1. Call to Order
Chair, Benjamin Domask-Ruh, called the meeting to order at: 6;02 pm Eastern
2. Roll:
Present: Afton Benson, Mike Sullivan, Nick Hanson, Ross Berenson, Sofia Noethe, Tahyer Jasper Schlichter, Martin Frost, Michael Karas, Biz, Kaylin Meyers
Absent: Noel Yee, Jonathan Perry
Recorder: Michael Karas
3. Approval of Agenda
Motion: Sofia
Second by: Biz
Discussion: N/A
Vote: Passes Unanimous
4. Approval of Minutes:
Business Board Meeting (Business Meeting Agenda – 7/28/2025 )
Motion: Sofia
Second: Michael
Discussion: Summarized
Vote: Passes Unanimous
5. Reports
Please keep verbal reports to 5 min or less except for festival discussion.
2025 Festival Report (Noel Yee & Afton Benson)
Discussion: Evansville slow on invoices. Finally got some answers today. Still having discussions with Doubletree about room blocks. We did make the attrition. Is it possible attendance was lower because of inaccurate reports that room blocks were sold out? Festival will break even or turn a small profit. Shout-out to Christian Kloc for contributing so much to the raffle. Saved money on shipping by delivering raffle prizes to the EJC. Raffle raised over $10K, more than double what we’re used to. 89 people took the festival survey. Most people didn’t love Evansville as a location, but enjoyed the fest. Convention center was a bit lacking in some facilities, including restroom cleanliness.
2026 Festival Report (Noel Yee)
Discussion: Discussion of registration. Discussion of under-18 complimentary gym admission with attached adult registration. Discussion of different wrist-bands for spectator/juggler. Discussion of exciting new registration page on website, currently being worked on.
29 people registered out of the 82 festival survey replies who provided an email.
Jake Darrow joined at 6:24pm
August 2026 Update
We’re excited to share the latest updates for the 2026 IJA Festival in Fort Wayne, Indiana! Earlier this month, we went on a site visit organized by our contact at Visit Fort Wayne and Mike Sullivan. During the visit, we toured the Grand Wayne Convention Center, the Embassy Theatre, and several other spaces around the city, and after seeing everything, we feel confident that Fort Wayne will be an outstanding location for the festival. The city has a lot to offer in terms of venues, accessibility, and amenities, and we think it’s going to make for a fantastic experience for everyone.
Registration is already live, which is earlier than usual, and a big thank-you goes out to Shivella for getting everything set up both during and after the Evansville event. All ticket links are up and working, and right now we’re running a special promotion—if you fill out the 2025 festival survey, you’ll receive a discount code for tickets to the 2026 festival. This promo will run for the next few weeks, and then early bird pricing will start. As announced at the Annual General Meeting in Evansville, youth under 18 will now get a free gym pass, which we’re very excited about as a way to make our community more accessible to families and youth groups.We’ve also added options for youth shirts and show tickets as optional items for purchase. More information will be coming soon on details. Shout out to the 2027 organizational team for pushing the ideas forward!
On the programming and planning side, we’re happy to share that Amy Wieliczka has been confirmed as our Show Director for 2026, and Thayer is currently working on the full design package for the festival’s branding and materials. There’s a lot of great energy around this event already, and we have plenty more ideas and updates coming soon.
Financial Report (Afton Benson)
Discussion: Discussion of various investment accounts and the related fees. We think it could be possible to find an account with even lower fees.
- What portfolio are we going with for the iiWii investment?
- Questions about expense reimbursement restrictions going forward?
Future Festival Site Report (Mike Sullivan and Jake Darrow)
Welcoming Nick Hanson to the team, beginning his training to become Jake’s #2 in the next year. (Please note: it is a requirement to work on the IJA Future Festival Site team that your given name must be exactly four letters and must contain the letter ‘k.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter.)
Question: Have we heard what happened to the 193 room/nights we were told we had sold at the Doubletree in Evansville that never checked-in? (967 sold vs. 1,160 reportedly booked – a 16.7% difference)
We are seeking an additional 300 room/nights at a courtesy rate in Cedar Rapids for 2027. We have 1,250 under contract at the Doubletree at an excellent rate, but they are very unlikely to offer us any more as we are already soaking up 200 of their 240 rooms on peak. They need to keep some inventory for various reasons including for flight crews, Hilton corporate guarantees and revenue preservation.
