First Meeting of the Year! (Poll+Agenda Ideas)
Rayn
Hey UPP’ers,
I hope everyone is having an excellent weekend!
I’m writing about our first meeting - when and where it will be, and also a general idea of what I hope we’ll be doing (but if anyone else has something they want to add, feel free to do so – this is a group for all of us to equally explore urban issues together, and collectively decide what we want to focus on!).
Here’s a link to the Doodle poll for our meeting time/date: http://doodle.com/aneba6qffqg4e9u2.
But hopefully Thursday evening (around the same time that our GIM was last week) will work for everyone. We will be in the Hodgdon Lounge for now until we have access to the University’s reservation system, R25, which will happen once we become an official TCU-recognized group. Please vote soon so that we can announce when we’re meeting a few days in advance.
For the first meeting, here’s a brief list of things that I think we should work on to get ourselves started on our short-term and long-term goals.
1. 1. Introductions of everyone again (especially because many couldn’t make it to the GIM).
2. 2. Finishing up the process of becoming an official group of Tufts, so we can apply for funding to travel, and so we can be more grounded in order to network with other organizations, Professors, and alumni at Tufts and elsewhere, as well as so we can host future events/speakers at school. This means that we will need to begin working on our constitution as a group, and also an official member list. If you want to start thinking about how we can draft our constitution, here are some general guidelines: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Focl.tufts.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2FCreatingaConstitution.pdf
3. 3. Discussing our particular interests/experiences related to urban development (i.e., social issues, economic issues, political issues, environmental issues, regional issues, specific cities, specific case-studies, and so on). So feel free to think a bit about this before you come, if you’d like to. And if you don’t really have any particular interests or experiences, that’s great too – no worries!
4. 4. If you’d like, bring in something that interests you to share, like a certain case-study. Everyone has such interesting backgrounds and I can’t wait to learn a lot from you guys. Here are some potential examples (although we’ll need a screen in our eventual meeting room to view videos): http://www.vanishingny.org/video/vny_trailer.html, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/23/world/middleeast/two-peoples-one-capital.html, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E.
In the end, UP3 is a new group on campus, with a lot of collective dreams to accomplish. I think that as Tufts’ only urban development group, all of this is more than possible if we want it and if we all take collective ownership over it. After all, in under a week, there are already over 35 UPP’ers registered on our e-list!
I apologize for the length of this e-mail; this is not going to be the norm, but I thought it was necessary to keep you all in the loop as to what to look forward to later this week (so that you guys can turn the group into your group and into what you want to explore).
If anyone has any questions please e-mail me or UP3T...@gmail.com.
Hope to see you all soon!
Rayn