NorthEast Suburban Chapter February Report

February brought some cold to the weather and some warmth to our meetings. In Washington County two of our MICAH congregations shared the Overnight Emergency Warming Shelter responsibilities – in January it was St. Andrew’s and their Community Resource Center in Mahtomedi and in February it was Trinity Lutheran in Stillwater. This was new work for Trinity, and both sites ran a daytime warming space as well as opening for the coldest nights. Trinity opened for three days in February, and had 10 guests. We look forward to hearing feedback from both sites on how it went!

Our monthly meeting brought together 15 of our NorthEast leaders to discuss a number of things. We got our Legislative Folders, to be used in this year’s legislative session and whenever we need facts to back up our requests. If you didn’t get a folder, contact John (slade@micah.org) and we will be sure to bring some to our next meetings!

We also discussed the legislative breakfast. We can’t do anything about the weather, which decreased turnout, but we had a few learnings; 1) be more aggressive and early about promoting the event, and 2) be more assertive about getting our legislators to speak to our points. We did have good turnout from the legislators but did not get some of them to commit in real ways to our issues.

Finally, we did an exercise building a strategic plan for the coming years.

We ranked four overall themes (with a number of sub-topics in those themes):

• chapter growth,

• legislative focus,

• leadership training, and

• advocacy campaigns.

Votes are being tallied and will be revealed in our March meeting, which will be on Tuesday March 10th at 8 AM at White Bear Lake City Hall, second floor, Expansion Room.