[C-U Smokefree] News from meeting last night

[Scott P Hays]

We had a good and well-attended meeting last night.  There are a few things I'd like to mention to the full list.

First, we scheduled the next meeting for Tuesday, August 17 at 7pm. We hope you can make it!

Before that, we will be staffing our tent at the Farmer's Market in Urbana on August 14th from 7am til noon (that's a Saturday).  We need someone with a van or truck to get there for setup at 7.  Any volunteers?  I'll post more details on signing up soon.

We're also signed up for the Sweetcorn Fest in August and we'll need volunteers to staff the tent there as well.  As several volunteers testified last night, staffing the tent can be a wonderful experience as our citizens stop by to thank and praise our work.  It's really uplifting (fiesty opponents aside)!  Ask anyone who's done it.

Also, we tentatively agreed that "Great American SmokeOut Week" might be a good week to target introducing our ordinance, IF all of our ducks are in a row.  We're hoping to plan a "roll-out" event of our several thousand supporters signatures (we already have over 2,000) on our courthouse steps on the day we introduce this.  Also, this will be coordinated with a week of smokefree activities (including a smokefree bar night at Legends) hosted by Colleges Against Cancer with a grant they received from "Live Free Tobacco Free" at Southern Illinois University.  That's Monday November 15th in Urbana, and November 16th in Champaign.  Again - this is ONLY assuming all goes well and we have our votes.  We need 4 in Urbana and 5 in Champaign.  Right now, the count is 2 supporters in each city, and we haven't really done much to convince any of them - YET.

On that note, we'll be getting our information packets in the hands of both councils ASAP and scheduling initial visits with them as soon as we can.  We'll need volunteers for that as well.

Finally, we got some airtime on Ch. 3 news at 10 last night - I got in a sound bite or two, they were sure to run the one where I said we were thinking about going to council in October or November. We'll need a lot of work to pull this one off, but we've got a good organizing with several thousand people behind us already.

Wish ourselves luck!

C-U Smokefree!

Prez Scott