Meeting Minutes

January 14, 2003

Location: Office of Surface Mining, DOI, 1999 Broadway, Denver, CO

There are several challenges facing AIPC regarding its officers. Jan Jacobs, the newly elected AIPC secretary, will be resigning because her job is being eliminated. Members have been told unofficially that Robert Moore is also resigning. That means that Helen Littlejohn will take over the responsibilities of the Chair and the AIPC needs to elect a new co-chair and a new Secretary at the next meeting.

Action: Please send your nominations for co-chair and secretary to Helen Littlejohn before March 1 so that we can put together a list of candidates prior to the next meeting of the AIPC. Helen can be reached at Helen.littlejohn@ed.gov

The next regular meeting of the AIPC is scheduled for April 1. Lorenzo Cervantes, BLM, has agreed to host the meeting at Building 50 at the Denver Federal Center (Use gate 1 @ 6th and Kipling). We will send out an announcement and map prior to the next meeting. Since we are electing two new officers at that meeting, please plan on attending.

Action Items: Ask Georgia Madrid to send out reminders. Lorenzo Cervantes will send a map to Lori Windle to put on the website.

170 people registered out of 223 people who attended (includes speakers and workshop leaders). The evaluations were overwhelmingly positive. Lori Windle has videotapes of the conference; please contact her if you would like to see them. Helen Littlejohn collated all the responses to the conference (attached). Some suggestions for the next training: needed a map to help people locate the hotel, sound integrity was not sufficient for all the speakers, more handouts would be appreciated, need to establish a "vegetarian" option for lunch (even tho no one asked for it in the registration). Speakers were all rated well, and the presentations were excellent. Jane Wilson will check with DFEB CJ Beaseley regarding the financial close-out, and will check on payment to Ben Sherman and others.

It was suggested that we send a thank you gift and/or a letter of appreciation to Larry Grandison with a cc to Mike Hosckello at WAPA (Chairman of DFEB).

Action Item: Need to finalize "lessons learned" by reviewing the final budget/costs of the training (Jane will get from DFEB). Pictures taken at the conference were unusable (digital technology)?consider getting several cameras at next conference to ensure redundancy. Georgia provided a very effective format for the committees which really helped in conference planning (thanks, Georgia). Each committee chair is requested to develop a lessons learned paragraph and send to Jane Wilson at JWilson@osophs.dhhs.gov

The group started planning for coverage at the pow wow. Jane Wilson agreed to check with DFEB regarding our payment for and reservation of a booth. It appears that we did not reserve or pay for a booth for the March pow wow. Vi Rogers confirmed with the pow wow committee that our name does not appear on the booth reservations, and that we cannot get a booth at this time.

Some of the discussion at the meeting focused on reviewing and updating the book that we used last year at the booth, printing an updated AIPC brochure for the booth, getting the SAIGE logo ready for the pow wow, sign-up sheets for coverage, designating someone to set up the booth, trading off passes for the pow wow, and developing a sheet with job websites for the table. Need information on Quikhire procedures.

Action Items: Although we will not have a table in 2003, we need to ensure that our reservations are made next year. We need to assign someone @ the April meeting to clarify where the announcement for the booth is sent. We need to take the suggestions at this meeting into the planning process for next year.

There was a lively discussion about needing to re-focus our activities onto our mission statement. Do we need to re-focus on the recruitment and retention of American Indians? Are we getting too far afield from our original intent to increase the number of American Indians in Federal Government Service? There is a sense that we have not seen a return on our information effort? Is this true? Can this committee develop a persistent strategy to address the things we really want to do? Recruitment and retention, government to government relationships, information to all levels of federal staff.

The Native American Science Bowl will be held in Colorado Springs on February 15. They are looking for professionals to be judges and for general volunteers to serve as score keepers, timers and runners. If interested, contact Clint LeBeau @ 303-221-7410

The AIPC had agreed to coordinate with the FAA Diversity Conference to be held at the Holiday Inn Downtown in May, 2003. The conference is scheduled for 5 days, and the FAA would be willing to make space for our issues on 2-3 days. We need to develop a subcommittee to work with FAA. Lori Windle, Jane Wilson, Dale, Vi, Grace Sage, Helen Littlejohn and Chuck agreed to work together with FAA.