Adding another block at a courtesy rate would be a nice cushion for our historic 80th annual festival, especially considering the tiered pricing we have on the different room types at the DT. Good news: there is a new 123-room AC Hotel by Marriott opening right across the river from the Doubletree later this year.They should be able to offer us the 300 room/nights with 53 on peak that we need for 2027.
David and Scott Cain will be touring Sharonville, OH, a suburb of Cincinnati, on Monday. As a suburban conference center destination, none of us think this will pan out but we wanted to have the Cains definitively rule it out for us with a half-day preliminary site visit.
Jake and I have booked the Albany, NY site visit for November 2-5. We are optimistic that the destination will be suitable. We need to hear from the Board if we should entertain a hotel offer for only part of our block at rates as high as $199/night. We think the Hilton and other downtown properties will step up and get us the room block size we need without needing any rooms at the $199/night Renaissance. Albany is our #1 best hope for 2029 right now 🤞🏼.
Jake and an IJA Board member or officer to be named later are hoping to schedule a site visit to Rochester, MN in October. Our main concerns there are the long walk distance to the hotels from the Center/Theater, airlift into RST (ORD and MSP only, AA and DL only, 2-3 flights/day), and our very low attendance there in 2011.
Abilene, Texas: we emailed twice, called and left messages twice with their CVB DOS, no reply. This was recommended to us as a good prospect by Bruce Manners, who worked a children’s book festival there in June and said it would be a good choice. However, it seems that their CVB is a 1-person shop and she either doesn’t want to bother with us or has smaller fish to fry.
We have asked the relevant people within IJA for their feedback on our full-length RFP document, and need their responses before the end of the month. The RFP we bring to the “meeting for people who hold meetings” early next month will be what gets widely circulated to potential host cities for the next two years at least.
Other leads we have worked recently, all leading nowhere: Rochester, NY; Fort Smith, AR; Atlantic City, NJ; Augusta, GA; Ames, IA; Dayton, OH; Richmond, VA (their state capitol convention district does not have enough hotel capacity for a puny little group like IJA!!); Reno, NV; Eau Claire, WI; Vancouver, WA (purely a summer tourist destination with virtually no convention facilities or convention hotels).
Jake and Mike will be at the SMMC conference during next month’s BoD call, but we will try to file a brief status update in time for the meeting.
Discussion:
Afton: Reach out to Mark Hayward about a potential Madison, WI space.
Mike Sullivan departed at 6:48 pm ET
eJuggle Report (Eric Shibuya)
Discussion: Sorry for the late response! Life crisis: pipe leak in the house has me displaced to a hotel since 11 July, and we’ve started work 1 August. Things have been crazy here.
No significant news this month. Call for more coverage on the festival did not really pan out, will need to figure out a better campaign to get that coverage.
UPDATE: Naomi just replied back to an email. Francisco Javier’s article series on physical training and juggling is coming along. The first draft is really long, so we may split that into two. Naomi and Javier are looking at an article every three weeks. This could be very exciting.
JoAnn Ireland continues to serve as our festival roving reporter!
I hope to finish a review of The Compendium of Soviet Juggling Wisdom published by NDJuggling soon.
Membership (Marilyn Sullivan)
Membership Data
Discussion: Refocus efforts on WJD as a membership drive opportunity. Is there a misunderstanding that folks have to be invited to be an IJA member? If so, let’s clarify that.
Marketing Report (Lisa Ellipse)IJA social media requests
Welcome Chloe Duarcán to the Marketing Team! Chloe will be helping out with social media takeovers, reposts, and monitoring of socials. We are excited for Chloe to be joining the team and assisting in our media presence.
We have started rolling out the ‘Meet the Board’ series on social media to have our members know who is on the board and get to know them.
I am missing 3 people’s information: Jonathan, Sofia, and Biz. If you could fill out the google form as soon as possible, that would be appreciated.
Content Idea: Starting to post on social stories about business and vision board meetings. Feel like this might get more people to attend and remind members they are welcomed to join meetings and voice their opinions, suggestions, and ideas.
Discussion: How can the social media team also help with letting everyone know that anyone can be a member of the IJA? Shooting for Sept. 1 to open registration, so let’s make sure to clear that week for registration push.
IRC Report (Erin Stephens)
Discussion: We have two more confirmed IRC and one proposed in the below motions for the end of 2025. Things are going well and moving forward with each of them. We are going to be focusing on some new, fresh and more extensive marketing tactics for these IRC.
