January 2025 Interim Report to Members

 
 

Board Update

Your new board has been “firing on all cylinders” lately! Our meeting notes are published on the website (our meetings are open to all) and we recently came together for a full-day strategic planning session to map out our 2025 plans, identify areas we need more help, identify what’s working, what we need to spend more (or less) time on, and ensure we have leaders covering all of the necessary tasks.

Since October, we have made a number of structural and logistic changes in how UHCA operates to ensure that we are operating as efficiently and cost effectively as possible:

  • Reduced our storage costs by $200/month moving to a donated space (thank you Pemberley Realty!) and cleaned-up old/unused items
  • Cleaned-up multiple paper and electronic records into a membership and donation database so that we can accurately track memberships and ensure that we can communicate more easily
  • In December we began automating membership renewal reminders, starting with the most recently expired memberships. You will see an email from membershiprenewals@uhsd.org and have the option to auto-renew on Zeffy
  • Launched Zeffy, a new payment platform for memberships, donations, and other payments. Zeffy eliminates the 3+% fees that PayPal and Venmo were charging us – and that also allows people to “auto-renew” saving time and costs (saving over $110 in just the last month!)
  • We began to reach out to advertisers who have not received invoices for months to settle outstanding balances, while also reaching out to new businesses to join as members and begin advertising
  • Brought our accounting up-to-date and updated our required state filings that were past due
  • Successfully added board member Bill Ellig to the Uptown Community Planning Group to replace our previous member who held the seat – this seat will be up for election again in March
  • Launched our new on-line Merch Store giving people more choices and eliminating the need to invest in carrying and storing inventory
  • At the same time, we were able to keep producing the paper (at a significantly lower cost), restart monthly update emails, increase our social media activity, improve our blockwalker communications, and ensure that holiday events like Caroling in the Heights, the Holiday Mixer, Lights in the Heights, and Birney Giving Tree all went off without a hitch.

For 2025, with the help of our “energizer bunnies” on the board and our partner organizations, a slew of events are in the planning stages:

  • St. Patrick’s Day Pub Crawl (March 15)
  • UH Bike Tune-Up Clinic (April 19)
  • Party on Park (May 10)
  • Bike Everywhere Day (May 15)
  • UH Community Yard Sale & Recycle Event (June 7)
  • Co-sponsorship of Summer in the Park Concerts (July)
  • Summer Mixer (August 8)
  • Movies in the Park (September 13)
  • Participation in UH Fall Festival (October 18)
  • Trick or Treat on Park (October 25)
  • Participation in Taste of UH/UH Art Walk (November 9)
  • Holiday Mixer (December 4)
  • Caroling in the Heights (December 13)
  • Lights in the Heights & Bike Ride (December 14)

Those special events are on top of our monthly community meetings (see survey http://www.uhsd.org/meetingsurvey), Zone Watch activities, social media, UH News, SDPD Captain’s Advisory Group, and other activities.

There is a lot that still needs to be done, and we’re working together to:

  • Finalizing our financial reports and publishing an annual report, and quarterly financial reports following that. We hope to have those in the coming months.
  • The current board consists of 7 people, and our target is to have 9. We have reached out to UHCDC and asked one of their board members to join our board (and vice versa) to help our organizations work more closely together for the good of UH.
  • We have started the task of reviewing and updating our by-laws. We expect this will take a few months, with a goal of having a proposal available to the membership to review and vote on by fall.
  • We are actively working on filling the important role of Volunteer Coordinator, as we need to make sure that volunteers are onboarded, trained, and feel connected.

We have had a productive several months of work, and the board feels good about what we’ve been able to accomplish with shoring up the foundation of UHCA. We have a lot to do ahead of us, but the outpouring of support from members, volunteers, and the community-at-large has really been an encouragement!

We will, as promised, keep updating our members on progress, accomplishments, needs, and learnings as we go.

UHCA Officers & Board
Marc, Angela, Andy, Deborah, Roxanne, Bill, & Lauren

UHCA CommTeam