 All right, let's call this a meeting to order. And we'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. OK, since we have a hybrid meeting, I would just like to do a roll call. So all the person, Akley, all the person, Akley. Her mic is up. Yes. Here. Thank you. Ruth, she's here. Jim and Yolanda, I don't see them online. Jim and Yolanda, are you guys caller one? No. OK, I don't I don't hear anything from them. All right, Shar, Hensie and Mark Hensie are here. Annie, I saw you online. Yep, Annie's here. Thank you. OK, I'm not hearing anything from Tom. Carolyn, I see you online. No, is Rich with you or did he leave the room? He started his class. Oh, OK. All right, so no. We saw him on the screen briefly. Just wanted to make sure. No, he's starting his class. Gotcha. OK, Cole, we see you online. Present. Thank you. Trent. Hello. Hi, we see you online. Anna and Henry are here in person. All right, we've got both of them. Patrick is here. And Julie, are you online? I think she's watching the WSCS live broadcast in Boston. OK, so she's not logged in? No. That's good for a roll call. All right, sir, do we have any correspondence? Or the spot? Just to kind of recap, so the email that I sent out to everybody on February 2nd, I had stated that we had exchanged some emails with Esslingen in January. So that was the most recent from them. And then also on that February 2nd email, I included a draft of a reply email that I sent off to Subame. I sent that on February 4th. I have not received any response back, so that's the last communication from them. And that's all I have. All right, let's move on to the approval of the minutes from the November 5th meeting that we're emailed out to everyone. And would someone like to make a motion on that? We need a second. We'll get a motion and a second. I mean, it's approved. Any discussion? Any discussion, I'm sorry. That's all right. Hearing none, we'll move on. We have to vote. Pardon? We have to vote. We have to vote? Yeah, all in favor. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Sorry, everybody, it's been a while for me since I've put on this. I'm going to try this again. Opposed. Any opposed? I'm going to try this again. Hello? Can you hear Jim and Yolk? Who is it? Oh, is this is Yolk? Can you hear me? OK, now we can hear you. Yes, now we can hear you. OK, all right. Are you guys watching caller one, huh? Probably. OK, OK, you're just on the phone. OK, gotcha. Yes. All right, so there's no opposites of the minutes from November 5th. Hearing none, let's move on to items for discussion and possible actions. Annie, are you out there with the Esslingen coffee talks updates from? Yes, yes. So yeah, so basically Esslingen, some folks from Esslingen reached out, I think, to Sheboygan to find out about whether a handful of people here would be willing to really help with just some informal conversational English by Zoom. So we've been having video meetings for a handful of the firefighters or firefighters dispatchers and schedulers at the fire department in Esslingen because they've been recently getting more calls, or I guess an increase in time over calls, an increase over time in calls that are in English. And so a few of those who are answering the calls just aren't comfortable, totally comfortable with their level of conversational English knowledge when those calls come in. And so to increase their confidence and their understanding of it, even though they all know English quite well, but they really just want to polish up their skills in it conversationally. So the idea is for a handful of us here in Sheboygan to have some virtual meetings with those firefighters and dispatchers to help them with that. So I think this idea started back in maybe late October or so. So I remember we had mentioned it in Sarah Rich had mentioned the idea of it for the first time for this group. I believe at the November meeting. So yeah, so I'm sort of the representative for the Mayor's International Committee in the group. We have, I believe it's four or five total kind of partner couplings with one person from the Esslingen Fire Department and then one Sheboyganite paired up. And we had a little bit of a gap in the scheduling due to some health issues from someone on the Esslingen side who was quite involved in it. But after that kind of little hiatus, we actually just this week have started our first set of calls with them. So I met with a firefighter named Christian this morning and had a good 20 or 30 minute or so kind of informal video meeting with him and I'm just kind of talking about whatever in life and what life is like in Sheboygan and Esslingen to learn some language there. So yeah, so it's been going really well and we plan to have a handful more of those kinds of meetings over about every week or every other week over maybe the next month or something similar to that. So I'll keep you all posted but that's pretty much the idea for it. And I think my impression anyway is that the beginning of the program has been going really well. So it's good. Is there a certain time that you guys meet or talk? The on the Sheboygan side, we had one sort of pre-meeting just to kind of talk about ideas for conversation or sort of reminders about ways that might be helpful to talk with them as they're learning English better. So that meeting we had, I don't know, a couple of months ago or maybe in January it was. So that was sort of the one kind of bigger group meeting but it only had the Sheboygan side and other than that, it's really been individual timed meetings at different times based on the schedules of each