February 2025 - Board Meeting

02/05/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

02/05/2025 - Area 515 Board Meeting

Attending:

• President: Dave (remote)

• Vice President: Jake (remote)

• Secretary: Brad

• Director: John

• Director: Matt (remote)

Absent:

• Treasurer: Meg

• Director: Chris

Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting

Vote to approve the minutes of the January board meeting

Yes: 4

No: 0

Result: Passed

Note: Not everyone was in the meeting when this vote happened, but we still had enough for quorum.

Refiling with State of Iowa

• Jake took care of this. Chris' name was accidentally spelled wrong, but there's no way to correct it online.

• Interestingly, only non-profits require the names and addresses of everyone on the board.

Current Members: 85

• We had over 10 people at our last Open House. Most people have found our space through Google search. Apparently our ranking in the search engine changed for the better somehow.

• The new 3D printers have been super popular.

Laser Grant Application

• Big thank yous to (in no particular order) Chris, Isaiah, John, Bailey and Brad for working on this Prairie Meadows grant application.

• Among the items still to do for the application, we need a direct quote from the company. Isaiah already reached out and is waiting to hear back.

• We had looked at applying to Bravo for a grant. Jake spoke with them and discovered we're not the kind of organization they're looking to fund.

• In order to show Prairie Meadows that we're serious about this application, it was decided that the space would match private donations up to $5,000. That is as much as we usually allocate for buying new tools over a whole year. So far $2,140 has been pledged in private donations.

Vote to match up to $5,000 in new laser donations from the general fund

Yes: 5

No: 0

Result: Passed

• The next steps are to finish and submit the application, and keep asking members for donations.

• If the space ever got an audit done on its finances, we would be eligible to apply for much larger grants. However, since those cost around $5k, we decided to focus on writing better grants first.

Game Night!

• Friday, Feb. 14 at 6:30pm

• Much fun and merriment will be had by all.

Space Updates

• The state of Iowa is getting rid of some of the PPE supplies that it stocked up on during the pandemic, and offered it free to nonprofits. Brad applied and picked up...

  • 600 N95 masks

  • 200 Splash goggles

  • 500+ full body protective suits*

  • 80 polyester nylon gowns

*Technically, the boxes are labeled "Proetective Siuts"

• After the meeting Brad stored and labeled the boxes and sent a notice out to all members that the PPE was free to anyone who wanted to use it.

• There was some discussion about whether we wanted to attend the next Mini Maker Faire at the Science Center in August. We attended in years past but never found it effective at generating new members. Nobody expressed interest in leading the effort to attend this year.

• Discussion then turned to when Dave went to a full Maker Faire in Kansas City. It was held at Union Station and was easily 10x the area of the Science Center's mini one.

Meeting Adjourned

• Let the record show: Dave purchased the surface grinder all by himself from DMACC for $1.

• While setting up the Google Meet call, Dave accidentally created an audio feedback loop momentarily. "Now you can hear me an infinite number of times!" - Dave

• During the vote to match up to $5k in donations, Matt was attending remotely and was muted, so he voted by typing which lead to the following conversation... Brad: "Matt, you're voting 'L'?" Dave: "I think that's a one." Brad: "Wait, I get it. it's a capital 'I' as in 'aye'." Everyone: "Ooh."

• The above would probably be funnier if rendered in a serif font.

Financials