Report from Our First Meeting

Ten men attended our first meeting. After checking in and a short overview, we went over questions we have about Boys to Men. These will be forwarded to Mike Bonahan, who is guiding us through this process. Mike is currently the head of Boys to Men in Hawai'i. I will share his answers when I get them.

Two Goals

Our two main goals right now are to determine how we will get our mentors trained (required before we work with boys) and how we will get incorporated. We currently have a Google Docs folder that we have been using for various organizational purposes. The link is here:

RESPONSIBILITIES 

We also began splitting up responsibilities. The men who signed up for these responsibilities are not taking the whole thing on their shoulders. They are the beginnings of larger teams who will handle each of these responsibilities together. If you want to be join one of these teams, please say so! -

• Incorporation - Nate Rogers 
• Administration/Finance - Rick Borelli 
• Secretary/Communication - Christopher O'Dell 
• Boys Outreach 
• Mentor Recruitment - Zat Elias, Steve Matthews 
• Mentor Training - Darshan, Zat Elias 

I chose these responsibilities to focus on first from a list of the responsibilities fulfilled by the board members of Boys to Men Hawaii provided to me by Mike Bonahan, as well as my own judgment (BTM Hawaii is is already incorporated and so doesn't need an incorporation team - we do).

The full list of responsibilities he gave me are as follows:

• Mentor Coordinators 
• Administration & Finance Coordinators 
• Mentor Training Coordinators Outreach Coordinators 
• Rite of Passage Adventure Weekend (the BTM analog to the NWTA) 
• Coordinators J-Group (the BTM analog to I-Groups) Coordinators 

As well as the standard positions of a non-profit:

• President
• Vice President
• Secretary 
• Treasurer 

So far as I understand it, we can choose to split our responsibilities up differently if we so choose, adding responsibilities or splitting teams and responsibilities up as makes sense to us. The important thing is that we have already begun taking on these responsibilities.

NEXT MEETING 

We are planning for our next meeting to be in early or late May, at Zat Elias' house in Culver City. We are hoping to have one or two men from established Boys to Men centers join us virtually, though we haven't contacted them about this yet. -Christopher O'Dell