Announcements from the October 2019 Chapter Meeting

Highlights from October Chapter Meeting
The Announcements
View the full set of October Announcements by clicking here.

The Dark Video

We held our first chapter meeting at the WaterUniversity building at the AgriLife Reseach facility on Coit Road. The facility is one of the most spectacular that we have used for a meeting. The video apparatus wasn’t so spectacular; it didn’t work at all. So Meghan and I had to present our programs without the PowerPoint we had planned. I have an outline of the announcements on my iPhone, so I could at least see what order the announcements were planned with the people who wanted to make a verbal announcement scheduled first.
Meghan’s program on journaling went very well in spite of the missing video that would have shown what she had planned for us to do in our journals. She had four stations for each of us to observe and enter into our journals. We didn’t have to get up and move to the next station, the room was setup so that the materials for the next station were on a portable table that was brought to us; very convenient.

The Important Announcements That You Didn’t Hear

We need some ideas for projects for the spring class. These projects give the new class a chance to work with a group of classmates and get to know one another. The projects also give our partner organizations a chance to get some focused volunteer help on something that would enhance their facility. The Benny J. Simpson EcoPark that we saw at the Water University is an example of how student master naturalists worked with AgriLife to develop signs for the self-guided trial. Send an email to David Parrish with your project ideas.
Registration for the 2020 class started October 1 and runs through the end of November. Our publicity for the new class has evolved as we now have social media and our website to promote the class. Laura Kimberly, former new class director, did a survey to find out how people found our class and by far the largest number checked us out because of a recommendation from somebody familiar with the North Texas Master Naturalists. Complete information about what we do and how to register for the class are on our public website. The open house for the new class will be at the Water University building on Tuesday, October 22. There are more details in the announcements on the new class.
Our dues for 2020 will be $40 and is due before the end of this year. Please pay online using PayPal.
Please enter your hours by November 15 to have them included when we determine the milestones for 2019 for the Awards Banquet on December 11.
Details about these activities are in the announcements.

Silent Auction
We need donations from you, the NTMN members. There is a list of items that were sold at a silent auction in the Dallas area earlier in the year. Please review the list and see if there is something you could put together or someplace that you might go to see if you can get a donation for the Texas Master Naturalist Silent Auction. There are only 16 days until the auction and whatever you can rustle up would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

We have added an Auction tab on the NTMN Public site. This page is linked to the Texas Master Naturalist Annual Conference page when master naturalists request information about the auction.

The Auction page on our website has 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

Sign up to Volunteer at the Silent Auction
We have the VolunteerSignup that we have used to list the volunteer opportunities at the Texas Master Naturalist Annual Conference. We still need volunteers for the silent auction. We have not received as many donations as we had hoped by now so we assume that we will be slammed when people bring in their things and drop them off on Friday, October 18. We will need a lot of help processing these donations on Friday.

Training Sessions
We have also setup training sessions to prepare you for what you will be doing at the silent auction.

Receiving items and entering them into Silent Auction Pro