- Thank you, everybody who contributed. I think we'll call it a robust Happy Dollars week. A lot of good
- news floating around. I think we all could use a fair amount of good news. And with that, Jeff McKim
- will introduce this week's speaker. Thank you very much. Do you hear me? All right. Dave Askin. So Dave
- Askin grew up in Columbus, Indiana.
- and has lived in many places, including Bloomington in the late 1980s before returning at the end of
- 2018. In July of 2019, he launched the B Square Bulletin, a one-man online-only news outlet focused
- on local government. Since then, he's kept a particularly close and careful watch on city and county
- government, providing detailed, consistent, and fact-driven reporting that many in our club rely on
- to understand what's actually happening at City Hall.
- Dave brings to bear his journalistic experience running a similar operation with his wife in Ann Arbor,
- and after that, working for Daily Newspapers in South Dakota. He's now working to generate enough recurring
- revenue to staff the operation with a full newsroom with the goal of allowing the B Square to serve
- as a comprehensive local paper for Bloomington, even if it is distributed only in digital form. In addition
- to his serious reporting, Dave is also
- responsible for the absolute worst Bloomington related puns, which appear in his Sunday funnies, a recurring
- dialogue between the fish on the roof of the courthouse and a hawk that occasionally lands on the fish.
- You've been warned. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dave for the local paper. Every place is somebody's
- backyard. Okay.
- Dave, before we get started, you'll just have to ask state advanced slide or next slide as we go through.
- Right. All right. Okay. So the slides will show up and replace my face, I hope, right? There will be
- a tiny you. Okay. As long as there's a tiny you. Well, while we wait for the slide to show up, I just
- want to mention that I did see Council Member Sims
- Just before it was declared that there were no more hands, I saw his screen with his hand raised. So
- I hope that we can come back to him at some point. I will try to leave enough time for my talk, for
- whatever he wanted to say. If not, I will just say that I kept the advice of Council Member
- Simms' grandmother in mind when I was preparing this. And that is, if you've ever heard Council Member
- Simms' talk,
- about his grandmother, you know what the reference is. She said, God gave us two ears and one mouth
- for a reason. So I'm hoping to leave twice as much time for comments as I have left to give myself a
- chance to talk. So with that, let's get started. Actually, could we go back to the title slide?
- All right, so the title of this I'll just read it the local paper every place is somebody's backyard.
- That's a kind of a highfalutin title And I want to lower expectations right now The talk is not going
- to live up to that title but it does mention backyards and how they fit into local journalism as I conceive
- it and especially into the idea of what I call total news I'm gonna end this
- talk with a request for some help. That is not about donating money, although that's always welcome,
- too. The request that I'm going to make comes in connection with the Be There section of the B-Square
- Bulletin website. And that is a very intentional rhyme, Be There or B-Square. I hope that you enjoy
- it just as much as I do. OK, next slide. That is the B-Square Bulletin logo. It was designed by Joe
- Myers and Kathy Groxson,
- Meyers Croxton group and it is beautiful. I wanted you to stare at it for at least a couple of seconds
- next slide Here's today's agenda I'm going to briefly contrast the b-square then when it first launched
- and the b-square now talk about how my work in journalism literally began in my own backyard and then
- I'm going to shift to talk about Bloomington backyards and before
- I tell you about how Backyards and the Be There section of the website fit into Total News. I need to
- introduce the idea of Total News, so I'll talk a bit about that. But then I'll end up with the Be There
- section of the B-Square website. So here we go. Buckle up. Next slide. So the B-Square Bulletin began
- as a local news outlet with a singular narrow focus, and that was to give
- Bloomington residents an easy on-ramp to understanding the workings of local government. Next slide.
- So after shutting down late in 2024 and relaunching early 2025, the mission expanded to include not
- just local government, but all aspects of the place that we call Bloomington with a mission of helping
- people who live here
- get the information they need to help Bloomington's community, not just government, but the whole community
- thrive. Next slide. All right. I'm not sure why that slide is there, but we need to go to the next one.