sort of pairing of folks. Sounds great. Any discussion on that? I'm just wondering if we got one of the dispatchers from our dispatch to participate. Do you think that would be of any value so they could talk about things that they see coming in when people bring emergencies to their attention by dialing 911? Mayor Mike, that's a good idea that no one actually has brought up to my knowledge in this group, but I can bring it back to Carly at the Sheboygan fire department who's kind of been one of the main coordinators for it and John Peckinen people to people as well who's been involved. So I'll bring that idea up to them and maybe also Paul who's the main coordinator on the Essling inside just to get a sense of whether that might be helpful. So I think that's a good idea. Some of the specialized vocabulary especially that might be helpful for them is not something that the rest of us who are already involved in the conversations are as familiar with. So that's a good thought to bring up. Thank you. No problem. Let me know if you need to contact. Okay, thanks. Great. Moving on to 3.2. Discussing our Essling trip in 2022. Does anybody have any input to say about that? At this time, I have not re-approach anybody at Discovery Travel. I know our kids from people to people hopefully are going to be going in August. I don't know if anyone knows well, but there really has been no further discussion on our potential trip for next year. Is that something anybody else wants to address or talk about? I mean, I know that things haven't changed a lot in the world yet, but is it something we want to just wait for a while or? I think we should wait for a while and see how things change with COVID across the nation and in Europe. And then we can make our final decision somewhere down the road. Yeah, I think until we all figure out what's going on here. Is this something that? I would guess that we might have a better sense even by later in the spring or early summer as more and more people at least here and hopefully in Europe are getting vaccinated as well. Mark, I did just a little thought. You know, we always go on May and maybe conceivably you might think September of 2022. Otherwise, the weather should be about the same. It'll just be a little darker. I mean, when we go there in May, it's nine o'clock before it's dark. So if you're walking around, you can see where you're going, but I think the weather would be the same if you went in September. So, because I'm, you know, obviously we need about a nine month window to probably get this from start to finish. September of this year, you're saying? No, no, no. Oh, 2022. 2022. Any other discussion on that? All right, let's move on then to 3.3. Mike, would you like to speak about this? Sure. Josh Hernday is with us. He's the executive director of the Sheboygan Symphony and Josh participated in the chamber leadership program. And what they do is they encourage all those members of the shadow, a different individual that they've met during the different classes that they have and Josh picked me. And as our conversation rolled around, we brought up the subject of our sister city and Josh was kind of interested in that because he knows that they have a great music program. And I told him that in the early years of our partnership, the symphony actually went over to Esslingen and performed there and they exchanged and did something similar over here and we thought that maybe it might be worth talking about the youth symphony possibly either coming along with us when we go or setting up a separate trip to have more students involved. The mayor of Esslingen has pushed me a little bit to try to get more students involved in our exchange program and this would be a great way to have a whole group of them that could participate. So I'm gonna turn it over to Josh. He was gonna talk about this further with the symphony and he's got some information to share with us. Yeah, so in our talking, I have a colleague that lives just outside of Esslingen about 45 minutes away and he has always been bragging about how wonderful their youth symphony program is and I'd likewise break back to him about ours. But we have about on a non-COVID year obviously about 60 students in our what we consider our advanced ensemble which is primarily high school age students later high school years. And having done a lot of international travel myself I thought this would be a great way as we found out in our discussion that to get more students going over to Esslingen as well as bringing some over here doing some sort of screen program, but whether it be they come, they would come here one year we go in opposite year or whatever have you, I guess right now we're wanting to kind of feel at the feasibility of a program like this and I guess when we would be looking at doing this, because it's something that we certainly could do with enough planning and we'd be very excited to do it. I'd say there'd be, this would be a wonderful opportunity for the city, for the students and just I guess the music scene in general in both our cities. Was there a discussion of how long in exchange would be because like the middle school one they do three weeks here and then switch and do three weeks? It could all be discussed with our counterparts over there what we would exactly want the program to look like since we will be taking students we wanna make sure that it fits with both the programs that we're running. I think if this is something that we'd like to pursue we just need to instruct us to open the discussion with Esslingen and put some of the musical people