Category: Annual General Meeting

Save the Date! AGM Thursday, May 2 at 7PM

agmskookSave the Date! Our Annual General  Meeting (AGM) will be held on Thursday, May 2 at 7:00 PM at the United Church’s Trinity Hall (kitty-corner to City Hall at 6932 Crofton Street).

Feel free to bring along some snacks and desserts, but we will lay on a nice spread of snacks and beverages, so no worries.

You will be all be getting a notice in the mail (along with your newly revamped share certificates) soon, but here is a rough look at what our AGM will look like:

  • A progress report for the past year, including a report on how we did financially.
  • Elections for four directors (interested in joining the seven-member volunteer board? We’re looking for a few ‘passionate-about-food’ members with talents and time to put toward this amazing project we call Skookum). Contact us if you are interested or want more info.
  • Fabulous Door Prizes! (Do you also want to donate a local food or related item? Let us know.)
  • An update on how Powell River Dollars can benefit the co-op, and an opportunity to buy some PR$.
  • After the formalities, we’ll enjoy our delicious refreshments and a fun ‘Meet-and-Greet’ event to get to know your wonderful fellow members. Please also bring some treats too if you can– finger food and desserts, especially vegan and gluten free options welcome); we know we have some of the best bakers in Powell River amongst our membership and we want to help you showcase your skills!
  • A chance to buy some newly-ordered Tattler reusable BPA-free Canning Lids (see below for more info).
  • Remember the blog post we put out on cover crops? Well, they arrived a bit too late for Seedy Saturday, but we will have cover-crop seed samplers (1/2-pound packets of an Organic Pea & Oat mix for $3.00 each). These are crops that add nutrients, loosen  your soil, and suppress weeds in your garden beds.
  • It looks as though we will have some Cafe Justicia Fair Trade “Plus” Coffee on sale too!
  • Find out more about our Bulk Buying Club, The Abundant Pantry, too in time for the May 12 springtime shopping deadline! What amazing products for the lowest possible prices. Find out more here: http://skookumfood.ca/bulk-buying/members/faq.php).

Well, there will surely be even more going on at the Skookum AGM, too.

See you there on Thursday, May 2!

More about Tattler lids

This time we’re selling Tattler lids at even lower prices! They’re about half the price you’d pay via Amazon.ca (and 15% of the cost goes to support Skookum). We ask members to limit purchases to 100 lids ea. at this point, to allow more members to take advantage. After the AGM, we will offer the lids on a per-order basis.

We will have:

    • 24-packs of regular lids + rubber rings .60 ea ($14.50); 50-packs ($30);
    • 24-pack wide mouth lids + rubber rings  .70 ea ($17.00); 50-packs ($35);
    • Individual extra rubber rings (wide and regular) .22 each in packs of 5  ($1.10 per pack).

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

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!