- I want to talk about how my work in journalism began. It began during the golden era of blogging, which
- ran from something like 2003 to 2010.
- The blog that I created was called Teeter Talk. I built a teeter totter in my backyard with my bare
- hands, and I invited people over to my backyard to be interviewed while writing the teeter totter.
- Next slide. Those are two examples of what blog entries looked like. There was also a whole transcript.
- So each entry of the blog was the transcript of the conversation plus a portrait
- of the person who was riding the teeter totter with me from my vantage point on my end of the teeter
- totter. So the very first person who agreed to do this was Renee Gref. She was the owner of the Ann
- Arbor Brewing Company. And at the time she was a board member of something called the Ann Arbor Downtown
- Development Authority. It's rough analog here in Bloomington is the Redevelopment Commission. And that
- was over 20 years ago. It became
- thing that people were willing to do. Even the mayor of Ann Arbor at the time, John Hefja, agreed to
- do it. Next slide. Let's see. I have lost my place. That's okay. I made these slides so I know what
- they are. So the project
- I would say it kind of took off. This slide is filled with thumbnails of, I think, most of the guests
- who agreed to be interviewed on the teeter totter. That's a lot of them. I would note that there were
- no reportable injuries ever for those interviews. Next slide. I went as far as to install one of those
- park signs because they have the teeter totter guys on them. That's outside my house in Ann Arbor. That's
- from a recent Google
- Street View. So it's still there. It turns out you don't have to prove that you're with the government
- in order to buy one of those signs. Next slide. So not everybody wanted to come to my backyard because
- when you think about it, that's a little bit creepy to invite somebody over to your backyard yard to
- write a teeter totter and be interviewed. So I built a mobile version of the teeter totter and carted
- it around on my bicycle
- to various locations. And one year, the year was 2008, I entered it in the Fourth of July parade for
- the city of Ann Arbor. And the title of that entry was The Totters of the American Revolution. Jeff
- McKim warned you. Next slide. Okay. All right. So that was a bit about my
- Literal Ann Arbor backyard. Let's talk about my Bloomington backyard next slide Okay now before Well,
- I want to say this now don't advance to the next slide until I tell you you've been doing Has been doing
- has been doing a fantastic job, but for this one is particularly important So I want to talk about the
- red dots for a second. Each red dot is a place in America I have lived and I offer this simply to provide
- some credentials for my
- perspective on commenting on Bloomington. It's not like Bloomington is the only place I ever lived.
- So I've lived in other places and each red dot is one of those places I've lived for a significant period
- of time. In the state of Indiana, you see there's Bloomington on the left and then the one on the right,
- that's Columbus, Indiana. And I really appreciate Phil Amerson talking or he mentioned the fact that
- I share the same hometown as one of the churches where Joe G. Emerson was pastor. He was pastor of my
- childhood church. I grew up in the First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Pastor Emerson
- was my pastor. And when I bumped into him here in Bloomington, I didn't know he had moved to Bloomington
- when I moved to Bloomington. Anyway, I introduced myself and, you know,
- I'm not sure if he really remembered my family, but he said he did. But he did say something that I
- know is true, because he said it was such passion. He said, you know, the thing I liked about that sanctuary
- at First United Methodist in Columbus is that it was a place, it was set up, the physical configuration,
- you could actually preach. And he distinguished actually preaching from just having a conversation like
- some of these modern young ministers do.
- And that squared up exactly with my recollection of Sunday mornings at First United Methodist. He would
- preach. Anyway, so don't go to the next slide yet. Bloomington, of all of these red dots, is the place
- where I feel most seen, most understood, most welcomed of any of these places. And the next slide will
- show you why. So next slide.
- So this is the north-south alley that runs between Kirkwood Avenue and 6th Street, runs right by my
- building. And one morning I woke up and it was freshly paved. That was great. And also there was fresh
- graffiti there on the left of the screen. Dave sucks. And I thought, wow, how did they find out that
- I live here? And you notice that it's in a stencil, which means that
- It's a message that could be replicated and disseminated really efficiently. That was important to the
- graffiti artist. And also, it ensures uniformity of the message. So it never wavered from the same thing.
