Held at Quinsigamond Community College

 Attendance: Lane Lloyd, Patrick Burke, Nicole Ouimette, Max Page, Emily Round, Nedia Morsy, Paola Ozuna, Anastasia Wilson, Nicole Mitchell, Ben Taylor, Ryan Manita, Craig Slatin, Ken Haar, Jim Tarr, Stasha Lampert, Alex Kulenovic, Hollywood Aman, Ferd Wulkan

Updates

• Nicole has formed Students for Affordable and Valuable Education (SAVE) at HCC and has begun doing class raps.
• 2 Higher Ed Summits organized by PHENOM held in past few weeks to develop common strategy among public higher ed advocates for casino money, supplemental budget, and next year’s state budget.
• The joint effort led by PHENOM was successful in having the House allocate some of the casino revenues to higher education.  The bill now moves to the Senate.
• PHENOM is supporting a GEO-led initiative to roll back the change to “co-insurance” at UMA and UMD that would cost some students a lot of money.
• Department of Higher Ed Student Leadership Conference has been postponed until  March.

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Meeting held at Quinsigamond Community College

Attendance:  Ken Haar, Marie Hedrick, Travis Henderson, Alex Kulenovic, Stasha Lampert, Ryan Manita, Max Page, Craig Slatin, Ferd Wulkan

1.            Finances

a) The Board reviewed and discussed the IRS 990 form.  A motion was made to accept it.  The motion passed unanimously.

b) A motion was made to replace former Treasurer Ken Haar with current Treasurer Marie Hedrick as a signatory on our bank account.  The motion passed unanimously.

c) A discussion on Fundraising touched on COMECC, house parties, grants, and diversity.  The Board voted to set up a Fundraising Committee.  Initial volunteers to serve on the committee are Ryan Manita, Marie Hedrick, Max Page and Craig Slatin.  Marie will convene the committee.

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The good news: This year was probably rock bottom. The state has passed very austere budgets for the past few years and higher ed has seen deep funding cuts, the worst of which was this year, the proverbial cliff many have been talking about, when stimulus funds finally ran out. From here, we will finally be talking about funding increases again rather than cuts. Meaningful, if small, legislative victories will be relatively easy to achieve. This will also help our organizing, as energy will be high and we will have forward momentum to keep people motivated. In many ways it will resemble the situation when we started this four years ago. Except that four years ago we did not have PHENOM. -Alex Kulenovic  (Analysis of Economic and Political Situation Facing Public Higher Education, bottom of Notes)

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It has been a very difficult year for public higher education, and next year’s budget will be extremely challenging, but PHENOM was successful in a number of ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Approximately 42 members of PHENOM attended the Annual Meeting June 6, 2009 at Springfield Technical Community College.  Following a get-to-know-each-other icebreaker, members discussed what PHENOM did well this year, what could have been done better, and what we should do next year. Read the rest of this entry »