Many of you know of the recent dilemma caused by the Red Bank Charter School's delay in responding to our request to have our meetings there for the upcoming year. The Board of the Charter School not only requires an expensive Certificate of Insurance, but this year they want $50 an hour for us to meet there. We've asked that they abandon this new fee, but have waited over five weeks and received no response. They seem to be waiting for their Board meeting in mid-September. We cannot wait that long. We are ready to move forward with our meeting schedule with or without the Charter School as our meeting location.
Obviously, it's difficult to find a comfortable, free location where we can show up with 40+ people on a Sunday morning, make coffee and have a long, un-interrupted philosophical discussion about Humanism. Our options are extremely limited! We have been forced to select an alternate meeting time for our monthly Forum. We hope you can adjust your schedule accordingly.
Once the Charter School gives us an answer we will make our next move. We may go back there, or we may have to seek a new permanent meeting space. Meanwhile, please note all the changes in our schedule (see announcements below). Look at it this way: for now we'll just have to take our show on the road.
ADDITIONALLY, due to popular demand, we have abandoned our monthly Camaraderie dinner in favor of a 2nd monthly Forum. We have simply outgrown this format. Our goal has always been to focus on our discussion rather than the food. This 2nd monthly Forum will be an "Open Topic" Forum, different from our regular "Scheduled Topic Forum." At the
Open Topic Forum we invite attendees to suggest topics of interest to Humanists. Those topics will be put to a vote and we'll have a discussion of the topics one by one, starting with the most popular, and not moving on to the next topic until we decide we're ready. |
