Minutes North Quabbin Energy
Meeting on Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Millers River Environmental Center

Attending: Don Audet, Steve and Janice Kurkowski, Jane Manring, Brian Nugent, Tom Rich, Cathy Stanton

Announcements
There will be a Sustainable Energy Summit at Smith College all day on Saturday, April 28, sponsored by Co-op Power and other area groups. For more information, click here. Some NQE people may attend and are interested in car-pooling.

Home Show de-brief
We had a table at the North Quabbin Home Show at Athol High School this past weekend. General consensus was that this was very much worth doing. People reported having good conversations with attendees. Ideas about next year were:

Pursue the idea of combining our energy expo with next year's Home Show. Cathy will talk to Steve Raymond at the Chamber of Commerce about this; he expressed interest when we raised it with him at the show.
We should work on creating a good, all-purpose list of vendors and people who are resources for various energy-related topics in the area. This would help when people ask us specific questions that we can't answer!
People at the Home Show are usually looking for prizes and freebies. We should think about ideas for this for next year (perhaps seed packets, to encourage people to grow some of their own food?) as well as improving our signs and overall presentation, which we didn't have a lot of time to do this year.

River Rat parade
Steve and Janice are working on getting some cars to include in the parade. Jane and Cathy will drop off the signs from last year's parade to the Environmental Center, so they can be re-used. There is one more Saturday when people will be working on puppet-making and other parade planning at the Center. Drivers and walkers for the parade on Saturday, April 14 are welcome to contact Steve and Janice at jdauphin3@hotmail.com or Pat Larson at plarson24@hotmail.com.

Recycling show on AOTV
The date for this has been set as Tuesday, May 15 at 6 p.m. We are aiming to host and tape a live panel discussion with three or four people involved in local recycling, along with "infomercial" skits produced by Steve and Janice. The skits may be staged live, or we may tape them and edit them in later. Janice is going to explore the possibility of getting some students involved in this part of the show. Cathy will work on lining up panelists and gathering information about recycling options in the nine North Quabbin towns. Tom is going to pursue the idea of getting us a tour of a recycling facility, possibly as an extra event and/or something that we might tape and use as part of the show.

Millers River Environmental Center building
We talked a bit about some of our ideas for this, and agreed to keep it on our agendas during the spring and summer. Brian and Don are interested in starting to work on some projects for the center.

Next meeting
Wednesday, May 2, 7 p.m. at MREC

Return to Minutes page.

Return to North Quabbin Energy home.