This is not my most exciting blog ever but here are our meeting minutes from the partner meeting we held last month... The biggest and most exciting thing is that we are now moving forward with creating community shop space at the Rude Mechs venue and opening up community storage space at the SVT venue...
Co-op Partners Meeting, July 18th 2012
Present: Connor, Eliot, Thomas (Rude Mech), Joe (St Edwards University), Zac, Jenny
The goal of the meeting was to discuss with partners what would be useful to them in creating a relationship with the Co-op and exploring and discussing ways that the larger budget partners can help make the Co-op more sustainable. Are the bigger organizations interested in making an annual contribution to the Co-op and what would make that viable for them?
Joe from St Eds said that they are not interested in making an annual contribution or having a "membership" but that they are willing to let the Co-op manage the rentals of the St Eds stock and keep the profit. The details need to be worked out but Joe said he would be happy to get an Office Depot gift card back from the Co-op at the end of the year and the Co-op keep all profits from the rentals. For example, Joe would love for the Co-op to manage the rentals for their prop stock. Joe would also like to give the Co-op a lot of furniture that they no longer need or use. They need more storage space but for them to buy in to the Co-op storage it would need to be closed to St Eds.
Eliot, who also works at St Eds, is going to help complete the St Eds inventory at the same time that the Co-op inventory is being completed. Both inventories are due by August 31st.
The basic idea being that the Co-op would almost be a consignment shop for the St Eds inventory. Managing other peoples stock and rentals.
Thomas talked about Scott Guthries desire and intention to create a rentable and usable scene shop space out of the CenterCenter at the Rude Mechs space. The lease would be $300 a month. The talk started to revolve around the idea that SVT could become the main storage space and Rudes could house the shop space. The shop space could be rented out and companies could rent out parts of SVT for their storage, this can potentially create income for the Co-op right away. Scott would be the person in charge of managing the Shop. He wouldn't be paid by the Co-op but would be paid through his contract work and some money from scene shop rentals. The Co-op would cover 1/2 to 2/3 of the rent for this shop space.
The next steps are that Connor needs to talk to Scott about collaborating on this scene shop idea. We need to create a system of how the space and the rental rate of the space is shared. The Co-op also will approach Ia and Rupert and PaperChairs about their storage needs and interest in taking up some space at SVT.
The idea was discussed to use the remaining storage budget to pay for tool repair and rent at the CenterCenter for the new shop space.
Jenny Larson, Salvage Vanguard Theater and The Austin Scenic Co-op
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