t panicked yet. In the past week we have tested our process and have made changes which should make things go a little smoother.
We have added an Auction tab on the NTMN Public site that is in beta test right now. This page will be linked to the Texas Master Naturalist Annual Conference page when master naturalists request information about the auction.
The Auction page on our website will have links to
- The procedure to follow to donate an item
- The form that we will use for the description of each item.
- Instructions and tutorials about how to register, bid, and participate in the auction.
Go to the Silent Auction Support page on our website and check it out.
Our goal is to have as many things that people plan to donate in the Silent Auction Pro database by mid October so we don’t have as much chaos on the first day of the conference when people bring their things in. Their items will already listed for the auction, we will just have to check them in. We know that there will be some items brought on the first day of the conference, that we won’t already know about, but hopefully we will have most of the items already entered and ready-to-go.
What’s Next for NTMN for the Auction
We plan to ask you to send us the description of what you are donating as well as a photo of the item. This will happen in the next two weeks. We may stage auction donation parties to help you enter your donation into the system.
Moving!
A sign posted on the door of the Marsh Lane AgriLife Office suggests that we may be moving the third week of October as we have always suspected.
Before the chapter meeting on Wednesday we began to pack things at the Marsh Lane office. We removed the plaques, photos, and other things on the walls and put them into boxes. Sara Beckelman was the honoree on most of them, so she took those that she was most fond of; we don’t know when we will have walls to put these things on.
The archives that are in the office date back to the beginning of the chapter. The original member applications which were all on paper will be shredded along with financial records older than seven years. Many of our records, meeting minutes and financial records, are already on our website. We will also look into cloud storage for these records as we already have our photos and videos in the cloud.
We visited the new AgriLife facility on Rockwall Road in Garland. There are some nice meeting rooms but sadly no apparent storage space there. It is located in the southeast corner of tour area and would be a challenge to get to in rush hour traffic for most NTMN members.
In the next few weeks we will be able to get a better picture of what facilities will be available to us at the new County Office Building that is being prepared in what was formerly the Brinker Building on Highway 635 and Hillcrest. We would like to have a small office or cubicle and storage for at least the laptops, color printer, and video projectors. If there is minimal storage space we can make it work.
The plan is to resolve this move as well as we can so it doesn’t interfere with our fall outreach and also our duties as host of the Texas Master Naturalist 2019 Annual Conference.
Thank you for your participation,
Bruce Stewart
President
North Texas Master Naturalist
