Our meeting on Monday night was a success! We had about 15 people in attendance, our biggest turnout yet, including some of the regulars who have been working on this project since day one, plus lots of new faces. It was great to hear everyone’s ideas and get a conversation going about how we want our CSA to work.
The hot topic for the evening was definitely recruiting more members. We all agreed that we need to put together a new flyer and/or brochure. Jeremy, Karen, Kimberly and I will work on that this week. Once it’s ready, we’ll all pitch in and help post it around the neighborhood, in our buildings, on our blocks, and in local shops/restaurants. We can spend some of our Citizens for NYC grant money on printing costs if necessary, but we’ll investigate other options first. We also tried to come up with other ways to reach people, such as churches and community organizations. Do we want to plan an outreach event? Maybe participate in the Lefferts Manor flower barrel planting on May 5th? I’ll also post about the CSA again on the Lefferts yahoo group.
We also talked a lot about how to organize the distribution. How many volunteers do we want to cover each shift, one or two? Two is obviously better in case one person can’t make it, but this raised some concerns that we might not have enough members to cover all the shifts that way. Also since a lot of members work in the city, it might be hard for them to arrive by 4. One way to handle this might be to divide each shift, with one person covering the early half and another person covering the late half. We also discussed the possibility of having the farmers box the shares for us. I’ll ask them. If not, maybe we could have the volunteers divide the shares into boxes or bags? We wouldn’t want the last person to arrive at pickup to get less. We’ll definitely need to make some decisions about this in the next few weeks so we can start planning for the first few deliveries.
Another decision we need to make is what to do with any leftover shares that are not picked up. There might be a soup kitchen on Rogers and Lincoln, I’ll try to contact them and see if they would be interested. We can also try City Harvest. However, since we’re not sure yet what the quantity will be and how often, I don’t know if it would be worth it for them to pick up from us. As an alternative we could give the extra to Maple Street School or to the distribution volunteers.
We also talked about adding a discussion board to the website to share ideas and continue the dialog started at the meeting. This will also be useful help people make arrangements with other members to pick up their share if they are working late or on vacation, and to trade recipes and tips for all the interesting new veggies we’re going to be getting. Check back for this new feature coming soon!
We’ll plan on meeting again Monday May 14th two weeks before the first delivery. Hope to see you all then!
