Hi Shailja! Thanks for you interest in BwoB. It is very generous to offer so much of your time to us as a volunteer. I am just wondering how remote work could help our small local organization get more lab members or donations of equipment and supplies. These are the two needs we have.

A bit more about us:

Our goal is to keep the lab funded through lab memberships and not fall into a cycle of being mostly a science education program where the income from classes is our major funding source. We run classes and workshops because they bring in folks who can see the lab and hopefully imagine themselves doing a project in it.

We have no paid staff and no capacity to run programming that involves 9-5 weekday mentorship at this time. Booting up a program like this would require a major investment of time and resources and the participation of qualified mentors.

We cannot run programming for anyone under the age of 18 unless I or another fully vetted and qualified person is supervising.

Our space has a maximum capacity of 12 people for hands-on classes, and this is stretching it. For lectures we can hold maybe 25-30 people.

We are less interested in creating online communities- there are plenty of those! Online research collaborations can be facilitated through sites like JOGL(Just One Giant Lab) who have already built out the infrastructure.

Let me know if you have any further thoughts about volunteering.

@Ellen Jorgensen Hi Ellen, it's a pleasure connecting with you! Thank you for providing more information about the current goals and capacity of the organization! Since the primary goal is to gain more lab memberships in order to keep the lab funded, I believe that connecting with individuals from the biotech community in NYC would be a helpful way to welcome new members who're looking to get access to a lab space for individual projects or to simply support the organization's mission. I am hoping to volunteer by networking with biotech professionals (students, professors and independent researchers) and getting the word out to individuals who would be interested in being a part of BwoB as members & donors.

Please let me know if you're open to chatting about the details of how I can contribute to the funding initiatives remotely, and I'm sure that we can come up with a structure! Hoping to speak to you soon!

Please reach out to me directly at [email protected] to continue the conversation

@Ellen Jorgensen I'm interested in listening in on this conversation and in my discussions with Shailja I thought it would be helpful to have these on Loomio so if others wanted to share feedback they could do so. Also I didn't think that the project of creating a strategy to increase membership would be something that would take up all the time she was willing to offer us and perhaps there were needs that she could fulfill with some of her other expertise. Ultimately my hope is that Shailja will propose her role in this thread and anybody working with her can voice their consent on that proposal.

In that case Shailja please post more detailed specific proposals on this s thread for comment and review.

Thank you for your patience, Ellen and Danny, a family bereavement led to a delayed response on my end. Thank you for the clarification, Danny! My goal is to support BwoB's current needs in a structured way and with the time I currently have to devote towards it, I'm hoping that I could help accelerate current processes in addition to proposing new ideas. Here are some ways that Danny and I discussed through which I could potentially contribute after receiving feedback from the members:

• Connecting with student-led biotech committees that are looking to get access to a professional biotech lab environment and gain exposure to the broader biotech community beyond the academic atmosphere. Based on their needs, we can connect with them regarding what BwoB currently has to offer from a learning point of view (classes, workshops, space to execute novel projects). Being a recent university student myself, I can personally vouch for the number of biotech students and clubs looking for an opportunity to connect with organizations like BwoB!

• Find funding opportunities: I understand that the lab requires some amount of funding to sustain, from a rent perspective. Workshops and renting the space out is a great way to give back to the organization; additionally exploring individual and organizations with a passion to fuel biotech initiatives would help enhance the current lab operations whether it's for rent, adding/replacing equipment or expanding the lab's capacity in the future.

• Existing projects: From what I can comprehend, there are some active group projects hosted by BwoB. While I understand that parts of those projects need physical presence and wet lab expertise, I am extremely interested in collaborating with the members of these projects and contributing by conducting remote research. My background in biotechnology has equipped me with efficient technical knowledge, whether it is to answer questions regarding a certain technique or reviewing existing research papers to explore future prospects of a project.

These are some ideas that we came up with but I'm hoping to hear everyone's thoughts on the above as well as additional ideas on how I can contribute further!

@Shailja Singh Those are all great suggestions for areas you can work on. I think you are more than ready to write any or all of these into a more formal proposal on Loomio (using decision > proposal > consent OR consensus OR advice) that indicates for each area:

1. How many hours you intend to spend on the area

2. What is the proposed deliverable (if any) for area OR what specific responsibility you intend to take on in order to advance the area

As I had mentioned on our last call I'm happy to spend time checking on the first area. It intersects with a networking event that I'm helping to organize at another location and I'd like to work with you to better integrate this event into the BwoB strategy for getting new members. Additionally I am willing to provide guidance in any area on how to interface over Loomio (as I am doing here) so that other members may benefit from your assistance. Lastly, the way you are talking about the second area makes me think you may be able to help with onboarding or recruiting instructors from leads or from cold outreach if that is of interest to you.

The first step to moving forward with a work plan would be to propose it. If you want to include all three areas in your proposal that's fine or you can break it up into just one area for your first proposal. Thanks for your continued engagement with BwoB and hope to start to work more closely with you once we have more consensus over your role.

Please keep me in the loop with any activities you do. As president, I kinda need to know how you are presenting the organization to people, which if any grants you are focusing on, etc. Since you are volunteering remotely please keep in mind that the capabilities and limitations of our space may preclude some activities (we cannot rent kab space or handle a typical class size of students for example).