 co-host and one of you host. All right, Angela, I've started the recording as you requested. Beautiful, thanks. Welcome, everyone. This is the meeting of the Cultural Council. We're waiting to make quorum. There will not be any votes taken until they get to quorum. But at this time, you can go ahead and discuss and voice opinions on matters on the agenda. Thanks, Angela. And we'll say we're holding this meeting via remote means. Thanks to the governor's ongoing extension of the COVID order. And there's no in-person attendance, but members of the public can access this via Zoom. This was publicly posted. And we don't have any attendees in the waiting room right now, but the recording will be made available on the town's YouTube channel shortly after the meeting. So why don't we go ahead and check audio? And we've heard from everybody, but Rachel, if you could just do it once for the recording. Yes, I'm here. And Christie. I am here. And Julie. Hi, I'm here. And I'm here as well. And we have Angela for the moment. Staff liaison. Okay, so let me just, I'll pull up the agenda that we posted if you just give me a moment. Okay, so we don't have any minutes to approve. We don't have any members of the public. So the next item is a membership update, which has just been a standing item for us because we do need to recruit. And Angela, that would be a question, I guess, for you is, are we able to pull together some interviews to try to replenish our membership? Absolutely. And you've had a few applicants. So now that I know that you're having trouble reaching for them, then let's push this forward and try and get it done. I think because you had such high membership level, we were going to try and wait until that cycle that gets you ready for the next fiscal year. We were going to try and wait until the June cycle. But now that I'm here and I'm witnessing this, let's try and fill that spot. Yeah, I'd like you to email us a list of folks. There was someone in particular that I thought was applying the next fiscal year. Yeah, I think you've had a handful of new applicants this New Year, so I'm happy to pull that list together tomorrow. Sure. Great. And as always, Christy, Rachel, and I speak to myself too. We want to keep on thinking about who might be good prospective candidates for the council. Okay, so grants update. So we have one, as I mentioned, we have one particular request that merits some discussion. But before we get into that one, I want to kind of give kudos to Julianne on the public meeting for setting up the Adobe Acrobat eSignature platform. I just can't speak highly enough of how much paper and headache this has saved. I mean, the amount of time that it takes for grantees to print things, sign them, bring them to the Jones, put them in the mailbox. Angela has to collect them from Town Hall. We have to get them from the library. All that entire process was hours upon hours of just very, very rote work. And Julianne has, we've worked closely with Holly in the treasurer's office, but Julianne has done all the heavy lifting of setting up the technology. So it's now, it's not entirely digital. Of course, folks have the option to print it and sign it if they'd rather, but there's no reason to. It's entirely digital. They do not have that option. We took that away. It's a digital application process via the MCC, and we've moved to an all-digital process. And we are not, everything is to be turned into us for the final grant report via email. Okay. And they agreed to it when they signed all the digital paperwork, so we're good. Okay. So it's an entirely, you heard her here first. It's an entirely digital process, and it has really streamlined things quite a bit. So I'll say that, and then Julianne, I don't know, as the kind of acting treasurer, you wanna speak to the overall grants process? How many have we, have we seen everybody come in now? How many are left outstanding, do you know? I have not been able to prepare for this meeting. We're in a huge push at work, and I have been nonstop around the clock. So I'm sorry. It is nearly, nearly done. Just about everybody in and accounted for. It must be a handful at this point. So there was also a prompting reminder system that was put in place with the digital signing process. So that really helped. Okay. Yeah, I don't see a tracker. So then why don't we go to the matter of substance? And the email thread really lays it all out for you, but I'll just speak to it in case we had had a chance to read back through it. The ancestral, so we had two large grants this year, which supported Black Liberation specifically. The Still We Rise Black Celebration series, we funded at $3,000, which was our largest single grant of the year. And then we had Juneteenth. So well, Juneteenth is an Amherst Cinema specific event, which we funded at $1,500. And then we funded ancestral bridges. And if you're sort of following anything in Amherst, you know that ancestral bridges has been a real sort of national and international highlight for the town. It's the work of Anika Lopes primarily looking at mainly her family roots, but