Thank you to the board members who attended the joint meeting with Minneapolis in February. There were 5 of us who made the trip "across the river", along with one prospective member.

Speaker for March

Our speaker for our March meeting is Dr. Florence Monsour Stewart, professor of teacher education at River Falls--University of Wisconsin.  Her topic is service education. This will be another good opportunity to bring prospects to our meeting. Be sure to call Dorothy if you are bringing guests.

Service Applications

Judy says that she has received only one application and since the committee is not meeting to review proposals until early April, if you have other groups that should be submitting a proposal, please encourage them to do so as soon as possible.

Board Meeting:

We had a board meeting last week to talk about board officers and next year. Connie has determined that her schedule will not allow her to take on the responsibilities of President next year so we are looking for a President. We have a possible candidate, but have not confirmed that yet. Jennifer has agreed to stand for the President-Elect position, but she’s fairly certain that she will be moving within the next year so she probably will not become President.

We also would like to discuss the possibility of moving our meetings to lunch time instead of in the evening either on a regular basis, or on an alternating schedule of evening and lunch meetings. We are going to propose that we reschedule our April meeting to lunch time. At that meeting we want to talk specifically about officers and the possibility of moving our meeting times to see if that will help us bring in more members.

April Meeting

We are going to propose that we move the April 27^th meeting to lunch. By the time we meet next week, we will have a location selected. At that meeting we will talk about officers, our meeting time and location, prospective service projects. This is probably not a good meeting for prospective members to attend.

Linder’s Gift Certificates

We would like to sell Linder’s Garden Center gift certificates again this year to build our convention travel fund. Would someone be willing to chair this project?

Area Meeting

The Area Meeting is scheduled for April 23 and 24 in Mankato. Enclosed with this newsletter is the registration information.

The meeting was called to order at 7:00 p.m. The brag bag and tambourine were passed around.

Minutes from the December meeting were approved with changes made to clarify District Conference, Area Meeting and International Convention.

Marj let us know how Kathy and Mary Pulse are doing. And, she distributed a number of letters she received over the holidays from former Zonta members.

Usher reviewed the income and expenses report, noting that our International Fund is not sufficient to cover the costs of travel for our delegate to Convention.

International Convention Delegate

It was VOTED: to select Romelle Vanek Helfmann as our delegate to Convention.

By consensus we agreed that we were interested in hosting the Global Event in 2004 in conjunction with a performance at the Great American History Theater again. Usher will relay this information to Romelle who will be in contact with the History Theater. Usher also noted that the building across the street and connected by skyway to the History Theater has a large lobby space which may be suitable for the dinner and auction.

Usher reminded the members that it will soon be time to set up a nominating committee for the selection of officers. She will not be continuing as President for another year, so we will need to find someone to serve as President Elect. We will also need to find someone to do the newsletter and to chair Membership. The Board will be discussing these issues at their next meeting.

Our speaker was Kia Moua from Neighborhood House.

Meeting adjourned at 8:00PM

Respectfully submitted,

Joann Usher

Secretary Protem