Corporate Secretary End of Term Report

Spartan Housing Cooperative Pine Press, 27 August 2021 facts. Because of him I know, like, a couple things about concrete. Without him, I would know nothing about concrete.

I’ ve been thinking about the Ship of Thesus a lot recently, a pretty classic thought experiment about identity over time. If the ships boards were replaced one by one until all the original wood had been stripped, is this still the same ship? Many “ solutions” have been proposed, but there’s two opposite responses that I resonate with the most. First, that no identity holds over time. The ship ceased being the Ship of Thesus as soon as the first board was replaced. As a river does not have the same water, as I wake up the next day with millions of my cells replaced, we are fundamentally different beings from one moment to the next. The second solution says, fuck all that, we are whoever we say we are for as long as we say we are. The ship is the Ship as long as people say it is. I am me, you are you, the river is the river, as long as we believe it to be true. I think both answers are correct. Yes, there is no stagnant identity over time, but the identity we ascribe to something lasts as long as we wish it to. Our houses fundamentally change the moment a new person is added or lost. In fact, houses even change from day to day. The Bowie of January 2021 was fundamentally different than the Bowie of April 2021, even with no change in membership. But the Bowie of January 2021, the Bowie of January 1991, and the Bowie of January 2041 are all still Bowie. Until someone changes the name again to the Laura Les Memorial Cooperative. And it’s beautiful to know that I, as one of the countless members who have and will live in our rooms (until it’s condemned, because lets be honest), am both insignificant and central to the story of these walls. Just like everyone else I know and cherish. So when I sit transfixed on these murals, I don’t feel something that stems from pain, but I certainly feel in the presence of something greater than myself. The might of one person is no match for these walls, but I don’t feel powerless next to this force, I feel powerful. Because I’m not comparing my power to the coop, it’s one and the same. I draw my power from it, as all of us do. As I stare at the wall for 36 hours I don’t just experience power, I don’t just experience beauty, I don’t just experience oneness. I feel all of these in a swirling of emotions I can only describe as Sublime, which like the identities self-ascribed by people and communities, means whatever the fuck I want it to mean.

By Dale Kruithoff, 2020-2021 Corporate Secretary

Well, my friends, here we are at the end of another year within the coops, and with that the end of my term as the SHC’s Corporate Secretary. I entered into this role amid a global pandemic having served on the Board of Directors for one year prior. After several long board meetings, three referendums, five elections/appointments, and a dozen intermittent operations reports, I am glad to have served the board and the membership in this capacity.

One of the primary responsibilities of the Corporate Secretary is to record all the meeting minutes of the Board of Directors meetings. While it took time to adjust to virtual board meetings over zoom, I eventually was able to come up with a consistent template and method for taking minutes at each meeting. One thing I had to keep in mind and recommend future corporate secretaries remind themselves of is that “if it is not recorded in the minutes, it didn't happen. ” This is true for every committee and meeting of the SHC. My practice was to record motions made by Board Members exactly as worded as opposed to inferring what they were trying to say with their motion. If the wording of the motion sounded contradictory to their intent it was important for me to ask them to clarify their wording and ensure that the entire board was informed of what they were voting on as it would be documented in the minutes. All board meeting minutes throughout my term were stored and archived electronically on the SHC Google Drive.

Executive Committee

The unique thing about the Corporate Secretary position is that they serve both as a voting member of the Board of Directors and a voting member of the Executive Committee. My responsibilities at meetings of the Executive Committee were similar to those at board meetings by taking the minutes for the meeting. However, EC meetings were more informal as decisions were reached through a consensus rather than formal motions. The practice of taking notes at EC meetings was to add the notes to the existing agenda in a different color text.

Operations Reports

Once every two weeks the Corporate Secretary is expected to send out an operations report to all members of the SHC to keep them informed of what the SHC is doing. My method for doing these reports was to take each officer's report from the notes of the EC meetings and put them into a separate document. I would then share this document with the EC to make any changes they saw fit. Finally, I made my edits and revisions to the report to adjust it to the membership as the audience as opposed to other officers. During the first couple of months of my term, I worked with the VPE to include the operations reports in the monthly Pine Press. I regret to report that the inclusion of the reports in the Pine Press fell out of practice later in my term. One of the major changes I made to the operations report during my term was the decision to include copies of all the meeting minutes for the EC, Board of Directors, and all other operational committees as attachments when the report was sent through email. I felt this was a great step forward in the interest of transparency from the SHC by making these documents very easy for any member to access.