Board of Directors

Regular Meeting -- January 17, 2021

The Board of Directors held its regular monthly meeting at 2007 Bert Avenue, Austin, TX 78704, starting at 2:30 pm. The following directors (constituting a quorum of the full board) were present at the meeting by Zoom: Secretary John McGarey, Treasurer Penny Chambers and Kim Pillsbury. The following directors were absent: Lia Nelson and President Kathy Lee. Robert McGarey (Executive Director) and Sammm Younse were also present at the meeting.

Discussion of Board finances

The board spoke about what to talk about perhaps during a personnel meeting without Bob:

1. raising Bob's salary from $250 per month.

2. how much to raise it (it matters to him not to have too much because of other financial consequences)

3. possibly Lia could be paid for her work at HPC by paying her rent (precedent set by Pam having a similar arrangement) and acknowledgement would mean a lot to her

Executive Director's Report

Back Patio. Impacts of the carpenter bees were shown by Bob in the form of actual wood weakend by those holes in them. Chris is still working slowly on the paint and 2/3 of the roof is painted with primer and there will be double the cost of the paint work since primer is not a final coat.

Community Members. Katie is finding someone to take her place since she is leaving before her term is up. She has recommended someone per her agreement (Nina Cline) and we discussed her application to become a member of the community and responses from attendees were positive

Finances. Bob applied for employee retention credit and the Center should receive $1200 as a result. Bob worked hard to get tax documents prepared. Bob thanked the board for his bonus.

Computer. Bob downloaded the new beta version of Panorama and they have fixed a lot of the problems.

New Employee. Amanda has been helping and attended the last Executive committee meeting.

Administration. Kathy Lee spoke to Bob recently about wanting to take on more responsibilities at the center possibly as a future volunteer executive director. Which would potentially allow for the center to thrive for a long time. And she could help relieve day to day operations from Bob's shoulders.

Administration and executive director are separate sets of skills and Bob fortunately has both skills. Interestingly there are often growing pains from having a founder as executive director. Sometimes a founder as executive director can stifle innovation, either by stifling it directly, or because innovators respect the founder and are intimidated.

Mortgage. We cut 0.5% from mortgage APR, and will save us about $1000 less per year although we paid about $1000 to get the refinancing done. Bob's goal would be to put $1,000/mo into the principal where currently we are putting in $550.

LifeLab. Penny was interested by the term Lifelab which she found in her notes. She proposed keeping a list of great quotes and members choosing quotes and take that on and report on how it affected their lives.

The Human Potential Center is like a fitness center for the mind and heart and LifeLab is like a Language Lab but for your life. Helping people "live it" is core to the Human Potential Center. AHP seems to be the philosophical side and HPC seems to be the "living it" side.

Penny is collecting quotes and ideas about putting this into practice and may talk with Amanda about the Lifelab to brainstorm.

"You can talk about it all you want, but you've got to live it." - Gladys Taylor McGarey

"It's great to be able to live a long time, but it's more important to be able to love a long time." - Gladys Taylor McGarey

AHP. Bob is resigning from his current role and is open to an executive director position there. On a related note, he's been attempting to do more things to bring him Joy at the center.

Since there was no further business, the meeting adjourned at around 4:26 pm.

Minutes submitted by John McGarey, Secretary, January 17, 2021.