Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State
Executive Board Meeting
November 6, 2024
Held on Zoom
ATTENDANCE
Present were: President Tana Hasart, Exec VP Cathi Lamoreux, Treasurer Gilbert Plascencia, Secretary John Strong, Past President Don Enstrom, State Program Lead Jennifer Marquis, Debbie Benbow.
OPENING
President Tana opened the meeting at 4:00 pm.
STATE LEADER REPORT
Jennifer announced that the 2023 Annual Report is available and at this link. The 2024 Annual Report will be done by April 30th.
2025 Program Planning: Evaluations were launched in 2024 with 5 counties participating. Over 300 responses to the survey were received. A medium-term survey just went out. Goal for 2025 is to have 120 counties take part in the evaluations and get over 1,000 responses. Counties may use the Priorities Toolkit to assist with this.
Northwest Flower & Garden Festival: The theme this year is “Gardening in a Changing Climate”. This year’s booth is completely redesigned. There will be hands-on activities. CE-approved seminars will be marked in the program. We will soon have link for the purchase of NWFGF tickets. We are supposed to get a commission from sales through that link. We need to verify that is true, since it appears we did not get the commission last year.
Dean Powers is planning to attend the Festival this year.
MG Basic Training: The developers of the new training materials are making sure it is accessible and peer reviewed. It will be easily updatable. Plans are to make it available to the public (without certifying as a master gardener). It will, however, qualify for clock hours for certain professions. It is hoped this will expand our audience, and provide for additional program revenue. The online training development is expensive. Some costs can be saved with a few adjustments, including moving to a single-source model. Update is due in 2026.
TREASURER REPORT
Gilbert shared the financial reports as of October 31. He noted the main expenditure this month was our donation to the Endowed Chair Fund of a little over $10,000, pursuant to our policy of sharing AEC profits with the fund. Notable income in the month was revenue of about $3,000 from sales of AEC class recordings.
With one of our CDs coming due in the coming month, and another in January, and with significant balances in our money market and checking accounts, Gilbert suggested putting a portion of those funds into earning vehicles. After some discussion, it was decided to move $25,000 into our Agency Capital fund at Yakima County Community Foundation.
CAMPAIGN UPDATE
Tana and Jennifer have met with the new WSU development team for the Endowed Chair fund. The meeting was encouraging; the team are learning a lot about us, and have good ideas for future efforts. We will step back for a re-tooling of our approach and re-analyze how we want our fund-raising effort to go forward.
It was noted that several contributing master gardeners from several parts of the state have voiced a desire to get more direct communication from WSU Development.
2024 AEC
Debbie noted that we sold 25 AEC recordings to date. About 100 surveys from the conference keynote are in… all positive! 316 class evaluation surveys have been received. Most-reviewed classes included Native Cultivars, and Climate Change in Washington. Reported “knowledge gained” is 31%. Of those who plan to take steps to apply their knowledge 194 said ‘extremely likely’, 89 ‘likely’, and 23 ‘somewhat likely’. 232 were extremely satisfied, 53 somewhat satisfied, and only 4 extremely dissatisfied.
Our MailChimp audience is now 1,550, 660 of whom were attendees. An email goes out this weekend to promote the AEC class recordings, followed by another one next week.
Work has begun to ‘batch’ class recordings together for sale at the NWFGF. Cathi is looking for testimonials about the conference for use in future marketing. If you hear positive comments, please forward them to Cathi.
2025 AEC
The planning team for 2025 meets on November 25th. We need a lead person to take on the Program design. This position is crucial to the conference success.
The team is assembling a ‘playbook’ to help guide local activities, viewing parties, etc. for next year’s conference.
BYLAWS, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES
Cathi will meet with the team this week to review final details. There is a bit more work to do before presenting policies and procedures at the December Board meeting. And a few tweaks are needed in the bylaws. When they are finalized they will be filed with the Secretary of State.
ANNUAL REPORT
Tana has the draft of our 2024 report ready. She asked for suggestions for distribution of the report. Ideas include posting to the website, sharing the link in Seeds for Thought, and drafting an introductory letter to send with the report.
Tana would like to hold a session or two with local presidents on topics including bylaws, annual report, and job descriptions for board representatives and committee chairs.
OPEN POSITIONS
There is a possible candidate from King County (Marty Byrne) for the Communication Director. Tana is also thinking that gathering the team of folks who are responsible for various parts of our communications to work to develop a communications plan. More of that discussion to come in January.
The potential Development Director candidate who dropped out due to a family loss may be able to reconsider some time next year. Tana will follow up with her.
Important that we all look in our own chapters for candidates for all open positions.
RETREAT
We agreed on January 18, 2025 as the date for our in-person Executive Board Retreat, to be held in Ellensburg. A facilitator has been located. We will obtain input from the full board about topics and goals for discussion there.
OFFICER RECOGNITION
Tana wishes to recognize and thank past members of our Executive Team who have worked under her tenure. That will be done at our full December Board meeting.
OTHER BUSINESS
Patricia Bosh and Kathy Brenberger have agreed to work on awards again this year, and want new people to shadow them to take over in 2026.
Debbie is working on new stationery for the Foundation.
ADJOURNMENT
The meeting was adjourned just before 6 p.m