together to talk about this and see if this has legs. So if this looks okay, this is something we could envision. I talked to Josh a little bit about the concept of the middle school exchange where hopefully if this would happen the students in Esslingen would house the students that are visiting from Sheboygan and then likewise we would ask the students here to do the same so that we could eliminate the cost of lodging and then we'd just have to worry about the cost of any airfare and things like that. Josh, could you talk a little bit about that? Is that something that you feel the families could pick up in the symphony or would you be looking for any assistance from us in that area? In terms of taking in students that come over here? No, just in the cost of the airfare. That's why we wanna talk about the timeline specifically if we're gonna have to be doing fundraising. This is quite a large project to fundraise for so we'd want plenty of time to be able to do that and to get the word out there and get the interest. Because a program like this is obviously gonna spark interest in a number of students that may not be involved in our program already. So that's one hope is recruitment for the arts but having that time to be able to do any fundraising that we need is obviously gonna be a big deal. But yeah, the parent organization is great with helping in fundraising and really coordinating any number of things with the youth symphony. We have a very strong parent organization and even within our own symphony. A lot of folks would be on board in supporting this. Absolutely. And when I mentioned this to Rich, he had brought up the fact that people-to-people might have an interest in being involved in some ways. So I'm not sure what that would be but that would also be out there as a possibility. Any other discussion? Okay, none. This is showing one. Thank you, Josh. I'm just wondering if we should initiate the discussion with Thesslingen, any feelings about that? Would you feel positive about this concept? I think it's a great idea to at least talk with Thesslingen about and find out whether there might be interest there. I think it's a really exciting idea to have an arts-based exchange. I'm not thoroughly familiar with the history of the different kinds of types of exchanges but I think it sounds really exciting. I think it's worth at least exploring with Thesslingen for sure. And you have contacts over there, correct? Yes, I do. I'm happy to reach out to any of the directors. What we'll do is start with something with Catherine, our contacts over there with Thesslingen so they're aware of it. And we'll put you on that email so she would have your information and then you might wanna give me some information on the people you would like to work with there and hopefully that'll all fit together. Very good. All right, we'll follow through with that. Thank you very much for coming tonight, Josh. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let's move on. I guess future possible fundraisers for our events going up. I know we did not do Thesslingen Fest last year. Rich had sent me an email that sounds like three sheeps would be willing to do this again if all works out at the timeframe that we are able to gather. Maybe in smaller groups, maybe a smaller thing. And I know that we've talked about doing other things to raise money. Is there any other thoughts out there of fundraisers for us? This is Yoh. Yoh. Yes. This is Yoh. Maybe we would consider the Thesslingen Fest as a drive-through that's depending upon the status of COVID later this year. I would agree with that. I know of other people who had the drive-through fries and they've gone over very well, very well. And maybe by October things will be, because it's when we generally do it as in October, I have a little better handle on it that we can do a drive-through and maybe a small gathering of limited number. But again, I think it's all gonna come down to what the public health will allow us to do, correct? I think that's true, Patrick. And the other thing I think we need to start doing is Rich usually work with them on a date that's possible. And if we get that set up, it could be tentative for a while until we make final plans. I still have a stock of over 500 of the cranes I made. That project I kind of put on hold with everything with COVID, not really sure how we wanted to approach that. If you wanna consider talking about that again, I'm definitely open to it. Any way of fundraising that encourages social distancing and maybe involves some type of an item that people can purchase, I think would be beneficial. I'm cold, I remember last year when you presented the idea with the 3D printed cranes that that could involve like an art installation and like an awareness sort of campaign. Are you still thinking? Yes, that's correct. Doing something along those lines? Yeah, absolutely. I kind of put the brakes on that because I wasn't sure about encouraging people to come out and look at something. But at this point, I think it would be a really good idea. And I have definitely a small army that we could put together. We find a location for that. I would be happy to work on that with whoever would like to be involved in having some type of a write up and then putting a nice display together. Now, we do have a couple of people in the committee that are here now that weren't here a year ago. So maybe for their information, could you maybe explain a little bit more about the, I know you gave some info about it, but just kind of for some of our newer people that aren't familiar with the 3D