Members’ Table Scraps

At the Skookum AGM in April, our crack team of Event Organizers came up with some great ideas to coax out some of our members own thoughts on worthy projects for the cooperative. Each person attending was given a card with the image of a vegetable on it. Then, when the time came, we split up according to the vegetable image. And, with the tables draped with ‘scraps’ of kraft paper and pens, we got to work. Below is a transcription of those ideas collected that evening.

We welcome even more ideas (and the energy to back it up) from those who attended and from the general membership. Just leave a comment below even if you support one or a few of the projects listed here; we’d like to know.

Annual General Meeting Members’ Table Notes (April 27, 2012)

Food processing for value-added projects (eg. Sundried tomatoes, blackberry chipotle sauce)
Stanley Darland: Sausage-maker
Workshop: Kitchen Aid (3hour workshop)
Employment for people with disabilities (NACL)
Nut-cracking Machine
Maple Syrup making
Pollination and Cross-pollination workshop
What you can do with blackberries
Hydraulic ram pump demo
Slug-killing by frogs/workshop by Colleen (donation by laughter )
Wood-chipper, chainsaw, gas-fired cement mixer
Making fruit vinegars (workshop)
Specific fruit and vegetable selection for PR region (workshop; prepared seed collection for this)
Develop a “Skookum Almanac” with variety of tips, anecdotes, etc. on growing exotic or unusual products
Elder stories about farming, food-saving, growing in the area; invite them and others to record—maybe a lunch event; maybe salmon lunch
Bulk-buying of plants/trees;
Meat-grinder
Organic pest-control workshop
Apple Cider and Vinegar-making workshop
Wild-crafting workshop
Active involvement in edible garden Tour
Skookum Marketing board: package food, prepare food, clean food and prep for market
Market stall for co-op members at the Open Air market(s), where people can drop off produce, a few people will clean and prep and one person will sell it
Small-scale member-driven produce sales (via Abundant Pantry or via short-term announcements via email or facebook; i.e. “I have a box of chard” + cost or barter possibilities.
Relationship building with PRREDS; project where they pay for soil analysis in the area to find out what would grow well where; make this info public.
Relationship with job creation entities (Career Link/ Community Futures, etc.) to develop Food Hub (including long-term cold storage facilities for year-round storage needs)
Community cold-freeze; people can buy meat in quantity and rent a small part of a large freezer to keep this
Community smoke-house
Couple with private company (Reliable Rentals) to ensure they get a certain number of requests for a certain garden-related machine, maybe a renters’ club; benefits include that they would buy and maintain the equipment
Tool share- Nola has rototiller for proposed tool library; share use for other equipment;
Repair/Repurpose classes
Carpentry workshop—how to build stuff (for gals)
Explore possibility to partner with VIU for their asset-based community development: contact Alison Taplay
Turn the cards (our business cards) into stickers or magnets
Silke’s or another retail outlet (? Not sure what this means—buy Silke’s?- Ed.)
Mapping commercial kitchens
Blackberry products

Report from Skookum’s 2012 Annual General Meeting

skookumagm1_2012 — President Pete Tebbutt presenting the year-end rundown to our members.

Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative held its 2012 Annual General Meeting on Friday April 27. Twenty-eight of our members came out to hear about what happened during the ten months since our last AGM, hear about our finances, and elect several new directors.

Anyone interested in knowing about Skookum’s finances as of the end of our last-completed fiscal year (April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012) can consult our financial statement. The upshot is that we are $1525.94 ahead of where we were at the 2011 year-end. We paid off the remaining balance on the loan for our cider press, so we have no outstanding liabilities. And we have begun to allocate funds to the Community Fund, which stands at $109.06 at the year-end.

Pete Tebbutt delivered the report from the directors, setting out our accomplishments over the past year and some of the board’s identified goals for the coming year. There are so many highlights that you should just go read the report in its entirety!

The membership then voted for new directors. Because we are now on a system of staggered two-year terms, only three directors were required to step down this time around; however, director Sharon Deane also announced her intention to withdraw from the board, so we had four board positions to fill. Luckily, two directors whose seats were up for election — Jan Burnikell and Jacqueline Huddleston — accepted nominations, and two new members stepped forward: Laura Berezan and Rosemary Bjorknas. As there were four nominations for four positions, these candidates were declared elected by acclamation. Congratulations and welcome to our two new directors; and welcome back to Jan and Jacqueline.

We made it through the AGM in under an hour, and then turned to the evening over to our Event-Planning Team, who organized us into tables and got us talking, eating, making connections, and thinking about what Skookum might do in the future.