- Dave sucks. It's something that I think everybody knows. And of course, I felt sort of personally targeted
- by this graffiti because Dave is not that common a name. So I figured it had to be me. And it's why I love
- Bloomington. Next slide. So this is the next series of photographs. These are photographs I took strolling
- through my backyard or what I consider to be my backyard in Bloomington on Sunday. It was a snowy day.
- Next slide. The snow is still falling. There was city plow out. Next slide. That's 14th Street looking
- east. Next slide.
- And then, you know, I was out in the snow taking photographs, mostly with my smartphone. And then I
- noticed when I reached for my smartphone, it was no longer in the breast pocket of my winter coat. It
- has a zipper on it that I was paying extra special close attention to make sure I zipped up every single
- time I put it back in, I guess, except for that last time. Long story short, I trudged from 17th Street
- back home to 6th Street.
- where I fired up my laptop to see if I had actually checked the box on the right thing when I bought
- my new phone to see if it had that locator function. And it did. And then Mary Morgan, my lovely wife,
- agreed to help me go look for it. And we found ourselves in the middle of College Avenue, right by Miller
- Showers Park, trying to listen for the sound of the stupid alarm on the phone. And it was really hard
- because there were cars
- Crunching past on the snow not a lot of traffic out but those who were out it was enough to to to mask
- the sound but we thought we could hear it and You know long story short if we were standing right over
- it and I dug through a couple of inches of packed snow And there it was and it still works. It's a snowstorm
- miracle but the point of this story is that every story about a backyard has a hero next slide and
- The hero of this story is Mary Morgan Mary Morgan is a hero that day and every day and I will fight
- anybody who says different next slide All right to understand Let's see, let's make sure I know exactly
- where I am To understand how backyards and the be there section of the website fit into the idea of
- total news You got to understand what I mean by total news
- It's not necessarily the breadth of topic. It's not that every subject is covered. It includes that,
- yes, but it's more about future, present, and past. So the B-squares mission is to make Bloomington
- a place where it's easy to find out what's going to happen, to find out what just happened, and to find
- out what happened a million years ago. So
- built some digital tools, some standalone tools, in service of this broader total news network. And
- I'm going to tick through some of them right now. So next slide. So one of those tools that serves the
- total news mission, specifically future, is a community calendar. It's built purely out of syndicated
- feeds. It's in rough shape right now. It's not perfect. It's not pretty. But it is what I use to plan every
- working day, and so it does have some functional utility. Next slide. So another digital tool that has
- already been built in service of total news is a website called the bloomingtonchronicle.org. It's a
- collection of timelines of people and topics. This was an example of the Bloomington Convention Center.
- That's what its name is now. Let's remember it used to be the Monroe Convention Center. It's
- A collection of timelines with links to original sources proving that the fact claimed in a particular
- timeline item is actually true. So you can actually verify that, oh, yes, this actually happened. It's
- not just that somebody wrote it down. Next slide. Another digital tool that's already been built in
- the service of total news is it kind of bridges the past and the present.
- It's a website called bloomdocs.org. It's a public document repository. So if a document matters to
- us now, it should be on bloomdocs.org, and it should be easy to find there, and it should be easy to
- find forever, so into the future. So in the future, bloomdocs.org will serve the function of the past
- documentation. Next slide.
- Okay, the present. This is perhaps sort of the most conventional part of what people might think of
- as a news outlet. It's a website where news articles are published. So that's what it is. This is the
- view of the website. I don't know, it was a week ago, two weeks ago. That's what it looks like. Next slide.
- So another tool that I've built in service of the total news mission is the almost daily bulletin newsletter.
- That's an email message that arrives in your inbox every Monday and Thursday if you sign up for it.
- What's in the newsletter? Let's tick through a couple of the standard sections. Next slide. Generally,
- it will start off with a weather forecast straight from the National Weather Service. Next slide.