There is a lot of interest coming in for the IRC 2026! Including one being proposed in the motions below for the first weeks of January in Nicaragua. France is another new country that has expressed interest and they are in the stages of reviewing the list of host and IJA requirements. This would be in partnership with the Maison de Jonglage (House of Juggling). A festival in Argentina has also expressed strong interest. Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico all hope to continue their streak of ongoing IRC.
Matan and I had a meeting recently to discuss visions, plans, marketing, the IRC team and more. It ended with a plan for me to create a list of short term, mid-term and long term goals and then meeting again to discuss how to take steps to reach those goals. These documents will be shared with the board for input and ideas throughout the process.
I am feeling a new and refreshing excitement and motivation for the IRC, and look forward to how they continue to develop.
Discussion: So wonderful! Please let us know how we can help as things develop. 🙂
YJA Report (Benjamin Domask-Ruh)
Discussion: Excited how things went in 2025.
Still decompressing from a successful Festival run with Curriculum Course, Club YJA, and YJA Table getting more traction (hooray for activity pages!)
The education book is still underway with chapters submitted and editing in process!
Starting to plan for next year’s festival and youth involvement with Planting the Juggling Seed!
OpsO Report (Ross Berenson)
Discussion: We need to create surveys that are more helpful for future planning. EJuggle on the new website will be more user-friendly. Very excited about the new direction of the website and festival 2026 site. A few of us had a meeting with the EJA in the Netherlands and got excited – lots of good ideas about future collaboration. Looking forward to cross-promotion and a shared vision plan as well. Looking forward to making celebratory 80th/50th IJA/EJC videos for each other. Discussion of accessibility on new website, including how it works with screen readers. Discussion of local juggling clubs and how they can be shown on the site – a map? Can members add their local club to the membership profile?
- 2025 Festival Survey Results can be found in the IJA Google Drive.
- Festival Website Update:
- Getting registration setup for 2026
- Updated Registration page design to be easier to navigate and understand
- Created a separate page for vendors
- IJA Website Design – In progress. Hopefully will be at the final stages soon and kick off dev.
- Setup WhatsApp groups for the IJA
6. Motions for Consideration
- Motion to approve hosting the IRC Sudamérica 2025 – Chile at the Congreso Internacional de Malabarismo y Artes Circenses (International Congress of Juggling and Circus Arts) in Valparaíso on October 24, 2025.
Proposal: IRC Sudamérica 2025 – Chile
Budget:
Motion: Kaylin
Second: Sofia
Discussion:
ERIN: This will be the 4th annual IRC in Chile. In 2022 we decided to try a new model with CIMAC to have the local team be trained to run the IRC, and to hold it every year. Chile has a massive number of remarkable jugglers, and the annual IRC has been a big hit. There have been anywhere from 24 to 35 competitors annually. CIMAC is incredibly organized, does excellent marketing, has a great organizational team and helps to make the IRC more cost effective by being run by their local team, rather than paying for travel expenses. The budget expenses will come directly from the IRC budget.
Vote: Passes Unanimously
- Motion to approve hosting the IRC Centroamérica 2026 at the Berrenche Festival in Granada, Nicaragua between January 4-11 .
Proposal: IRC Centroamérica 2026
Budget:
Motion: Michael
Second: Benjamin
Discussion: We want to know where the IRC footage and photos live. ehstephens@gmail.com Please let Afton know so we can get a Shared Google Drive setup to store all IRC footage.
ERIN: This is the 13th annual Berrenche festival and I’m excited to partner with them for the first ever IRC in Nicaragua. They have a lot of community back as well as support from the artistic communities in other countries of South America. I have been impressed with their organization and responsiveness to this point. We have had various medalists from Nicaragua in the IRC Centroamérica historically, and each of them is quite excited about the idea of the IRC being held in their country and the impact it will have on the up and coming generation of jugglers. The IRC Representative for this event will be Miguel Hernandez, our Guatemalan representative.
Vote: Passes unanimously
7. Varia:
Jonathan: I think invitations to the IJA Google Drive need to be resent to the new IJA emails and/or the new Board members. Ross – Good idea. We should try and get rid of the personal email addresses in the drive. Afton – Tis on my list, everyone needs to actually log into the .org emails and we can resend invites as needed.
8. Confirm Next Meeting
Next meetings will take place on…
September 4, 2025 at 6:00pm ET for the next vision meeting
September 18, 2025 6:00pm ET for the next business meeting
9. Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 7:24 pm Eastern.