Our holiday potluck and party is right around the corner, December 12th after Latihan. As you’re figuring out a dish to bring, don’t forget that we will be collecting canned goods for a local food bank, so please bring a can or cans to contribute. Bhakti will be doing some preliminary setup at 4:00 on December 11th, and it would be great if a few people wanted to help. Please let me know by email or phone if you would like to help.

Our own Halimah Bellows is having shoulder surgery December 14th. She will appreciate our thoughts and prayers.

Last week Debbie and Ricardo replaced all the batteries in the inside alarms, CO2 detectors, and locks. Thank you both for helping keep the house safe and well-maintained!

This week a big thank you goes to Ricardo for picking up leaves around the Subud house and redistributing them on the garden beds. Not only that, but for cleaning the gutters and installing a new lock on the outside of the women’s latihan hall.

We appreciate your hard work, Debbie and Ricardo!

The chair (with active collaboration including the rest of the committee) will do these things to help insure a smoothly functional group: 

• Make sure there is a place for members to do the latihan.
• Set agenda for board meetings and general meetings
• Review minutes, financial reports, and support reports, prior to meetings
• Track progress on pending issues, finances, work in support of the center
• Help address issues that come up, such as maintenance and emergencies
• Maintain and track a list of recurring events. Examples:
  • Licenses needed for the city
  • City, State and Federal tax filings
  • Building Maintenance:  pruning, weeding, cleaning gutters, batteries in smoke alarms, fire extinguisher annual check and certification

o   Regular review of maintenance/ life expectancy schedule for building and important components

Communicate with helpers, committee, members, wings and support personnel.

Attend regional meetings monthly via Zoom.

Keep everyone informed – members, board, helpers, regional committee, etc.

How much time does this entail?  A rough guess would be about 8 hours monthly.

What helps?

A fully populated dewan committed to working together, with division of duties.

Documentation provided by previous dewan.

Advice from former board members and helpers

Testing:  What are the needs of the group at this time?  How should I be to perform these duties at this time?, etc.

Jim O’Halloran

On Saturday, December 18^th, at 10 am your committee will be having its last meeting as a committee before our January 9^th General meeting and selection of new officers at Spring Street Center. In this meeting I will present my final annual summary financial report for 2021.

In the days before this committee meeting, I will be working on pulling together data for and then creating the report for the Committee meeting, along with my monthly SGS Treasurer Financial Report.

It occurs to me that those of you considering becoming our next treasurer might be interested in following along in this process.  For those interested, I will create a summary process that we can review in a short zoom session. If you’re interested in participating, please contact me.

Here are some of the immediate needs new treasurer will need to address other than the financial report:

1. Depositing checks.
2. Paying 1-2 monthly invoices for services.
3. Tracking and reporting monthly on the group’s donations, income and expenses.

I have prepared documentation for these and other areas which it would be helpful to go through with the new treasurer before I leave town on January 10^th, the day after our general meeting.

Please note that there will be no Eastside Friday latihan on Dec. 24 and Dec. 31 due to Christmas Eve and also New Years celebrations.  Eastside members wish you all a wonderful holiday!

Marston Gregory

The party will take place on Sunday December 12th after Latihan. We have arranged to use the house, and will be having a potluck. Also, please bring one or more canned goods to donate to a local food bank. Thanks, and I look forward to our gathering!

November 19, 2021

Please Contribute Before 2021 is over – 

You have 41 days left to make your last-minute donations!  Time is running out ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°). Your donations account for 49% of our building needs. They are essential in maintaining our center. Thank You! 

Future Expenses – Progress on fund raising to repairing the siding on the South side of our building.

Through November members have contributed $4,172. Combined with $7000 of the income set aside from our iTrips rentals we now have $11,172 saved for that project.  We now need to raise an additional $10,828 in order to have the $22,000 needed for this project. We are nearly one half of the way to this goal.  Who will help us there?

Building Repairs Fund

We are grateful for members who already have contributed to this fund – over and above their regular contributions-to this fund. Earmark your checks for any portion of your donation you wish to go to our building fund.

Building Rentals

We had 19 days of rentals in November bringing in rental income of approximately $3,509. This will be deposited in December after the income statement is finalized. Due to the continued ability of iTrips to bring in renters for Spring Street Center, the committee agreed to set aside an additional $1,000 into the Building Repairs Fund and to increase our donation to the region to its pre-pandemic level of $800 per month.