- Let's see, what is that I'm looking at? Well, if I'm having trouble seeing it, maybe you are too, I
- apologize for that. There's generally a list of headlines with links to recent articles. So you can
- click on the link and read the entire article if you want. If you don't wanna read the entire article
- or if you're rushed for time, there's a synopsis of what's in the article included right there. Next slide.
- There's also quick notes that are things that maybe don't need a full article, or maybe there's just
- not time to write a full article yet, but something that is useful to log in publication somewhere.
- This one is an example. It's a note about the Monroe County budget order, which is of interest to, I
- don't know, probably three people in the county, one of which is Jeff McKim.
- One of them is me, and I don't know who the third person might be. But still important to record for
- the record. Next slide. There is generally an on-the-calendar section. What's coming up, where I plan
- to be, if you're wondering what I'm planning to cover, generally it's reflected in the on-the-calendar
- section of the almost daily bulletin. Next slide.
- The Almost Daily Bulletin includes always a featured animal at the Bloomington City Animal Shelter.
- This is Cornbread. He's a very, very good boy. They're all very, very good boys and girls. You should
- consider adopting one of them if you're looking for a way to add an animal to your household. Next slide.
- And finally, let's see. The last item in the Almost Daily Bulletin is
- generally a photo. It runs under the banner of photo finish. And the images in the photo finish section
- of the Almost Daily Bulletin come from the Be There section of the website. So what is the Be There
- section of the website? Next slide. If you go to the section, right, so that shows you how to get there.
- So if you click on Be There in the top navigation menu, next slide.
- You'll see basically a stack of photos with the captions out to the side. Next slide. Individually,
- here's what they look like. The headlines are all names of intersections or places that if you feed
- it into a geocoding piece of software, it will be able to give you that launch with the idea that in
- the future, these things could be laid out on a map if you wanted. I'm not doing that right now. I'm
- just trying to make the work easier in the future.
- by making the headlines the place. This is a picture of a burned out shed behind the Bunger and Robertson,
- or the former Bunger and Robertson property at 4th and College. Next slide. This is just a photograph
- of an upcoming concert. Is that headline news? Well, no. Still, it serves an equally valid purpose,
- same as the very fancy syndicated feeds community calendar.
- You want to put information in front of people's faces where they're walking around in their own backyards.
- And this was a poster for Vic Luna's. I can't even read that. I think he should choose a different font.
- Latin Jazz Big Band, I think is what it says at the back door. Next slide. This is also good for celebrity
- sightings. So Smith Road and Third Street.
- That's the office lounge. This is a photograph. If you notice, I went and got all fancy and colorized
- him. Hank Ruff is sitting there at the table, and so he's in color. The rest of the people are in black
- and white. I don't know if you know Hank Ruff. He's the son of Andy Ruff, city council member. And there's
- also, there's another gentleman sitting at the table who's enjoyed some success in the music industry as well.
- slide. This one was on Kirkwood Avenue and Grant Street. These are a bunch of college students taking
- shelf selfies with each other. I was told that the guy in the middle of the tall one is really good
- at football. I'm not sure if that's true. But anyway, next slide. This one was taken the day after Perry
- Township trustee Dan Combs died. The B Square published an article
- about his death. And then after that, this scene unfolded outside the trustee's offices. That's something
- that should be recorded somewhere in our community's notebook. That's a memorial to Dan Combs that someone
- made. Next slide. And then this went up after the national championship game victory. Caveat MTOR apparently
- has championship gear.
