At the January 8, 2007 BICO Meeting, we were please to have in attendance most of the BICO Steering Committee, as well as seve

Dear BICO Steering Committee,

Thank you for responding to our need to conduct a BICO Steering Committee meeting. With almost the entire committee in attendance, we were able to discuss and vote on agenda items with relative ease. Thanks also go out to Bob Burchard for hosting the meeting. I plan to call Steering Committee meetings as the need to have them arises.

Also, I would like to thank you for all your efforts as they are the heart of BICO. Thank you so much for your dedicated commitment to BICO.

Best Regards,
Bob Iacovazzi, Chair

General BICO SC News

OPEN POSITION: We are in need of a BICO Certified Leader to fill the Vice Chair position. The position mainly involves keeping outing statistics, reserving vans, filing quarterly insurance reports, taking bi-monthly meeting minutes, and composing monthly outing summaries from trip reports.

TRACKING VOLUNTEERS: We all recognize the need to have a background check in process on each Volunteer after they participate in their second outing. During the meeting, we established guidelines for tracking this background check process.

After the second outing that a new volunteer participates in, the Team Leader is responsible for sending a link to the necessary paperwork on our web site (http://ico.sierraclub.org/baltimore/resources.html) in an e-mail to the new volunteer. The new volunteer needs a "Volunteer Agreement" and "Leader Application", which probably needs to be renamed as "Volunteer Application" on the site. Please copy Dave Barry, the Leadership Certification/Insurance Coordinator, at manhat@verizon.net when sending this e-mail.

The Vice Chair is to send a list of Volunteer’s names, the number of outings they have been on, and the team that they have been participating with to Dave Barry. This will help Dave keep track of volunteers, and to make sure that no one is skipped in the process.

Team Leaders are responsible for making sure that the names of all new volunteers who attend a given outing are listed in their Outing Report.

Team Leaders are responsible for checking back with Dave Barry regarding the status of the background check.

BICO BYLAWS CHANGES: We made a couple changes to the BICO Bylaws. These changes include:

Allowing day trips to be conducted by one Certified Leader and one background checked Volunteer when a First AID/CPR Certified Agency Representative who can drive the kids is present.
We dropped the requirement that Volunteers have to have a Sierra Club membership, but note that it is still required of Certified Leaders.

I have attached the new Bylaws and a sheet describing the changes in this e-mail. Note that the Agency Representative needs to send in a copy of their First Aid/CPR Certification to Dave Barry, the Leadership Certification/Insurance Coordinator, at manhat@verizon.net, before this #1 requirement can be implemented on an outing. Dave Barry will inform the Chair once each Agency Representative has sent in a copy of their First Aid/CPR certification (if they are not a Certified Leader of BICO already). At the present time, this would apply to the College Gardens and Franciscan Youth Center Teams, since Brian Green and Nicole Veltre-Luton are already BICO Certified Leaders.

CARP TRAINING: You all have gotten an e-mail from Gwen Bergen, Leadership Development Coordinator, regarding the new CARP Training, which has to be completed once per year. Please get your self-assessments into her as soon as possible. Also, we plan to talk about the CARP Training module at the next General Meeting on March 5.

NEW VOLUNTEER RECRUITMENT: Although our number of outings and kids served this year was up about 10%, our number of logged volunteers hours is at an all-time low. We need new volunteers, and especially ones that want to participate over a long-term basis. We all agreed that this is an important issue to be tackled by our teams. Here are some ideas that were discussed:

Create an ad for Dave Steiner radio show
Submit ads to the Volunteer sections of REI, EMS, CBF, or similar web sites. Also, submit ads to all outdoors-related clubs in the area (PATC, Capital Hiking Society, Sierra Club, etc.).
Inform the Superintendent of Baltimore City Schools know about our program
Enlist help from companies that encourage volunteerism amongst their employees

This is a work in process, and please if you have any suggestions, Angela Buffington, Recruitment/Publicity Coordinator, and I would love to hear your ideas.

GIFTS: As we have a $400 donation from an anonymous donor, we would like to make use of it this year. There were several suggestions, but the ones that seemed to make most sense to the group is to have BICO buy an item, such as a T-shirt, in bulk, and then share the items equally amongst the four teams. Nicole offered to have DHHS kids design a T-shirt that the Steering Committee can approve. We did not come to a consensus during the meeting, but this seemed to be a good idea. I did check with National, and we can use the Sierra Club logo, as long as it is used to their specifications, which is found on the Sierra Club web site. Further details will follow.

CHECK FIRST AID KITS: It is a New Year. Teams, please check your first aid kits for missing and expired supplies.