Meeting Notes June 18, 2012

[Rebecca Karger]

Hello! Below are the notes from the first meeting of the coop. I hope that all included here are able to invite people to join this forum, but i'm new to it, so please tell me if you can't.

The first stage is to find out what type of coop is feasible for Morristown. Participants acknowledged that starting and running a coop takes dedication and time from members, so we need to select a model that is sustainable. Ideas that came up in the meeting include:

• Extending the Morristown Farmer's Market for the full year 
  
• Exploring if there could be a coop tent at the Farmer's Market 
  
• Asking the Partnership about vacant store fronts (may be insurance issues with this)
  
• Starting with a buying club 
  
• A mobile food truck with produce (Christian is going to look into this)
  
• Voicing support to Grassroots in Denville in hopes that they might open a branch in Morristown -- for this option, Abby kindly volunteered to write a letter that we can sign as petition 

Attendees also thought of a number of ways to find information about coops and certain people volunteered to follow through on specific tasks. Ideas without names next to them are up for grabs for anyone interested in helping out. We can post our discoveries to the google forum.

• Creating a survey -- Rebecca
• Calling or visiting established coops
• Full year farmer's market in Montclair
• Jersey City Coop -- Kendra
• Virtual Farmer's Market -- Abby
• Hungry Hollow -- Kathy
• Soho Coop -- Kathy
• Purple Dragon Coop
• Griggstown Farm -- Rebecca

Last, if all copied here could start to think about items that they would want to purchase regularly, I'm going to start a separate thread    to post them.