Thank you to all the members who came out and brought delicious treats to share! And thanks to the Event-Planning Team (Stacy Fitzgerald, Jacqueline Huddleston, Jean Mackenzie, Alison Taplay, & Connie Thurber) for helping with setup and cleanup.

Announcing Skookum’s Annual General Meeting: Friday April 27, 2012

Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative is holding our Annual General Meeting on Friday April 27, starting at 7:00 PM, in Trinity Hall at the Powell River United Church, located at 6932 Crofton St., Powell River, BC (at the corner of Michigan Ave. and Duncan St.). The meeting will be followed by a social time with refreshments.

At this meeting, the board of directors will report on progress since the 2011 Annual General Meeting, including presentation of the year-end financial statement. Members will elect directors. Membership share certificates will be available for members who do not yet have theirs.

In true cooperative fashion, we are inviting members to bring a small potluck donation of sweet or savoury finger food (Skookum will subsidize the cost of beverages & hall rental; we are suggesting a $2 donation to help defray these costs). We are also suggesting that the musicians among us bring their instruments along. The rest of us can bring our dancing shoes!

We hope that all our members will be able to attend our 2012 Annual General Meeting. We allow proxy voting for any member who cannot attend and would otherwise have to travel by air or water to attend this meeting. If you need to fill out a proxy form, please download one from here or pick up a hard copy at our registered address (Kingfisher Used Books: 4486 Marine Avenue, Powell River, BC, CANADA V8A 2K2).

Please note that the board has decided not to provide printed copies of the agenda and financial report at the meeting to save both printing costs and paper. If you would like to have a copy of these documents at the meeting, please print them and bring them.

The agenda for the meeting is available as a PDF here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Skookum co-presents the film “To Make A Farm”

Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative is happy to co-sponsor (with Transition Town Powell River) the feature documentary, To Make a Farm (Canada, 2011) On Saturday February 18, 2012 at the Powell River Film Festival. See below for details, and a clip from the film.

ToMakeaFarm-1 — Sat. Feb 18 at 12:30PM, PR Recreation Complex. Click to see large version

Synopsis: Starting a farm from scratch takes more than just imagination, but it’s a good place to start. Often considered a way of life from the past, today there is a movement of young people without farming backgrounds taking up this challenging profession. To Make A Farm follows the lives of five such young people through their first seasons on the land, as the joys and disappointments of bringing life from the earth become a quiet manifesto for social change. Documentary filmmaker Steve Suderman searches his own family history in farming to wonder if the mistakes of the past can be avoided this time through.

To Make A Farm – preview 1 from Steve Suderman on Vimeo.

Announcing Skookum’s Bulk Seed-Buying Project

seedhead — Buying seed together, locally.

We’re happy to introduce a new project open to Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative members only. It’s a bulk seed-buying club that will start off small with a selection of some 30 seed types from a local provider, Eternal Seed. As you know, the more seed one buys, the cheaper the cost, but seeds don’t keep too well past a couple of years… so stocking up is not a great option. If we buy together, it’s better in many ways:

It’s less expensive to buy seeds this way (if you still have too many seeds, you can donate/barter them at Seedy Saturday, or share with neighbours/friends);
With a percentage of the cost of buying seed through this project, you get to support Skookum, the community, and a coordinator for the project;
We can support a local certified organic seed company, Eternal Seed.

If we manage to order 10 packs (or more) of any of the varieties listed here, we get a substantial discount from Eternal Seed. Then we tack on a small percentage to support Skookum projects (5%)the community fund (5%) plus another 15% for the project coordinator. Your seed packet will then cost on average 25% less than buying one packet via a normal retail outlet.

How it works

(Remember, this is MEMBERS ONLY. Not a member, but would like to join Skookum? Click here).

Skookum will not be held liable for the quality of seed or results from use of the seed, although Eternal Seed does have its own guarantee that can be found on their web site; download their catalogue as a pdf file here (please use Internet Explorer for best results). All seed descriptions below are from the Eternal Seed catalogue.

I chose about 30 types of seeds from the Eternal Seed catalogue (see here) ; In picking the seeds, I tended toward earlier, cooler temperature varieties, as well as a mix of good storage crops in a few cases.
10 packs of each of the c.30 seed varieties are offered to Skookum members only to purchase (note that you will be able to buy more than just one pack of any one seed variety as well) — first come first served;
The varieties of seeds that do not reach that “10 packet minimum order” threshold by the deadline of February 14 (Valentine’s Day!) 2012, will be dropped;
Click here to see the list of seeds on offer (with prices, descriptions, etc), and instructions on how to order.