printed cranes at all. Maybe just a little bit more about the story. Yeah, as briefly as I can. Paper origami cranes, origami in itself is, they're folded and put together in a display of a thousand when there is a goal for healing or peace and prosperity. It's kind of like a show is kind of a great effort. And I had started printing, 3D printing these crane models that we could hang on display and then sell individually for a fundraiser. If anything in itself just on display to bring awareness to what we're trying to do is rekindling our relationship with Subame and even possibly sending us an installation to them. Yes, Mary has one right there. Oh yeah. Right there. And I have over 500 and that would be sufficient for a display and I can continue producing more. We just like to, we need a place to display them that they can stay for an extended period of time at least several months. So that people could come and kind of take a look at that and then be able to read back story about a relationship with them and what we're trying to do to have that answers. Any questions or? I think it gives us a brief overview of that for the new people involved right here. Yeah, because Betty and Annie are the ones that come to mind that weren't here a year ago and they didn't have the backstory about the project. Okay. And I know 3D printing is really affordable. It's very cheap to produce these things and they look really nice. It was an easy, interesting thing that my Japanese friends thought was very interesting and they appreciated the effort and the sentiment involved there. Yes, they're like the ones that Mary had out there. It shows they're very a neat looking item. And maybe, I don't know, is there a place, we had talked about maybe the John Micro Polar Center trying to find something, did anybody approach for the displaying that there and? I think like everything just stopped in its tracks when coal was like just getting started with it. Yeah, I think you're right. So I think, yeah, we're kind of still at, other than he's got 500 of them now. So there's good supply, but beyond that, I think we're kind of at the bottom level of figuring the rest of it out. Another thing that Richard is that we're talking about fundraisers and brought up the John Micro Polar Center. Is there any news from anybody about if they're doing concerts this year that we can maybe try to raise some extra dollars there if people are willing to work, if it's gonna go on? So I did email my contacts at the Art Center today and they have not made a decision yet. They're anticipating a decision will be made by the end of March. So we'll just wait to hear what they decide to do with the Levitt Amp concerts and we'll certainly, you know, pass the information along to the rest of the committee as we find out from them. I think a lot of our steps on hold as we all know by COVID at least we're trying to get back together here and get things rolling again. The next, we kind of went over the Slinger Fast Crack in the fundraising talking and we're, I guess, moving on to promoting other Shibuygan international relationships. Is that also going to be with besides Tsumbe or I'm not sure what the, this is about zero? That's the one that Rich has reached out to other entities in the city of Shibuygan that have their own international relationships. So we had the information in the photo from, it's like Guatemala, I believe, a couple months ago. So I think we're still kind of open to ideas for anyone that has interesting stories to feature. I mean, it can be like a paragraph in a picture sort of thing, just trying to continually educate people about international relationships that Shibuygan has with the rest of the world. So it's open for anyone's ideas. Any discussion with anybody on that? Have we heard anything else? Are you done? Should we move on then? I guess to Tsumbame, sister city relationships. Yeah, I had a chance to talk to Father William Bolson, the new pastor at Grace Episcopal Church. And before I met with him, I went online and looked at his resume. And he spent seven years in Japan before coming to Shibuygan. And when we met, I had a chance to talk to him a little bit about that and mention our, our Tsubami sister city that we're trying, the relationship we're trying to revitalize. And he said that he knew some of the clergy up in that area and that he would try to reach out to them and see if we could maybe, you know, get something going through that contact. But he speaks Japanese fluently. He's, he also speaks Hmong fluently and is noted for some of his translations of Hmong into English. And so this is a new contact and we'll see where this takes us. Any other discussion on this? Mayor Mike, would you be willing to forward me his information so I could speak with him? I have not been able to find a single person who can speak any Japanese in this area. That would be really excellent for me. Sure, be happy to, Cole. Thank you very much. So, so far we received a response for them from them. That's great. If we continue to send a response back, we will continue doing this for the next 100 years before we get anywhere. What we need to do is come up with a very clear request of what we would like to, what type of a program or what type of a interaction we'd like to have with them and politely request that we work towards that. Otherwise, they will just send, they'll give us a very polite response and that will be it. So whoever, I'm not really sure what some of the initial programs or exchanges we would like to start, but once we've come up with a request, I don't know if it'd