the 54th Regiment, Black soldiers in the Civil War, and really just sort of the incredible legacy of Black citizenship in Amherst. And so ancestral bridges came in with a pretty broad application for called Reclaiming Our Narrative. I'm just looking at the spreadsheet now. Reclaiming Our Narrative and it was a $2,000 award. So in our really second or third tier of most, you know, high cost awards. And I don't have the full application in front of me. So- What are you looking for? They requested $17,760 for the total amount of grant award from us, and just remember because of the Pagache 1776. But yeah, so we granted 2,000 of that to them. Is that what you're looking for? No, but thank you. What were you looking for? No, that's fine. I was actually looking for the grant proposal itself, which Angela has really helpfully put everything on the website. And I have to confess, I was skeptical of this, but you've redacted it in such a way that it really, I think serves a great purpose. So kudos and thank you for doing that. So reclaiming Our Narrative, the grant proposal itself, I can share my screen. Oh, I can't. But if I could share my screen, I would pull up the grant proposal because the first request in that email thread was actually to remove the 1776 reference in the proposal. So I think it was maybe a miscommunication internally. And Julianne, would you give me thank you? Or would somebody give me the privileges to share? Let me see. I'm the co-host now, okay. You're all set. Sorry about that. Thank you. No, no problem. Thank you. So here is their original application. And I'm just gonna run down to the So Juneteenth was slated to be their first program. So that is already in the application. And it's a broad overview and it's a broad range of activities that they are really seeking to do. And so the proposed program, just take a second and let's read that if folks can see it. It's very ambivalent. It's very ambivalent. It's very ambivalent. If folks can see it. It's very ambitious. I would say storytelling and narrative mandate that they're trying to take on. Start with a kickoff, a kickoff on Juneteenth. And then more specifics regarding the activity, documenting and broadcasting, the appropriated and erased contributions of Black and Indigenous and Amherst. Led by Anika Lopes and her family. I'm just gonna get down to the budget section here, if you don't mind. So we gave them 2000 and you can see the accounting that gets to 1776, 17,760, stipends for storytellers, elders and intergenerational stories, intern stipends and oversight, and then archival and other technical costs. That's how they got to 17,760. A Juneteenth event that costs $15,000, this is a pretty well-known event and actually Angela might speak to it too. This is a town walk that they take to the tablets. And I should have said that at the outset. They're most known for the Civil War tablets that are at the bangs currently. And I'm embarrassed to say I've had it on my calendar the past couple of years and I have not actually done the full walk but I know several members of this group pretty well and it really is an amazing work and the tablets are amazing. But the Juneteenth event to the tablets is sort of the centerpiece of their grant application, I would say in terms of activities that they're proposing. So thanks for humoring me on that. That's the background. And then you see from the email thread that they declined the grant. They got the letter, it was for 2000 when they had requested 17,000 and change. And then they declined the grant sort of outright without any real explanation. And then the turnaround was just a matter of maybe two or three weeks. I'd have to look at the emails, but it was just a week or two, a short period of time, less than a month. They turned around and they said, can we apply this money for Juneteenth only essentially? So that's, those are the facts as I understand. Julianne, I don't know if you want to kind of... Yeah, I'd like to add to that that the way I read the brief email and we do have a amendment form that others fill out when things get this complex but I don't want to suggest that they do that if we're not going to really seriously look to move forward with it. But they asked if the way I read it, if we could just hand that those funds off as an in addition to the Juneteenth event as to give them more. And the thing that I don't understand about that is kind of the... Is that what it says though? I'm sorry, from the fiscal point of view, how do we just give funds to an event when we don't have all the criteria that they need to meet in the final grant report? Like, it's kind of like saying, oh, well, to be more specific, like what if it was, well, just give it to Amherst Cinema instead. But Julie, it doesn't say that. So I want to pause you there because it doesn't say what I think you're saying it says. Let me reread it, but it didn't sound to me like they were going to... I don't know. I just, I don't necessarily have enough information. It wasn't like there's a specific thing that we're going to do for Juneteenth and we want