- That's different than what that storefront normally looks like, and it's not headline news, and the
- function of the local paper is not necessarily to provide free advertising for businesses, but to me,
- that's significant that that happened. It should be recorded somewhere, and so I did. Next slide. So,
- you know, most of these photos that I just showed you are from my own travels through my own Bloomington
- backyard, but I want the geographic coverage
- of this section, the Be There section to expand. And I also want to lighten my own workload. So my request
- to you is this, as you move through your own Bloomington backyard, notice what's new, what's changed,
- what might not necessarily need to be headline news, but should be just written down, recorded somewhere
- in the record of our community, what Bloomington, Indiana was like on this day or during these days,
- send an email to Dave at bsquaredbulletin.com with an attachment of an image. It doesn't even have to
- include an image. Most of them do, but it can just simply be a text description of what's going on,
- what you see, not your opinion about what you see, just a description
- description of this is what I'm seeing. You can also send a text to that number there. That's my cell
- phone number 734-645-2633. And you can file be their items. I will load them up to the website and take
- care of everything like that. Next slide. If you want to sign up for the Almost Daily Bulletin newsletter,
- you can use that QR code. I am really hopeful that works. I believe it does. I've tested it.
- You know, in technology, sometimes the technology ends up getting buried under two inches of snow.
- That is it, I think. Next slide. Questions. I'm ready for questions. I have a question. Yes. Tim Jesson,
- can you hear me? I can hear you. Good. It's a wonderful program and a wonderful way to
- open a discussion on what's something that's slacking in our community right now. I used to write thanks
- to Bob Salzburg, a member of this club for the Herald Times. And then a few years ago, they said they
- didn't want any local news. I think I may have written an article or two for you. It was on the religions
- section. And right now we got plenty of questions
- and stories about the religion section, like the quarterback, Hernando, is a regular participant and
- communicant at the St. Paul's Methodist, not Methodist, St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church. And then the
- church is putting on this wonderful services for the homeless. But how can we get a better, your effort
- is wonderful, outstanding. I'm glad to know about it.
- but how can we get a better communication device that reaches to all the people instead of just a few
- hearing this and few hearing that. And we really need what you're doing and much more to illuminate
- what's going on in our town and our state and our nation as well. Thank you for the presentation. Okay.
- So, I mean, the question I heard in that was how can we
- make news and information available to everybody. I think certainly a big part of the B Square's mission
- is to make sure that all the information is always and forever free and accessible to everyone. So there's
- not a paywall of any kind. People who contribute money to the B Square don't get any more
- News and information than anybody else. So basically people who contribute are Making it possible for
- those who don't contribute to have access to the information So that includes the email newsletter almost
- daily bulletin. There's no cost to Subscribing to that. I mean when you when you do sign up for it,
- it'll give you the option of contributing But if you don't want to contribute you just choose the free
- option and you're good to go but I think that the
- I mean, simply making the information available for free and putting the information in as many places
- as possible so that people can stumble across it. Like, for example, the B Square Bulletin has a Facebook
- page. Every article that gets published gets automatically a link published to the Facebook page, not
- because I'm a fan of Facebook, just because
- A lot of people use Facebook to get their news and information. And so I want to throw the B-squares
- news and information into that pile so that people might stumble across it. I think the harder nut to
- crack and what your question really is asking is how do we make it so that more people in a community
- are relying on the same news source so that they have a uniform
- Experience with their news and information. So the local paper in the past I think it was a touchstone
- for people that That wove this or weaved It tied it tied the the community together because people had
- that common experience. There was that article. Did you see the op-ed? The Herald Times I think it used
- to like most local papers that used to serve that function and I think that increasingly the Herald Times has
- stopped serving that particular function where, well, if you say, did you see the piece in the Times,
- you could rely on most people saying, yes, I did. Or I saw that it was there. I haven't read it yet.
- But nowadays, I'm not so sure that's true. So the answer to your question, I don't know. That's the
- short answer. OK, next up, we have Judy Schroeder.
