Purposeful Pennies October 3, 2009 Minutes
Present : Khuram , Aya, Jonathan, Alla
1. Going over items on the agenda: sharing ideas, suggestions
o Everyone agreed that our name should be Purposeful Pennies (PPs would be the acronym)
2. Khuram’s ideas:
- Vision is usually more general, identifies general direction – what is our overarching goal
- Mission – operationalize your vision – how will you achieve your vision (our overarching goal)
- Need to decide on how specific our mission
- Need to formulate vision
More specified mission
3. Annual plans
- Our specific initiatives – what exactly are we planning to do to achieve our mission (specific projects)
- What are we envisioning in terms of our annual plan: we can do 3 initiatives per year – 4 months for each initiatives
- Maybe we will do 2 initiatives per year for now
- Might make a final decision on in December
- Kekenya project – education related
- Is education is the filed for us then – do all of our projects have to fall into the realm of education? Seems that we agree that it’s the main purpose of the group should be related to the education for the youth
- Another crucial component of our mission is that we want to help children
o define children (up to 15 years old)
- Specific amount of money should not be a part of the mission statement – we are committing ourselves up to 1000 per initiative.
Mission: children and education – key components
Based on the discussion:
Mission Statement
Purposeful Pennies contributes to organizational efforts aimed at providing education to underprivileged children. Purposeful Pennies will achieve this mission through collecting donations in the form of lose change (pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters). These funds will be used to contribute to specific initiatives being undertaken by nonprofit organizations of repute in the field of education for the underprivileged youth.
Vision Statement
The vision of Purposeful Pennies is to demonstrate that even a small contribution can bring a big positive result.
Core Values
- Small steps can bring about big change
- Pennies as metaphors for people associated with Purposeful Pennies
4. Legal issue concerns
- When we start fundraising money – raises issue of how the donations are kept – if in personal account - might raise the issue of transparency and accountability
- Good governance requires organization’s bank account
- Who are we – a social initiative or incorporated organization – goal to decide by December
- we can still proceed with smaller fundraising initiatives
- Whatever we end up deciding, still need to create organization form (that we will use with our partner organizations) – Jonathan will look into it
5. For the next meeting
- Aya will approach Kekenya – and we will decide if we will go with this initiative
- Khuram – will start drafting action plan
- Khuram and Jonathan will go to PNC and find out whether we can open a free checking accout for our organization
- Jonathan will find out if we can register our organization through Pitt
- Alla will prepare the logo
6. Ideas for the future
- Counting collected coins procedure could be used as a social event for all the members to get together and to recruit new members – social function – celebrating and advertising our purpose
- Issue of privacy –
o On our record sheet we will just record the money collected per month and the names of contributors
o We will keep our contributors anonymous for the sake of privacy
o We will not record how much a given individual contributed – instead we will record a total number of donations per month
o We will then post on our blog the amount of collected donations and names of the people who contributed
o thank you e-mails will be sent to our contributors
- down the road we might consider publishing a monthly newsletter reporting our progress
Next meeting on 7th Nov at 4 pm.
