Click the image above to view the full flyer with full details
Hana Turtle Granny and Jacqueline Huddleston offer you FREE Home Tanning Workshops, with the first in the series on Saturday, June 9, 2012!
For hunters, homesteaders, craftsmen, seamstresses & those with a serious intent to learn the basics of home tanning leathers and furs.
Click here to see the flyer with the full details!
Part 1 Introduction and Fleshing (June 9, 2012)
Part 2 Breaking/Pulling date to be announced*
Part 3 Softening/Finishing date to be announced
*We will schedule the subsequent workshops with those who come to the first one.
Participants will get to take home a rabbit skin in their colour choice (we have white, black, grey and grey/brown with a herringbone-like pattern).
More skins will be available for sale to those interested for $4/hide. To register email Jacqueline Huddleston: jaxhuddleston@me.com
Please note this is a free event open to the general public which will require vigorous participation. Register early to guarantee your space!
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.
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.
Well, we’ve made it through one test order in February, and another larger order in March, so it looks as though the Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club is really a going concern. We invite all members of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative to explore the bulk-buying website, where you can:
visit our current product selection;
link to our FAQ page;
read about one of our local producers; and
learn how to become a local producer, yourself.
Consider joining The Abundant Pantry, where shopping is easy thanks to our online shopping cart system, and there is no pressure to order, because we have no minimum.
Here is some of the progress we’re making behind the scenes:
We now have a working Advisory Team meeting monthly to support our Coordinator Wendy Pelton and our web programmer Barry Bookout. Thank you to Skookum members Dan Glover, Pete Tebbutt, and Laura Wallace for stepping forward to take on this extremely important work!
Wendy has been conducting a survey of member satisfaction and the Advisory Team is using this feedback to improve the website and the ordering and pickup system.
The splits page got quite a workout on the March order. Members are already getting better at working together to split sacks and cases, so that everyone benefits from low prices while still able to buy smaller quantities — a perfect example of cooperation in action!
The Advisory Team is hard at work developing policies and procedures to allow us to offer local farm produce and other products from the Upper Sunshine Coast. We’re really excited by the possibilities, so stay tuned for more news.
We’re thinking ahead to providing refrigerated and frozen products.
If you’re keen to participate in Powell River’s fastest-growing bulk-buying club — one that benefits your cooperative, your community, and our fabulous Coordinator Wendy Pelton — then find out how to join here. Our next order deadline will be Sunday May 13 at 11:00 PM, and the pickup day will be the following Thursday, May 17 from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
Just one of the benefits of membership in Powell River’s one and only non-profit cooperative!
If you have any questions, you may direct them to Wendy at bulkbuying@skookumfood.ca or call (604) 485-6664 after 11:00 AM.
Wendy is waiting for you to pick up your bulk food...
Exciting news! After many months of planning and hard work, Skookum’s Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Project is ready for prime time! The coordinator Wendy Pelton and her husband Barry Bookout have created a fantastic website for Skookum members to place their bimonthly orders for bulk food and all members of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative are invited to sign up and check it out.
Here’s how it works:
In the odd months (January, March, May, July, September, & November), Skookum members who have signed up with The Abundant Pantry will be invited to shop for bulk goods, using the new website;
Members can work together to split bags or cases, using the splits page;
The deadline for each order will be the second Sunday of the month;
Once we have closed the website and received the orders for that month, we pass our collective order to Melissa Call at Sunshine Organics/Ecossentials, who acts as our local distributor;
Ferries permitting, our order will come in on the following Wednesday and be ready for members on the Thursday of that week to come up to Melissa’s warehouse in Wildwood and get their food.
We currently have access to the catalogue from Horizon Distributors and plans are afoot to get other distributors’ catalogues into our online ordering system. Stay tuned.
The project's mascot, Skooky, created by Giovanni Spezzacatena
Beyond that, one of the most exciting aspects of this online ordering site is that we can list local producers and their products there for our members to buy in bulk quantities. Currently, our only local distributor is Skookum member Mischa Brooks-Thoma, the Powell River Natural Soap Lady, but Wendy is hard at work finding more local food other products for us. If you have suggestions, contact her. (Local producers whom we buy from do not need to be members.)
We’re also thinking ahead to frozen refrigerated products, but we plan to run a few simple orders before we start complicating things.
In February, we ran a small test run, and everything (well, almost!) went off without a hitch. And so we are now ready to try a larger order with more members involved. The order deadline this time around will be 11:00 PM on Sunday March 11, and the pickup day will be Thursday March 15.
You can check out the current catalogue here. (Please note that the full catalogue might take some time to load if you’re on a slow internet connection.) Information about joining The Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club and getting your own secure online login information is here.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Wendy or phone her at (604) 485-6664.
On behalf of all our members who will benefit from having a simple accessible online bulk ordering system, the Skookum board would like to acknowledge the contributions of the ‘guinea pigs’ of the pilot order, as well as Melissa Leigh, who has helped with invaluable advice on bookkeeping procedures financial sanity; Mischa Brooks-Thoma, for being the first local producer providing so much useful feedback; and above all, Wendy and Barry, who have given us so many hours of hard work trying to get the website all the procedures in order. Thank you, all!