to apply this $2,000 to that specific thing for Juneteenth. It was very vague to me as to who was getting the funds. It sounded like it was to be given to someone else. It wasn't like, can we still receive these funds but can you give them to Juneteenth? I get the impression Christy wants to say something. Okay, yeah. Let me just, having read the application through, I think they want to just do their Juneteenth part. That's what I think it says. But Christy- But didn't they refuse the money? Wait a minute, did I... They did. They flat out said, thanks, but no thanks. And then the exact words I'm reading in the email was, could you please reallocate the $2,000 to others and take our proposal off the website? That was one part. And then they came back and said, if you might allow us to use the grant you approved for Juneteenth programs, including the gospel choir and storytelling. For the July 4th. Yeah. But they already refused the money. It's like, I don't know. It just seems like, it just seems very confusing. It seems like it's a different project. It seems like, this is sort of at the last minute. I don't know. It just, I mean, administratively, I would be like, no, no, no, no, no. This is terrible precedent. Because then you have people coming back, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've got another, you know, it's like you got to stop it at some point and say, you made a proposal, we offered you this. You said, no, great. If you want it next year, apply again. Like, is there some reason that we have to do this this year? You know, like the money has to go this year. So Christie, I just wanted to speak to this for a second. So having looked at the grant application more closely just now. Wait a minute, which grant application? The one that I screen shared with you a minute ago. Yeah, but sorry, just, is that the original, that was the original grant application. Okay. Yep, yep. They said we don't want the money. Having looked at the original grant application just now, which was a $17,000 request, and having read it again more carefully, you know, with this context, the ancestral bridges Juneteenth event, which is a major undertaking, is clearly described in their original application, which we approved. Now, somewhere along, I don't disagree. This has been very confusing communication. Somewhere along the line, they said, you know what? We don't want it. That's not enough money. We don't want it. And that was, we accepted that. We said, that's fine. We have not taken any administrative action with those funds we are going to, you know, the intent is certainly to do so. And I don't disagree that, you know, a decision is a decision and, you know, and that's how it should go. That being said, you know, this is a, we are focused on public benefit and not so much on, you know, that that's our focus. And when I look at this, what I connected reading it through now together is, you know, here is ancestral bridges having taken a second look at their grant application and the funding that we've given them or we had given them approved. And then said, well, you know, they're not giving us the amount to run our full $17,000 programming, but we shouldn't say no to this amount that's gonna let us fund our Juneteenth programming. So my initial reaction, to be honest, is slightly different than what y'all are talking about. My initial reaction was, we're already funding Juneteenth on the common in a couple of different ways. We have Amherst Cinema. We actually applied for and got a festivals and projects grant for the town's Juneteenth activity, but ancestral bridges is a nonprofit standalone separate from the town, you know, they are, but they're, as I said, nationally, internationally, you know, very well respected. And they have their own Juneteenth activity, which is the, you know, which includes the walk to the, the walk that ends at the tablets. So when I read this, you know, had they not said, we're giving this money back on January 18th, I would have said, of course, you can use it for the, for your Juneteenth activity. Of course you can. That's literally in your original application, we gave you about 7% of what you asked for. And so you can use that 7% however you want. So to me, the issue is, do we give them a mulligan on this declination of the grant? And that's, that's a big Dewey. That's a big F. It does, it does seem like, I don't want to say, where's my brain? It's, it wouldn't have been as simple still. They still would have had to have done an amendment request to say, we're not doing the whole thing, but we'd like to still keep the funds. Can we amend it to just do this one part? And well, they are required to produce the event as described in the application. And this is just a part of it. And it's a wonderful part of it. And it is something that if they'd come to us for just that, we probably would have supported it. But, but at this point, they couldn't accept the grant funds and only do that one part. They would still, by our requirements have to amend. Yeah, Christy. Okay. A couple of things. Did, let me just