AAJA-DC Board Minutes Saturday, Sept. 15, 2007

Officers Attending: President Tan Ly, Membership Chairman Lister Lim, National Board Representative Doris Truong, Secretary Susan Yoo

Also Attending: Web mistress Peggy Hu, Qihui Huang from the FCC, Hanah Cho of the Baltimore Sun, Jay Wang of USA Today

1. AAJA National Convention - Miami: The convention was successful; close to 900 attended. The DC reception hosted by Doris Truong in her hotel suite was a bit hit, too.

2. 2007 Scholarship winners: Hirdesh Matta and Simone Laroche. Hirdesh is attending UMD and Simone is attending Syracuse in New York. Both are journalism majors. They attended the AAJA-DC summer picnic. Hirdesh will work with the local chapter on student programming, Tan reported. Tan suggested we plan a clips and critiques seminar for early fall.

3. Trivia Bowl – Oct. 19: We need volunteers for this event. We hope to have 3 to 5 people per table. We should look for student volunteers, since dinner is included for volunteers. We’ll need 3 volunteers for setup and breakdown, since we’re planning to bring our own food in (hopefully we can get a restaurant donation – possibly Meiwah). Doris is looking for a food provider/sponsor for the event. We need 2-3 judges. We moved the event to a smaller venue (HRC), because this created better chances to actually raise money rather than produce a loss in our treasury. USA Today would’ve cost us $50 per head. Still, we appreciate their offer to donate their space, and we’ll list them as a sponsor. Tan asked if anyone thought there might be an issue with holding the event at an organization with a strong position for gay marriage/gay rights. We all thought it was all right. HRC was the best deal we could find for the available space. Lister is working to find a sponsor. Tan couldn’t pin anyone down to be in charge of finding and managing volunteers. Susan asked if we could hold a meeting/seminar on fundraising and approaching potential donors. Doris said she could lead the meeting. Tan suggested we hold a fundraising retreat in early 2008. This segued into talk of finding officers and a discussion of training programs, which could help add some focus to our mission of supporting Asian-Americans in journalism. (See 6. below)

4. New officers (VP-Print 2007-2008, DC National Reps. 2008-2009, Community Liaison 2008, Membership Chair 2008): Elections must be completed by Nov. 5. We should have ballots cast by Oct. 31. We need to make a call for candidates. Doris will send job descriptions, and Susan will send out a call on the chapter listserv ASAP. Candidates must present themselves within 2 weeks of the announcement. Doris has been elected national secretary (go, Doris!), so we’ll need to find another national rep. Sherri Ly may be a good candidate. Next year, we envision fewer formal meetings (usually the board), but we want to keep up the same event activity.

5. Camp AAJA candidates: Camp AAJA will be held in late January 2008. Tan will send out the dates. Our chapter will cover hotel costs and airfare. We can send 2 board members. It will be a 3-day weekend at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

6. System to award money for training and educational programs: Tan proposed that we come up with a system to award money to our members for training and educational programs. We need to set up rules for this system/program. We can put a link on our web site for applications, and the board can review them. We'll start small. We didn't have a quorum at this meeting, so we decided to vote electronically. We need to consider our budget carefully. While we're comfortable with what's in our treasury, we're spending more money than we're making, so we need to consider our treasury goals.

7. Next meeting: Sunday, Nov. 11.