X-Message-Number: 1634 Date: 17 Jan 93 22:33:07 EST From: Charles Platt <> Subject: CRYONICS New York meeting, 1-17-93 To: Cryonet The monthly business meeting of the New York Chapter of the Alcor Foundation was held at 2 PM on January 17 1883. The following text is a brief personal summary and should not be considered official minutes of the meeting. Brenda Peters and Courtney Smith announced that because of their relocation in Chicago, it is no longer practical for them to do as much in the New York area as before. Brenda proposed that I should replace her as President of the New York Chapter. No one else wanted to be nominated, so I was elected by general acclaim, or by default, depending on your point of view. Courtney became the new Vice-President in a similar fashion. (Michael Paulle, the previous VP, was unable to continue in this position since we now have a rule that any officer of Alcor New York must also be a suspension member of Alcor; and Michael resigned his suspension membership last year.) Kevin Brown and Janet Pinkney were reelected as Treasurer and Secretary, respectively. We then discussed our general goals and the possibilities for achieving them. We agreed that our first goal is to improve our local capabilities for stabilizing a patient in an emergency. We need a van and would like some additional supplies. We also want to train an additional member for the stabilization team. This means (as always) we need more money and more members. We drew up a list of fund-raising and outreach possibilities. We plan in future to offer a series of seminars on cryonics and life extension, through The Learning Annex, a local organization that advertises adult-education classes and other activities. Each seminar will be on the same day of the month as our regular meeting, will be held at the same location, and will involve a slide show, using slides that Alvin Steinberg has spent a lot of time and effort gathering, with the help of other cryonicists. If a different person runs the seminar each time, this will give us all practice and experience in making presentations, and will prepare us for the next phase, which is to do an outreach to medical students. In addition, in collaboration with a couple of our members, I am planning a course in life extension and cryonics at The New School, a well-known New York college that specializes in adult education. Other outreach proposals include sending out letters to names of rich and/or famous people culled from Who's Who in America (a technique used by Robert Ettinger thirty years ago), handing out leaflets at street fairs in the summer, and setting up a table at futurist and science-fiction events. Also we hope we will be able to get names and addresses of people in our area who have entered the Omni contest, so we can contact them direct. The level of enthusiasm at the meeting was high, and I believe that at least some of these plans will be put into practice. Obviously I cannot hope to be as effective as Brenda, my much-admired predecessor. But I do hope to expand the membership and activities of the New York group during 1993. I also want everyone who attends our meetings to become more involved, even if it means they can only donate an hour of time per week. Meetings themselves do not accomplish anything. Personal action is needed. --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1634