- Hi there, Dave. Thank you so much for what you are doing for this community. It is just an incredible
- effort. Are there more than one of you? There is just one of me. There are what I've added since relaunching,
- since I actually publicly stated this is the goal and the mission to become the local paper, to cover
- everything that needs to be covered
- in Bloomington, everything that the local paper would cover. I've added some freelancers. Most notably,
- I have a freelancer covering K through 12 material. There's an article published this morning. Kelton
- O'Donnell is his name. And it's useful. Well, you don't have to add that, oh, by the way, he's a senior
- in high school. But, you know,
- I treat him just like any other freelancer. And I don't think he would notice that he is a senior in
- high school, except maybe if you looked at his, there's the photograph that runs by the byline,
- you might say, wow, he looks really young. But you wouldn't know it from reporting he's doing. He started
- working as a freelancer, it was late spring, early summer, kind of, I mean, you might call it an intern,
- but I would just call it more like, I don't know,
- of an apprentice. And then there's a handful of freelance photographers. There were two freelance
- photographers that covered Bloomington North and Bloomington South football. South was Dave Quick and
- North was Amy Mason. So their photographs of those games were nice compliments to the game write-ups
- that a fellow named Sean McEvoy did.
- Met Sean through the media school. They basically put that connection together and I think he was enrolled
- for credit In fact, I know for a fact he was enrolled for credit for one credit as their internship
- But he got paid just like all the other freelancers did so, you know the high school football coverage
- was for this fall and now I
- to some extent, the basketball coverage, is an attempt to demonstrate that the B-square really is not
- just thinking about covering things besides local government, but will actually do that. And we will
- do it at a really high standard. I mean, I would put Sean McEvoy's game write-ups as, I would say, the
- gold standard for what high school sports write-up should be like. I want to also, we Rotarians owe
- you a special thanks
- for your coverage of Amir's, I want to say, capture by the FBI and by ICE. That was the most informative,
- thorough account that I've seen anywhere. How, in heaven's name, what is your business model? How do
- you do this? Well, if I could go back to that article about ICE, it was, and because I am terrible with names,
- It was Liz Vital. Well, yes, Liz was actually a key piece of the puzzle. And actually, let me use this
- as a vignette to illustrate why it's important to literally be there. So it was after a county council
- meeting. I went up and I talked to, it was Councilor Kate Wilts and Liz Vital. And I was talking to
- Kate Wilts, and at that time,
- She had passed along a tip and basically the initial sort of, I don't know, investigation is way too
- strong a word. My initial inquiries, you know, Bloomington police, MCCSC said, no, we have no information
- about anybody on, you know, school grounds. We know nothing. And basically I just wanted to report to
- counselor Wilts that I had done some due diligence and that I had not come up with anything.
- Well, Liz Fiddle was standing right there and she said, oh, but that's not a big nothing burger here.
- Let me give you a contact to, and I'm not coming up with his name. Dave Meyers. Yes, Dave Meyers.
- That was it. Thank you. Let me give you the name of a guy who can confirm all of this. And so she passed
- along that contact.
- If I had not been at the meeting in person, if I had not gone up to talk to Kate Wilts, if Liz Feidl
- had not been standing right there, I mean, this is what a community is made of. And if you just go to,
- I mean, it's not that much effort to show up to the meeting in person so that people see that you're
- there. If they wanna talk to you, they can. I mean, Liz Feidl, she could have kept her mouth shut. She
- didn't have to say anything, but she did.
- and she gave me something I could act on, and that's why that story could be reported. Liz Vital served
- this vital connection to Dave Myers, and that's how it got reported. I'm sorry, you actually had a question
- that I- Business model. Business model. There's two things. One is donations from individuals,
- And the other thing is donations, but from larger corporations. The donations from individuals that's
- been in place since the very beginning, that's an ongoing effort to try to inspire, one, more people
- to read and then more people to recognize that there's a value that they're getting out of it and that
- they can contribute something to it. And then more recently, you know,
- Advertising has always been, for the news industry, foundational for survival. And it's not advertising.
- What we're selling, it's sponsorships. And the folks who've put together the program, they understand
- clearly the difference between advertising and simply a sponsorship. Sponsorship is like, here's the logo.
- We wanna be affiliated with this operation. We want people to know that we're supporting this operation,
- but it's not like if it's a law firm, hey, if you've been injured, you should call us. Whether there's
- this call for action, no, it's just the name of the law firm. So I'm hoping that the corporate sponsorship
- program will be the thing that puts the B Square Bulletin on kind of an institutional foundation
- where, eventually, I would like to turn this thing into a nonprofit that has a board and has, then,
- a life beyond me getting tired and deciding that I just can't do it anymore. So that's in the future.