be student exchange or virtual, like a virtual language exchange or something like that between schools. And we can get that line of communication open and try to get something started. We've made a lot of progress. Beyond that, somebody is gonna have to go there, which I'm more than happy to do. I have multiple contacts who will help me with translation. Whoever does, we're gonna have to have a face to face and go and meet them and bow and shake somebody's hand and show our earnestness. Or my, excuse me for being frank, but this will never go anywhere besides ping-ponging emails like we've been doing over the last few years. Thanks for that practical approach, and I appreciate that. Alderman. Ackley. So I just wanted to let you guys know that my father is a consultant and he's a native of Japan. And he has several contacts with the Subame government areas. And he told me that if we're having problems getting this off the ground and getting to know people, he would be happy to introduce me to some of those folks so that we can have an open dialogue and we can get this moving so we can develop a better conversation with Subame because I think part of the issue is that nobody really has contacts. So I do have those government contacts. If you want me to just approach them and let them know that the city would like to get something going, I'm happy to do that. That's up to you guys. I just wanted to let you know. I think that's great, Betty, but I think Cole's suggestion of trying to talk about something that we want to do related to that exchange would be a good thing to keep the conversation going rather than just more of a general approach. So we'll have to maybe look at some of the things we did in the past and pick something that we want to propose to them. So when I was, actually when I just graduated from North in 2005, I was one of the students on the delegation to Obama in the summer of 2005. And I thought that was a terrific program. So I mean, if we're looking at just as one anecdotal example, that was a really good program where we had, I think it was mostly if not all high school students, we had a group of it was less than 10, maybe maybe six or seven or eight or something of us who went there. And there were maybe three adults, adults kind of shepherding the student group. But it was a really terrific experience. It was, I think two weeks. And there were a lot of different kinds of festivals. There are kind of events that we went to that was somewhere more formal, some were less formal. And there was some time in Tokyo as well to kind of explore that area. But overall, I mean, I just found it a really excellent, enter excellent program. And as a former participant of that at kind of a formulative time in my kind of becoming an adult, I would definitely recommend something like that again if we're looking at options for rekindling something that we've done in the past. But it took, I mean, it was probably a whole year of planning that were a mostly fundraising kind of planning as well as logistics that went into that trip. So given that we're, I would say on the eager side of wanting to rekindle that relationship a little bit more sooner rather than later. And we don't know what the timing will be for international travel writ large given the state of the pandemic and how quickly that's changing. I would recommend that we try something virtual for them with them and see if we can have some sort of virtual meeting with some combination of folks in Shibuygan and in Tsubame. And maybe the goal is to have a virtual meeting to decide what we'd like to do, but, you know, or establish a relationship of, you know, I don't know, five or six people, like a small-ish group who then can take that forward and have maybe more regular virtual meetings with them to talk about the kinds of programs that might make sense. Like if they, and I guess using also the symphony in Esslingen and Shibuygan as an example of, you know, we have a lot to learn about what would make sense for what they're doing in Tsubame and what their population is interested in and that sort of thing. So that's what I would recommend. It would be using Betty's, Alderman Ackley's contacts to move towards figuring out some group of people to talk with Tsubame folks to figure out what kinds of program to meet virtually and figure out what kinds of, and explore, I guess, brainstorm together sort of what types of programming might make sense. But, Cole, you might have some recommendations culturally for what, or Alderman Ackley as well for if that might make sense, you know, from the cultural perspective or not. Well, I think we have the beginning of a subcommittee here with Betty, Alexandria and Cole. You know, it'd be great if you could maybe meet separately and maybe develop some of those ideas to bring back to the whole group. I'd be happy to participate too. That sounds great. Sounds like we've got a subcommittee started. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Ah, is there any other discussion for this evening that we've talked about that anybody would like to bring up and rehash or shall we make a motion to close the meeting? Just close the meeting. Motion to adjourn by Nairing and second. Second. Who is that? This is Yolanda. Yolanda. Yolanda, okay. Any objections? No, you just have to ask for a vote. Let's have a vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any nays? All right. Thank you for putting up with me this evening. Our first time up here. And our next meeting is April 1st. Good night, everybody. Good night. Thanks for attending live and online.