This Month’s Donation Report

I am unable to determine the level of giving for November, as we are meeting early to avoid meeting over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Donations through October were back to your normal level of giving. 

Considering donating for the 1^st time –  Your Donation will go directly to Subud PNW

Your committee believes that all members should help contribute to our center and through it to the region.  For those who haven’t yet contributed this year, we’re making the following offer:

Every contribution from anyone who hasn’t contributed this year will go to Subud PNW. These contributions will help Subud PNW to support, among other areas, the following:

– SPNW’s commitment to SUSA and through it to our national cultural wing (SICA) and charity wing (SDUSA)

– SUSA contributions to the World Subud Association, which supports a Caring Fund, helping members in distress and funds International Helper Travel.  

Each year SPNW has relied on extra money from our annual kedjiwan gathering at the Menucha Conference Center to support the work of the region. Due to COVID-19 it has not been possible to hold this event for two years.

New to Subud? How to contribute

If you are new to our group and looking for a way to contribute, here’s how:

Single or Monthly contribution from your bank

1. Setup a recurring payment to “Subud PNW – Seattle Center” 
2. Have the payment sent to:

Subud PNW – Seattle Center

1101 15th Ave

Seattle, WA 98122-4523

Submitted by Oswald Norton & Jim O’Halloran

When your committee meets once a month, we have found it helpful to anchor our work around a rhythm of the following agenda:

1. A Moment of quiet and checking-in with each other
2. Review and approval of agenda and previous meeting minutes
3. Helper Report
4. Financial report
5. Spring Street Center/itrips reporton alternate months
6. Group Activities
7. Committee Member Vacations
8. 8. Date/Time of Next Committee meeting
9. 9. Date/Time of Next general meeting
10. A review of the center’s maintenance calendar and pending projects

One week before we meet, Jim puts together our agenda and sends it out, requesting that the rest of the committee review the agenda and make corrections/additions for any area that they want to expand on. Our goal is to keep the meeting to one hour, so we’re respectful of the time. However, if there is something that could take a little longer, having the agenda ahead of time prepares us for this.

Areas 4, 5, 6 and 10 might have projects that are associated with that area.  These projects, and a report on their status, become a part of that area’s agenda item.

Projects are areas that we worked on between meetings.  In the meeting, committee members who haven’t worked on the project are brought up to date on progress. Next steps are then reviewed and comments or suggestions on how to move forward are made by all committee members. After we reach an agreement on direction, new assignments might be made and goals we hope to accomplish before the next meeting are then recorded in our meeting minutes. If a decision with a large impact needs to be made, we may test on it and we also may opt to bring it to a general meeting.

An example of a project that took us many months to work through was our move from center members managing Spring Street Center to having an organization take this over. The process for that large project follows.

We began by looking at different types of rental options for our building. There were two: Renting to a business or school; Continuing with a style of rental that we’d been used to.

The idea of renting to a business came from Paul Nelson, who, as rental agent at the time, was approached by a real estate company looking for a suitable building for a boy’s school. We decided to see what this would entail and offered to meet with them. In the end they decided to not move forward. Thinking that others might be interested, we approached other real estate organizations who could represent the building for the business rental market. This option too did not pan out.

I had the feeling the year before that we might be seeing the end of a desire by members to continue  managing our Centerprise, and had begun to approach rental organizations that were in the business of managing other AirBnB types of organizations. The advantage of these organizations was that they had the ability to advertise Spring Street Center on multiple platforms – something that we’d not been able to do before. What I discovered was that our old model of renting individual rooms was not something that they would consider. After bringing this idea back to the committee, we began to explore it again.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, it became clear that the only option for renting our facility was to rent the whole building to one single group. AirBnB, which was struggling with their business, made this mandatory, along with a strict cleaning regimen.

Fortunately, we were already well into a process of reviewing potential organizations to take over our rental business. When we decided on iTrips, we knew that we were embarking on a change that would cause significant adjustments with the group’s usage of the building. However, we felt it was important for us to get the business moving again. So, after a group discussion and vote at a general meeting, we signed our contract with them.

This process has been well documented in the past, along with the challenges we’ve faced and the benefits we’ve received from having a professional management company. The purpose in describing it here is to show how our meeting process, aided us to – over a period of many months – take on one of the biggest challenges a committee would have to take.  We broke it down into steps, we divided the work amongst us to keep the load balanced, we tracked our progress, we brought the decision to the group and moved forward.