Dec 2nd, 2024: Board Elections, Picture/Art and Dessert Sharing

Bring a dessert to share and your best native plant photos/art from 2024!

Join us on December 4th at from 7PM to 8:30PM (but we have the room until 9:30, so there’s a bit of extra time) and share your best dessert and your best photos / art featuring California Native Plants!  This is a hybrid meeting (in-person and Zoom).  Note the early start time.

In-Person Address:
Zamperini Field, Floor 1 meeting room
3301 Airport Drive
Torrance CA 90505

Take Zamperini Way from Pacific Coast Highway

Zoom:

https://cnps-org.zoom.us/j/87240812653?pwd=UHBERGxDVFlrNEFyK0JrNVhwMEJydz09

Typically presentations are photos, but songs, poems, and other art are welcome.

Agenda:

• Nomination and election of the SCCNPS Board (contact us by email to self-nominate /ask questions – See below for more about serving on the Board)
• Informal and jovial community judging of best dessert.  Bring your best dessert – bonus for California native plant related desserts.
• Sharing of native plant photos, art, and ephemera

We will bring our garden seed library which we will open to our membership on a donate-what-you-want basis.

More Information About Photo/Art Sharing:

Some people like to present a travelogue of the past year. I like backpacking and hiking photos, but this year I’m hoping to show examples of good garden design with natives. You might remix a photo into another piece of art and talk about your process, sing a song, or read a poem.  Artists often perform their best when they work around constraints, so prepare your art featuring Ca native plants ahead of time and plan for no more than 10 minutes of presentation time and 20 photos or less for best impact.  Questions are encouraged with each presentation, but we do want to get to everyone who has photos to share, so we might limit questions if time is short.

There are only two rules: 1. Must feature California native plants (you are not a native plant), 2. There is a time limit.

Contact SouthCoastCNPS@gmail.com for a link to upload your presentation to a Google share drive or email your presentation or photos.  Photos will display in your preferred order if you name the files alphabetically.  I like file names such as 01MyFirstFile.jpg, 02MySecondFile.jpg…

Alternatively, you may present from your computer, your cloud storage, or your thumb drive.  Those who have uploaded their photos will present first and those who do otherwise will present if time allows.

More About the SCCNPS Board

• To serve on the board: You may self-nominate. We ask that you be a paid ($25 / year is the minimum) CNPS member and plan to make the majority of our Board meetings.  The term of office is two years.
• The Board meeting schedule is usually monthly (we are skipping December this year). When we have a Zoom general meeting (like last Monday) the Board meets via Zoom prior to the meeting for about an hour. Otherwise we usually pick the next Monday. Quarterly we meet for a longer meeting than normal.
• We coordinate by email (I originated 25+ emails in October from one of my accounts) but often they are for information exchange and don’t require action.
• We are mostly amateurs with informally-obtained plant knowledge.  We have a variety of educational backgrounds but everyone is passionate about native plants. There is NO requirement for specialized botany, conservation, or related expertise but we do have some members with those skills.
• Our board appears like it will have more than 10 people on it in 2025-26 – many hands makes light work.
• Board positions are often self-assigned.   If you have an interest or skill that you’d like to exercise, you might get involved more deeply in that area.  At-large Board members have no defined duties (other than participating in Board meetings).