One other thing beyond the date change of the COFED retreat from Sat to Sund (9-6) was that the link to the Food coop NING that was created was left out.
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Michelle Harvey <michelle.ann.harvey@gmail.com> wrote:
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/theuwfarmHi everyone - This email is a bit long, but worth reading if you are at all interested in learning more about the possibility of bringing a Food Cooperative to the UW campus. This is just a general update to those interested and involved with the Student Food Cooperative forming at the UW.
-Michelle
COFED Retreat
Matt spent a bit of his break down in San Francisco meeting with the students at the Berkeley Student Food Collective. The Berkeley Student Food Collective is renovating a space to create a sustainable cafeteria that serves local and organic food, 100% of which meets the real food challenge. They have raised 150 thousand dollars and have gathered wide support for their project. Those who started the project have been in communication with student food coops throughout the country, but most specifically those in the NW. They are trying to create a model of student food coops to be implemented nationally that will address the issues surrounding food on college campuses. The organization, Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (COFED), is attempting to do this through collaborating with the existing food coops. Excited by all of the work being done in the Northwest, COFED has gotten all of the student cooperative projects (PSU, Evergreen, UBS and here,) to agree to do a retreat in June. Organizers from these places will be coming to plan this event and do a meet and greet the first weekend of winter quarter. All are invited to come to this meeting. Part of this meeting is to provide the UW food coop with feedback from other coops and further discuss the concept of a UW coop.
RECAP:
COFED Planning meeting – Saturday, January 9th 2010
Place – Gould Hall, Room 110
Creating working documents
There are three crucial documents that need to be produced in short order.
- A project overview that explains the general why who what and how
- A business proposal that professionally analyzes the financial logistics of the project,
- A logistical plan that designs the cafeteria, the menu, the name and touches on the branding of the cafeteria.
These will be incredibly easy because there are multiple examples of these exact documents that we can pull from other student cafeteria projects to construct these. It just needs to fit UW. COFED is archiving documents such as these.
We will have three different task forces to construct these documents.
- I will lead a taskforce to do an overview of the project. This is the most general and the most immediately important.
- Matt will lead a taskforce to follow up with the business plan details with business advisors.
- And Teanna will lead a task force to create a logistical plan for the cafeteria. This is something less immediately important, but will be fun to craft. The one part of this that does need to happen sooner rather than later would be a working name.
- Afterwards we would need to create one sheet that provides the highlights of each of these documents.
The idea is to collaborate over these projects on a wiki so that people can update and give feedback and make changes as they can.
Website and list serve
Also, please visit and utilize a website that was created for the project. It has a collaborative format, which will allow people to control and update it in a user-friendly manner. This is a place to centralize activities of the coop, post developments and a mode for peer feedback and participation.
A list serve was created; just send your emails to http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/UWfoodcoop to be added to the list serve.
The two major events that will frame the project will occur within the first week of school.
1. There is a meeting with HFS on Wednesday (Jan. 6, 2010)
2. Meeting with an individual with ASUW this Friday (Jan. 8, 2010) to discuss legislation and potentially developing a partnership. Some schools have found it smoothest to have the financial structure of the student association be its non-profit umbrella.
If you are keenly interested in coming to either of these meetings, please send me an email. The best meeting to make though is the COFED-planning meeting on Saturday, January 10th.
Course around organizing a Cooperative Food System
Also stay tuned for the possibility of a course facilitated in conjunction with food courses taught by Ann Anagnost and Lucy Jarosz starting in the Spring. This would likely take the form of project based learning and with the credits being received as internship credit. The course would highlight the methods of localizing and contextualizing a food system through cooperatives.
UW Farm
The idea of the food coop is to present a localized food system that students can engage with holistically. Similar to how the BSFC and other student coops run, working on the farm and developing a relationship with the source of food is important to this process. The farm is in the process of creating its own business plan and expanding operations. It wants to gain more legitimacy within the UW community and support from the University, as well as become a more functional part of the university structure. Because the farm is already established, it can serve as a support system for the coop. However, with the branching out and increasing exposure of the UW food coop, more support can be given back to the farm, helping make use of the farm's ever increasing capacity to grow food.
No comments:
Post a Comment