Sustainable Crown Hill Minutes
August 26, 2007

Thanks to everyone for the great energy at the meeting. Here’s my take on what we discussed and decided. Please feel free to make additions or changes to these minutes. Remember that we can now email each other, independently of me, at sustainable@crownhillneighbors.org. These minutes will also be posted each month at crownhillneighbors.com. Thank you Bert and Heidi for letting us meet at your home.

NEXT MEETING: MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Michael and Danielle’s home
9240 Mary Ave NW

5:00-7:00 pm
5-5:30 potluck
5:30-7 meeting

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Charrette: Crown Hill Neighbors Assn received $40,000 for traffic calming projects on 12th, 13th, Mary & 95th, and on 14th south of Holman. An offshoot of a few Sustainable Crown Hill folks are putting together a meeting at Crown Hill School on Saturday, Sept. 15 from 1-3pm to collectively and creatively come up with ways in which we can capitalize on this success by creating other projects in and around the traffic calming projects. $15-$20,000 grants are easy to get from the City of Seattle Dept. of Neighborhoods for projects that we want to do. For those of you wanting to get involved in street art and increasing walkability in Crown Hill, don’t miss this meeting!

Bat Houses: Some Mary Ave folks are looking to build bat houses. Stay tuned for further information.

Lettuce Links: Bert came up with a project he is calling Lettuce Links that involves gleaning vegetables and fruit from people’s gardens and fruit trees that are not being used, and then donating the foods to local food banks. The effort would involve approaching neighbors who have fruit trees and garden vegetables and asking if they would donate unused portions. The standard would be organic foods only.
[Note: by the end of our meeting, we decided to adopt this project as Sustainable Crown Hill's first project together. The idea is to start out small and get a success under our belt, then keep expanding outward. ]

Kitchen Party: Kit and Dennis are hosting a Kitchen Party at their house on Sunday, Sept. 16 starting at 5pm. Food (potluck) and singing in the kitchen! [Note: later on in the meeting, we decided to have a fun get together with food once per season. This will be our first one.]

King County Council Member Touring Carkeek Park Friday August 31: Dennis is going to find out more about it and see if we can tag along and whisper in his ear.

Mayor of Seattle tours Crown Hill Friday, Sept. 7. You can read about it at the Crown Hill Neighbors Assn website at crownhillneighbors.com.

Crown Hill Business Assn meets Wed. Sept. 19th at 7am. Yes, that’s a.m. People are free to attend.

Bridging the Gap Public Meetings. Dept of Transportation has 4.5 million to spend. There are a bunch of public meetings going on around the city. People who show up and advocate for their neighborhood are more likely to get the goods than people who don’t.
Thursday, Sept 20
BF DAY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
3921 Linden Ave N

Tuesday, Sept 11
RAVENNA-ECKSTEIN COMMUNITY CENTER
6535 Ravenna Ave NE

Tuesday, Sept 18
McCLURE MIDDLE SCHOOL
1915 1st Avenue W

VISIONING DISCUSSION
Discussion: Our agenda was to articulate the purpose, scope and mission of Sustainable Crown Hill and to gain a clearer understanding of what distinguishes our group from Crown Hill Neighbors (our umbrella organization) and Crown Hill Business Assn. Mission statements for both of groups that we hold many values in common: creating community, sustainability, creating public spaces for the community to gather, making Crown Hill a more walkable and beautiful community, increasing small businesses in our community, to name a few. Yet each group maintains a slightly different stance and perspective that amply justifies the existence of each. Where we “mesh” with the two other groups will be at the “ground level” in the form of joint projects. Collaboration with other like minded groups is one of our stated values and it was suggested that cross pollination of members of each group be strongly encouraged.

ACTION: Heidi agreed to word smith a draft of a mission statement that will present it at the September mtg.

Next, we articulated a definition of sustainability for our purposes. The “criteria” for projects that we undertake should benefit one or more of the following areas. We acknowledged that some activities will hit all three and some maybe only one. Discussion on how our activities promote sustainability will be important.

Local Economy: The dollars stay in the community, whether that be Crown Hill, Puget Sound, “100-mile” economy….

Social: the activity helps to sustain healthy families and community members; invites and creates community; helps develop trust, security, fun….

Environment: benefits air, water and soil quality

NEXT STEPS
HAVE FUN, DO COOL STUFF. We decided that we should meet more often to have fun, not just to meet and make decisions. Others thought that when we meet, it should focus around some activity or project, like building bat houses. We finally landed on doing both. We’ll have a fun food thing once per season (the first being the Kitchen Party at Kit and Dennis’s house – see announcements above). Then whoever wants to do a project should do it. Like Carol and the bat houses.

LETTUCE LINKS. We decided that we need to do a small and easy project together. Get some success under our belt. Get to know each other better. So we decided to adopt Bert’s Lettuce Links as our first project.

ACTION: Bert will initiate our first steps and email us in the very near future.

Then people started going CRAZY. Community exchange on the web (Dennis, do it please)! Plant exchange! Pumpkin Hunt! Green Lake walks! Tree planting! Rain barrels! … no, water tanks! Bat houses! Windmills!! Breathe, people. Breathe.

What We Decided:
- Sustainable Crown Hill will develop its own mission statement.

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