Board Meeting Minutes: October 16, 2022
Attendees: Tenia Dewolf, Greg Fisher, Adam Goforth, Raphael Guillen, Matt Hoostal, Alex McCauslin, Melanie Odom-Groh, Anna Wysocki
Meeting Start: 2:04pm
Opening thoughts and prayer - Melanie Odom-Groh
The next 6 weeks
Starting this Tuesday (October 18), the church will no longer have a church office administrator, due to Susana's departure.
Six weeks from now, Alex's role as pastor will end.
Melanie has contacted the denomination about receiving parental leave funding for Alex.
Alex will be compiling documents containing information that only she has. These will be for both the next pastor as well as for the lay leadership of the church.
Alex's biggest concerns are around administration of the church, especially supervising employees and overseeing the ministries. Alex has been spending 4-5 hours per week supervising Rose, Michael, and Susana. In particular, she made a lot of logistics decisions about things like renters and finances, enabling Susana to move forward with unusual situations.
Greg, Tenia, and Melanie met earlier today and talked about a replacement for Susana. They defined some job duties and responsibilities and are suggesting that it would be a 16-20 hour per week job at $20 per hour.
Alex suggested that one or more people be designated for the new office administrator to contact and discuss unusual situations with. This will help the administrator learn how we do things, but also protect them in the case there is pushback on a decision from a church member or someone else.
Alex has accounts on a couple of online job boards that we can use to post the job opening. She also suggested that we could potentially share an office administrator with another church, who would work part-time at both churches. Tenia suggested we want to have someone in the building the majority of the days each week, but that we can be flexible with working hours, especially after an initial onboarding period. Other locations that were suggested for posting the job opening: Nextdoor in neighborhoods near the church and the Huron Valley DSA Slack server.
Tenia hopes to have the job description ready within a couple of days from now and wants to initially post it for about 7 days, in the hopes we can find someone quickly. If we don't find someone within that time period, we could consider paying to increase visibility with things like Facebook ads.
Greg, Tenia, and Melanie conducted an exit interview with Susana last week. They received some useful feedback from her. It is clear that she left the church in order to move to a better opportunity and has positive feelings about the church and her time of employment at it.
Church Finances
Matt sent out several spreadsheets in the last couple of weeks with income and expenses of the church since the beginning of 2020. There was some discussion of the details of the spreadsheets.
One difficulty in comparing the finances of 2021 with 2022 has to do with a couple of large West Willow grants. We received the funds from the grants at the end of 2021, but most of the expenditures for the grants were in 2022. This makes it seem like income was higher in 2021 and expenses were higher in 2022, but this is a matter of timing.
Comparing 2021 to 2022, the expenses have been very similar, but income has gone down. In particular, non-donation income (i.e. grants) has decreased.
One current financial issue is property taxes on the Peace House property. When we bought the house we didn't know that we needed to file tax exemption paperwork, and we have recently found out that taxes were expected to be paid each year since the purchase. Neither the church nor Peace House knew about the taxes, so they weren't paid. We've been talking to the city of Ypsilanti and also the county to try to get a retroactive tax exemption.
Ideas for Increasing the Church's Income
The homeless ministry is costing us about $56,000 per year, which is about equal to our budget shortfall. That seems like a place where we could potentially get grants to cover those expenses, balancing the books in the longer term.
In the short term, we could potentially extract some equity from the church building. Matt will be meeting with a financial representative of the Disciples denomination soon to discuss our options there. Matt doesn't feel confident about that area of finance and its consequences, so he would welcome any input from the board.
Anna suggested that we should increase our visibility in the community, which might help us increase our donations. We could appear more prominently in places like missiona2.org.
Matt also suggested getting stories into the press could be beneficial (MLive or the Michigan Daily) about things like the Art on a Journey exhibit at the Ann Arbor District Library, or about the daytime warming center.
Raphael suggested we might have an event or open house where we invite people into the church to get to know the church and its ministries.
Anna suggested we could partner with values-aligned organizations (e.g. FedUp Food Truck) to raise visibility in a mutually beneficial way.
Alex suggested we could talk to values-aligned organizations to share donor lists in both directions. This could widen our pool of people that we could ask for donations.
Alex also suggested we go back to the foundations that have given us grants in the past, tell them we're currently dealing with financial shortfalls, and ask them if they know about available funding around the specific expenses we have.
Anna suggested we could sell branded goods like t-shirts. Matt suggested we could sell items at Art on a Journey art shows.
Melanie committed to work on a stewardship campaign to be run near the end of the year. Alex mentioned that we often do fundraisers with specific goals in April and November. We could consider doing one before the end of this year.
Anna suggested we could open new donation avenues through money transfer apps like Venmo or Cash App. Alex noted that we would probably get more donations with more donation options, but it may or may not be worth the effort required to manage it.
Matt suggested we could raise awareness of the church through sidewalk chalking on the University of Michigan campus.
Anna suggested we could update our signage at the church building, making it clearer what kind of church we are. There is a lot of traffic on Washtenaw, so physical signs along the road could make more people aware of who we are. Tenia pointed out that the chalice icon communicates to people familiar with the Disciples denomination, but others might not know what it means. Alex noted that the church's sign was destroyed about 2 ½ years ago and we have had a temporary banner since then. It would cost about $4,000-10,000 to install a new sign.
Anna suggested that we might be able to get a media piece about someone who has previously used the homelessness ministry, but is currently housed.
Gift for Susana
In the past the church has given "love gifts" to employees that left the church. These gifts were gathered by asking the congregation to donate to a parting gift. For the past couple of employees, that resulted in about $300-500 worth of gifts.
The call for "love gift" donations for Susana has gone out, but nothing has come in yet. Will the church fill the gap from the church budget?
Potentially the church could give her the work laptop she has been using. She would like to buy it from the church and we've told her that it would cost her $450.
No conclusion was reached on this matter.
Suggestions for November Agenda
Defining a parental leave policy
Financial crisis plan: what do we do if we run out of money?
Church bank accounts: do we want to close the Memorial Christian Church account? Do we want to move our banking to a different financial institution?
Next board meeting
The next meeting will be on November 6 at 1pm, in person at Journey of Faith.
Debrief and prayer
Meeting end: 4:09pm