Monday, January 21, 2008

BULLETIN 1

Weekly Meeting
I want to apologize for the limited number of people that have access to our meetings. Right now, the meetings are in Philadelphia, because that’s where I live and I don’t have a car or money to travel. This weeks meeting was more of an intro for the five of us. I was ok with the meeting being as small as it was, because it was pretty focused on creating a website and designing/finding a logo. The people that came all had backgrounds ideal for these tasks. It was short, sweet and relatively productive. There will be another meeting this Thursday, 1/24, at Tbar, 117 South 12th Street, Philadelphia at 7pm.

Myspace
Myspace has been an integral part of getting started, getting the word out and getting people involved in the idea. Our myspace page is coming along nicely. We currenly have 1984 friends… weird. We’ve been getting a very encouraging amount of interest, and great ideas for everything that’s been posted. There are lots of people/organizations that are either going through the same thing as us or have gone through it, so we’re getting a lot of advice from all over the place, including overseas. I’m still not too saavy on myspace, so I don’t know how advanced this website is going to get, but we should have quite a few links and banners on the page soon. If anyone has knowledge about how to do this, please let me know so we can get it going soon. I think that’s it for myspace.

Logo
We’ve made some headway on the logo. We were thinking about designing a logo, but the concensus thus far has been that “world in my hands” encompasses everything that we want to accomplish. You can see this picture on our myspace page or at: http://www.ecocarpetclean../mediac/450_0/media/earth_in_my_hands.jpg
We believe that this picture isn’t copyrighted, so it should be extremely easy to make it happen. Justin volunteered to refine our logo and print out business cards for us. This should not be overlooked because it’s the first donation that have have taken! Thanks Justin!

Forum
I’ve been trying to find a good website to hold an open forum on, and I think we’ve found one at blogger.com. You can view and begin using this resource at:
http://savetheplanettour.blogspot.com/
Enjoy!

Website
We have to, somehow, generate money to fund our website. Mariano has already volunteered to create the website when we’re ready.

Banners
We need to find businesses that want to put their banners on our website and pay us for the number of people that visit their sites from those banners. This is a great and easy way to generate a lot of money. 

Mission Statement, Business Plan and becoming a Non-Profit
In order to become a Non-Profit Organization, we have to develop a Mission Statement and Business Plan. I believe that we have Mission Statement established, but it can always be changed. Here it is:
Our vision is to create positive change in the world. We resolve to do so by the following guidelines:
We are determined to raise awareness, while educating and motivating people on the issues that face the planet and all of it’s inhabitants, both locally and globally.
We aspire to unify organizations and individuals working toward the common goal of making the world a better place.
We respect everyone given their diversity, individuality and rights.
We will provide financial and any other applicable support to a variety of chosen charities.

If you have any improvements, please email it, write it on blogger, or on myspace. I’m going to try to get a student from the University of Penn help us out with a business plan and the logistics of becoming a non-profit. For now, that’s the plan, but again, get any ideas out on blogger or myspace.

T-Shirts and Merchandise
I believe that we’re going to have to develop these things in a very short time. It’s a great way to get the word out and make money at the same time. Of course we have to find good quality organic cotton, hemp, bamboo or other types of cloth. Stickers? I was thinking about hankercheifs as well(it saves trees). Any ideas? For the hankeys I was thinking “Save a tree. Use a hankey.” We’ve gotten a couple of good t-shirt ideas too.

Venues and Other Music Festivals
I want to start out by saying that there are plenty of spaces that are big enough for us to hold this tour around each of the desired cities. Autumn informed me of a few places between Seattle and Portland OR. So… on that note, it’s strange, I really thought I was coming up with an original idea when I thought about The Save the Planet Tour, but there are lots and lots of music tours/festivals that try to tackle individual causes out there. The first I knew of was LiveAid, then Live8, LiveEarth, Global Peace Concert, and many more. This year, a few of us are going to have to get out to some of these festivals and get the word out about our idea. Justin just told me about a new, huge festival that’s coming to the Philadelphia area- The Vineland Music Festival. Then there’s Bonaroo, Coachella, Lollapalooza, The Reading Music Festival and still more. The thing is, we’re different. Our ideas is to bring all of these together under one name, in one effort. So if you have any contacts with any of these festivals, talk to them! Let’s make it happen

About Me
My name’s Sean. You can check out my myspace at:
www.myspace.com/seanj8711
I first got into environmental activism when I was in high school. My freshman year I took Biology, in which I did a project on population, landfills and trash. I decided that we were going in a bad direction, so I began joining groups for community service and the environment. Then I went to college for environmental studies. I took my involvement in organizations on campus more seriously than school, but I can attribute that to where I am now. While still in my freshman year of college, a friend and I came to the conclusion that eventually, the world is going to make a shift, and money that is being spent on oil now is going to be spent somewhere else when the oil runs out. That lead me to believe that, in order to really make a difference, I would have to change an industry like Food Service. So, now I’m a culinary arts student in Philadelphia. I was in a car accident last April, which has made life, and dealing with life, a little difficult, so I’m sort of at a low point in my life right now. So, bear with me… it’s only going to get better. So… I live in Philadelphia with my girlfriend, Kristina, and our cat,Sara. I’m slightly obsesive compulsive and I consider myself an idea man. I tend to sit around and come up with ideas for restaurants and ways to save the planet, but the save the planet tour is the coolest idea yet. That’s it!

Thank you to everyone that has stuck with it so far. The ideas have been great! Let’s save the planet!

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