- To be clear, it is not a nonprofit yet. My initial thought on relaunch was, OK,
- We need to form a nonprofit as soon as possible. And that proved not to be workable just because forming
- a nonprofit is a huge amount of work that I think is vastly underappreciated. So I decided to focus
- instead on let's get revenue to a level where we can get some more people involved, where somebody can
- actually be paid to do the work of putting the nonprofit together and handling all the stuff that I
- absolutely hate to deal with. Like for example,
- I spent five hours. I mean, somebody who knows what they're doing would not have taken five hours, but
- I took five hours to put together the IRS forms that freelancers have to be issued at the end of a year.
- And I hated every second of it. So I'm going to jump in. We're almost at time. We have two hands up.
- We have Jeff Richardson and Joy Harder with their hands up. And then we have Jim
- Sims for Happy Dollars. So with one minute left, Jeff, kick it off. I'm going to let Joy ask questions
- since I spoke earlier, and my question is going to be more involved than a minute answer. Joy, go ahead.
- That's very kind, Jeff, mine is more of a reach out to you Dave number one to say thank you for what
- you do for the community. I'd love to have a cup of coffee with you. I am the relatively newer president
- of limestone post.
- magazine and hearing you speak and knowing that there's many, many missions that we share and seeing
- opportunities for collaboration going forward. If we were in the room together, I would have pinned
- you down, but I'm getting you online. Somehow, I'll put my information in the chat and you can get it.
- Thank you for what you do. Thank you. Go ahead. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'll be as quickly
- as possible.
- I would like to offer $20 because I'm happy. This has to do with my sister's closet. On Martin Luther
- King's birthday celebration day of service, she asked me to speak to her volunteers during their day
- of service there. I tried to highlight how the roadmap of my life has led to where we are today. I'm
- an Eagle Scout. I'm a member of Phi Beta Sigma Second Baptist Church and our own Rotary Club.
- And each and every one of those has a component of service in their mission. So I was very happy. I
- hope I touched some of those volunteers on what it means to serve and then personalize your service.
- And in honor of that, I'd like to offer $20 to the Teacher's Warehouse. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Thanks,
- Dave. All right. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on this
- Sort of impromptu digital only making this thing work Dave. Thank you so much for that presentation
- I know we've we've crossed paths a few times in the past and I think a lot of us in this club have And
- uh, it's kind of hard to see the point Sometimes in this world we occupy but uh, I think dramatically
- more often than not we can we can trust The b-square to to get the point right the first time. So thank
- you for talking to us today. Thank you for what you're doing Uh in honor of your talk today a donation
- will be made this quarter to amethyst house
- I'd also like to thank some of our volunteers today. Tyler Martin Nichols for making a lot of the machinery
- of this work on the fly. Literally could not do it without you. Leslie Kusnow for sort of managing the
- flow of folks in and out and questions and information. Our speaker introduction today from Jeff McKim,
- our reflection from Phil Amerson, a reporter for this meeting, Kyla Cox Deckard.
- I don't think we have a lot of pictures being taken today, but I'd still like to thank Alon for helping
- us sort of navigate the documentation stuff prior to the meeting. Our next regular meeting will be on
- February 3rd in the Georgian Room in the IMU, and Dr. Brad Fulton from the O'Neill School will speak
- to us about observing civic engagement. So sort of a continuation of today's conversation. And last
- but not least, we have the four-way plus one test.
- don't necessarily have to come off mute, but you can if you'd like. So first, is it the truth? Second,
- is it fair to all concerned? Fourth, will it build goodwill and friendships? Fourth, will it be beneficial
- to all concerned? And of course, as always, is it fun? All right. Once again, imagine you have heard
- a bell. That concludes this week's celebration of service. And again, thank you so much, everybody,
- for joining us. And hopefully, we'll see you all in person next week.