Dear members and friends,
We hope that you had a restful, joyous, and healthy holiday.
Thank you to all who attended our Terra Madre Day cyber celebration! It was so good to see some familiar faces, and to hear your ideas for our chapter in this new year.
As we mentioned at the meeting, our primary focus for 2021 is to fulfill our EIJ commitments. For those of you who don’t know, EIJ stands for Equity, Inclusion & Justice – all of which are values that we seek to embody and advance in the larger Sonoma County food community.
This past fall, we selected 5 EIJ commitments, or projects to submit to Slow Food USA. They are:
-
To deepen our collaboration with Steele Lane Elementary & Proctor Terrace Elementary, and strengthen our relationship with the SC School Garden Network.
-
To connect directly with farm and vineyard workers via United Farm Workers to explore how our chapter can better serve them and their communities.
-
To invite more diverse leaders to the board, including people of color, Indigenous leaders, and leaders in the LGBTQI communities.
-
To make Slow Food more accessible to people of all incomes.
-
To support the efforts of the Gravenstein Apple Presidium in processing donated Sonoma County apples.
We have a lot of uplifting work ahead of us, but if we are to meet these goals, we need your help!
Many of you shared that you would be more willing to step up and lead, or at least volunteer your time, if we gave you clear, concrete tasks. Well, we will need people to help us with outreach to potential partners, event coordination, fundraising, and more if we are to pull this off.
The Slow Food Russian River board is also in need of new members. Each one of us can promise you that being a board member DOES NOT require much of your time. We meet once every three weeks for 2 hours. Occasionally, you might be asked to spend a few hours between meetings on tasks that advance these EIJ goals.
In addition, we are actively seeking a new Treasurer as well as one or two people to join our Snail of Approval team. Please respond to this email if you are interested in supporting this chapter as a leader or volunteer.
Read on for other news, and stay tuned for more exciting virtual events coming your way!
We are ever thankful for your support.
– Slow Food Russian River leaders
|