ask, get some more information. Did anyone else reject the funding? Has anyone else- Not this year, but it's pretty common. It's pretty common. Okay. It has happened. Yeah. If that's the case that people reject the funding, then we must go to every one of those people and ask them, would they like to re-amend? Would they like to amend their proposal? Because you can't be, this is not something which is presented to our applicants. Like, oh, if you don't like it, come back with a new idea and we'll like give you the money for that. So, like talk about equity, diversity and inclusion. You are privileging one group because we happen to like them and we think this is good and it's positive and it's outreach and they're nationally recognized. I mean, that is not what we are about. We're not the NEH. We're about equity across all the applications. I think this is the kind of thing that gets you front page above the fold on the Hampshire Gazette. This is about backhand dealing, making situations to work for people that you like. And that is just like, that is not, it's not professional. It's probably not legal because the application, there is a procedure for revising. And I mean, this is really the kind of thing that sends me writing a letter to the Hampshire Gazette. I mean, I have to say guys, I find this just, if there was a reason why it had to be this year, like an emergency thing, if we don't do it this year, it's not gonna work. I could see if we had a big court, but I just, Matt, I think this is like, this is the recipe for a disaster, for like a professional disaster. And I just, I will absolutely go on the record. I mean, this is, I feel like the same thing we were up against with the school. This is not about our personal opinion. This is about what are our procedures and following the procedures. And then, so there's nothing, I mean, these are our neighbors, but the point is we are supposed to not deal with favorites. So I just- To speak to procedure, Christy, sorry to interrupt, but to speak to procedure, I questioned that Angela set us down the path of not having a quorum and discussing, because this is getting to being a lot like deliberation. And I didn't think it was appropriate for us to discuss the merits of something to this extent. You know, I feel like this is an inappropriate public meeting that's being recorded and now it's out there. And I really- Exactly. You know, I didn't want to get into the conversation without a quorum. We should not be discussing this. We should not be even discussing this. We have procedures. We have deadlines when things are due. It's March. We're in March. The grant information was sent out six weeks ago. You know, this is just, if you want to go back to everybody who has refused funding and say, oh, by the way, you can come up with a new idea now. You can't do that. I just- We do permit that people, once they have signed and even accepted the funds, that if there's a change, it's there required to come back when they change it for an amendment. And if it doesn't meet the criteria that were required to follow for an amendment, then they're required to return those funds. Now, as Matt said, the MCC at the state level has made it easier for simple change of date venue. This is not a simple. Yes. This is not a simple. It's a new proposal. I'm sorry, just because it deals with black people and Amherst is not reason to lump them all together. I mean, that's wrong and racist. And to say, well, they proposed this thing and now we're gonna come up with something else that's by the same group around the same issue. I'm sorry, I'm gonna pause for a second because I can tell that you both have a strong feeling of no, let's end. It's a procedure part, Matt. And I frankly feel very strongly as the host of this meeting that this wasn't simply putting information out there for people to think. We're now into active deliberation and discussion and weighing the merits of something. And this is outside of the way that we are allowed to operate and it has nothing to do about how I would vote. It's just that we are not allowed to operate this way in our capacity. We can have a discussion without a quorum. We may have a discussion without a quorum. We can. Well, I can't put it to a vote that is comfortable with having this discussion, but I know that from my sense of the level of evaluation, of possibly giving funds to someone, this is beyond any topic of conversation that I would have any other time of the year. So I really would like to move to conclude this meeting until we can have a quorum to address it. And Rachel, yeah, if you would like to say something, please. All I was gonna say is that looking at that email chain, it seemed clear to me that they already rejected the funds. They didn't want the money. So to me, that was the end of the story and to have come back. And yeah, I don't know if it's something that should even be entertained the discussion. So the fact that, I mean, we're not going to be voting on any decision anyway, but I think we're here having this, you know, discussion or for me that it seems pretty