World Carfree Network

Present: Everybody except Randy

Announcements

We received the EYF/Council of Europe core grant of 6,800 Euros and we received around 31,000 Euros from European Commission Youth Programme...so we are eating expensive cake!
We need to finalize the magazine budget before Tabor - in two weeks on wednesday April 26 and in the meantime Radka, Steven and others will work it out
Monday is a holiday
Kamila and Roeland will be away on Friday
Jiao will be away from May 2 to May 16
Anna will be away April 24 and 25
On April 7, Steve was in Bern, Switzerland, CAS (carfree switzerland) had a press conference and Steve gave speech about WCN and what it does, and there was some press response, but not as much as CAS hoped
Bike activist, Joel Pomerantz from San Francisco is in Prague and he would like to come to the office
Arie sent a letter of inquiry to the Rockefeller's Fund
"X minus Y" asked us if we would post funding possibilities from them at the Tabor site
We will pay all of the expenses for Kamila's journey to pick up the copier

Agenda
1. WCN Flyer
2. WCN Europe
3. DG Environment NGO twinning grant
4. Tabor meeting\\ 5. Biketour
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1. WCN Flyer

2. WCN Europe

We are one-step closer to applying for DG Environment Grant and becoming WCN Europe: we have a personal contact at DG Environment
We need to soon register WCN Europe
Randy is working on finding founding member orgs with audits
Kamila is looking into being registered as an "association of organisations" rather than association of citizens (we could be the former if we have a few citizens as members, such as the ICC office members)
The next step: Make new statutes and have a European steering committee (we currently have four European residents on our international steering committee)
How do we get the statutes approved? Arie will make statutes as close to how WCN works and bring it to the meeting next week and then will give it to the european steering committee
In Tabor, all of this could be approved (it is better that we get this done as soon as possible)
One final note: we have to alert all of our funders about our change in status

3. DG Environment NGO twinning/mentoring grant

We would like to apply for a project grant
There are two categories we could fit into: Europe-wide climate change public information campaigns, which is very difficult for us to get
The second category is mentoring with another country in Europe (non-EU member)
Gabrielle Herman of ITDP Europe proposes that her org and WCN partner with Yugo-cycling campaign in Serbia and possibly a group in Turkey, such as the student group hosting the conference or another group
if it does not work out with Turkey, we could mentor one of our Serbian or Croatian member groups, or carfree Russia
these groups have yet to be contacted as this is just a proposal
The grant would get these orgs a full time staff person (Yugo is run only by volunteers)
ITDP and WCN would have a half-time person who would go there and help them how to write grant applications, do campaigns, make a magazine etc. (this is the mentoring aspect)
We all agreet that this should be followed up on

4. Tabor meeting

5. Biketour

There are Polish and Hungarian routes
wiki pages of the tour are working and most of the things are on-line
we need places to sleep along the route, particularly in Poland where it will be for 3 weeks
A Slovakian expert will help with sleeping places, actions and route in Slovakia
Everything is good in Lithuania
participant recruitment from grant countries: Roeland has written organisations in these countries to give us a list of possible participants
Georgians have almost completed the list

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