The Business of the Council
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Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council
Digital Annual Meeting for Members
Monday, June 8, 2020
Scroll down for directions for Zoom meeting
5:30 pm start time (join any time after 5:15 pm)
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2020 Annual Meeting Agenda
Very brief report on our past year
Secretary’s & treasurer’s reports
Election to the Board of Directors
(scroll down for candidate biographies)
A historical minute featuring June in women’s history
Very brief look ahead and Q&A
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Who Can Vote?
Since its founding in 1988, the mission of the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council has been to fill the huge gaps in city histories by ensuring that its women citizens from the past are properly credited for their roles as community builders. We have always recruited everyone in the area to enjoy and learn from our programming, publications, workshops, and online materials—so who is actually a GGRWHC
member
?!
According to our
bylaws
,
anyone who currently supports us financially is a member entitled to vote on Council business. If your
membership/donation
is not up to date, please take care of business now on our website! If you use Stripe there (akin to PayPal), be sure to click on the lock at the end to submit payment. (It’s not necessarily intuitive.)
Or you can contact us if you did not receive our recent letter with mail-in forms: 616- 574-7307 or
info@ggrwhc.org
or GGRWHC, P.O. Box 68874, Grand Rapids MI 49516-8874
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GGRWHC Zooming
5:30 pm meeting start time—but sign in any time after 5:15 pm
If you are an old hand with Zoom, please join the meeting at
Should you be asked, here are the meeting
ID: 981 2354 7872
and p
assword: 011708
If you have never participated in a Zoom meeting, you can 1) join Zoom earlier at
zoom.com
, or you can 2) just click on the link above at 5:15 or a little after and follow directions. You might be asked to download the Zoom application. Before the meeting begins, click on “join audio” and “join video” on the lower left corner of your screen, though you can opt out of either at will. There is also a mute tab. Co-president Sophia Brewer will run the meeting and give a few directions at the beginning.
If you have trouble hearing, you can also join via telephone while remaining on the videoconference. Dial +1 312 626 6799 and follow the prompts (same meeting ID,
981 2354 7872, and password , 011708.
Need help?
Keep this newsletter open on your computer for reference or contact us for help. Near the time of the meeting, the phone would be best, but you can use email, too: 616-574-7307 or
info@ggrwhc.org
. Melissa Fox will be our troubleshooter!
See you tomorrow! If you have questions in the meantime, though let us know~
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Board Nominees for 2020
Before tomorrow’s meeting you might want to review the make-up of the GGRWHC’s
current board of directors
.
If you haven’t already met our three board candidates for 2020, either in person or virtually, please scroll down—then meet them tomorrow on screen. Keep a beverage on hand to toast them as new GGRWHC board members tomorrow!
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Past GGRWHC board president and current webmistress Melissa Fox is a freelance writer and researcher who has published articles in
Michigan History Magazine
and
West Michigan Modern
on topics related to Grand Rapids history, including architecture and design, furniture history, and notable Grand Rapidians. For the broader local history community, she has also coordinated History Detectives, a full day of programming sponsored by a consortium of local history organizations. Besides serving as president of the Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council and managing its communications, she has contributed to a massive GGRWHC project on the Woman’s Committees of the Council of National Defense during WWI. Her program “Riding the Rails on the Children's Special: Weighing and Measuring Babies along Michigan's Interurban Lines” has been presented locally and for the Midwestern History Association in 2018. Recently, she has bolstered GGRWHC centennial work celebrating the 19th Amendment with an overview program on Grand Rapids women's suffrage history and has researched "the commerce of suffrage," including the discovery of a local 1910 Cargill Company postcard collection. Fox worked in libraries for ten years, most recently as a librarian in the History and Special Collections Department at the Grand Rapids Public Library, with whom she will partner for a suffrage readers group this fall.
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West Michigan native Julie Hoogland's three-decade career in journalism took her to California and Vermont before she came home to culminate her work as editor of
MLive
and
The Grand Rapids Press
from 2012 through 2016. As
Press
editor, among her many roles was spearheading attention to women's issues. We first met Julie in 2014 when she oversaw coverage of our centennial program on the 1914 take-over of the
Grand Rapids Press
. “Oversaw” is right! She switched out the 2014 masthead for the 1914, a first in the newspaper world as far as we know! And that was just the start—the very next year she championed the cause of honoring Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering with more front-page news about women—and an editorial calling for their inclusion in the Community Legends project! During the 1930s, Kendrick and Eldering, with laboratory assistant Loney Clinton Gordon, had developed the first successful vaccine for whooping cough in Grand Rapids. When in 2019 Julie’s editorial support had resulted in the unveiling of a Legends statue of the three women, Julie was again instrumental by leading GGRWHC efforts to shed new light on their work, winkling out a broader race history in their lab, and tracking down surviving relatives so they could attend the ceremony.
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A colleague and very close friend of the GGRWHC’s Mary Seeger, Kathleen VanderVeen joined Grand Valley State University in 1991 and is currently an associate vice president in the Division of Inclusion and Equity. Not only does Kathleen oversee compliance issues as a university officer for the Americans with Disabilities Act, she has already helped us to see how we need to make a few changes ourselves! Also an adjunct faculty member in the School of Communications, VanderVeen holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from WMU and a master’s degree in College Student Affairs Leadership from GVSU. We met Kathleen first when, as a representative of GVSU’s Women’s Resource Center during the 1990s, she coordinated
university programming with GGRWHC’s splashy, community-wide Women’s History Month programs called Legacy. (This was such a big effort that Legacy occurred only every three years.) Recently, Kathleen served for over ten years on the board of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Kent County.
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GGRWHC’s program year honoring the 19th Amendment centennial has been interrupted by the coronavirus outbreak. We regret especially the loss of the August 26th celebration, but please stay tuned. And, for now, please stay home and stay safe. Celebrate with the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council virtually and in print!
Watch for Women’s History Wednesdays via this electronic newsletter, follow us on Facebook, watch for our monthly features in
Women’s Lifestyle Magazine
, and
click here
to receive our hard-copy newsletter and become a supporting member of GGRWHC!
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Stay home and stay safe--but celebrate with us virtually and in print!
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Hats off to the historical women who have shaped West Michigan!
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Please take a moment to forward this message to others you know who may be interested in women's history. If you've received this message as a forward, consider
joining our mailing list
in order to receive future updates about programming.
Thank you for your interest in preserving and celebrating the history of the many phenomenal women who've helped to shape West Michigan! If you aren't already a supporter of the Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council,
consider investing in our work as a volunteer or with an annual donation
. Visit our
website
for more information and the ability to
donate online.
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