clear cut that they already didn't want the money and that should be the end of it. That's- Yeah, and so- It's a holistic interpretation, but because what you said about people like grantees having the option of coming back to us and saying, we want to modify this or that or the other about our project. But that's with the understanding that they accepted the grant. They didn't reject it and then come back and then, you know, ask us or something. So I think that based on their initial decision, I don't know if there's even a point to have a conversation about it, to be honest. I mean- Yeah. Rachel, I don't- Procedural as well. So go ahead. Just let me know when you're done. I don't think it's simplistic at all. I think that's the only, you know, that that's a very straightforward point, which is they rejected it. And so if we simply want to hold them to their word on rejecting it, you know, knowing that internally, we have not actually done anything with the funds other than acknowledge their rejection. That's not the point. And that's, excuse me. Well, that's not the point. I mean, the point is we have a set of rules and procedures that we must follow fairly for everybody. And we're talking about breaking those rules and not applying them fairly. Like if we broke the rule and said, oh, we made some huge procedural error, we're going to go back and send out a new email to all the grant people. But we're not saying that. We're talking about singling out someone who, you know, had the initiative to ask. And I think one writes a very nice email and says, this sounds like a wonderful idea. We hope you'll put in a grant for this next year. Okay, can I finish my point though? You know, I mean, I, the rule, whichever rule you're speaking to, you know, I think there is a clear, they said we declined the funds. So to me, that is the point. And I understand you don't think that's the point. I agree with Rachel that that is the point that they said we declined the funds. I do, I do think that's the point. I think, I just, I think it all the way down that we have to, we have rules, we have quorum rules, we have whatever, that gives us protection as it should as members of the committee. I don't want to be, I don't want to be. Okay, yeah. I don't want to be in the paper. Christy, if you would just please give me a minute to finish my thought. Is that okay? Or should we just end? I really think that we should end because I really don't think that we should be having this discussion. I feel very strongly about that. And we, you know, I can't bring it to a vote. If I had the quorum, I would bring it to a vote to say, are we within our, you know, correct capacity and what we've been appointed to do to have this discussion, but I can't even bring it to a vote. So we're continuing and, Okay. All right. So further recording, we can end now and I won't, I will not finish my thought. Further report. It's okay because to have these thoughts, we should be having them on a quorum because this is an attempt to move towards a decision of which we can't vote, but we're supposed to do that with a quorum. So I know that you have good intentions and just, you know, really want to do right by folks, but we are outside of how we're supposed to operate. So I'd like to end the recording and revisit this when we do have a quorum and can properly address it. And we'll be happy to hear all your thoughts then. Okay. I just want to say, I mean, I've heard out a lot of thoughts from both of you. I mean, you know, all the way through. I think the fact is that none of us wanted to share our thoughts about this because we shouldn't be sharing our thoughts about it. And then why don't we have to continue to? Public body can meet without a quorum. It's okay. We're not breaking any rules or not breaking any laws. It's fine to have this conversation. That is not how I understand it because I would really like to end this. And I respectfully, you know, like your agreement that we can end the recording and end the meeting and pick this up when we have a quorum, please. Angela is holding, Angela opened this meeting knowing we didn't have a quorum because we can discuss it. Angela opened it because you're asking me to. Excuse me, Matt. Matt, she opened the meeting saying it would be a good record of the attempt to follow through on a scheduled meeting and that we wouldn't, didn't make quorum and therefore we would end it. And we all were like, oh, well, that makes sense. But not that we would get into discussions and deliberation of matters that would then later be voted on when we don't have a quorum and we shouldn't be discussing it. So I'd like to end. It'll be good to get a clarification from her because we've done this before where we've had meetings without quorum and not head votes. So it'd be good to get a clarification for her on that front. I'm happy to end the discussion now. I can tell that folks don't want to have this conversation right now. I wish you all a good night. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Christy. Enjoy Paris. Thank you, Rachel. Take care. Bye. Julie.