Topic Focused Organizing Calls
Working Name - for review 1/23/23
This marks the transition at CoopGardens to topic-focused discussions, and away from working groups. Seed Distribution will remain a working group, but in function, has begun taking place during Organizing Calls. Please let us know below via this form that will go to our central email, what topics of discussion you would like to focus on. Meeting facilitators for those discussions will reach out to you to schedule calls over the course of the season.
If you have topics you would like to facilitate a call around, or would like to collaborate on, please note that in your response below. If you have a topic idea that you would like to introduce, please note that in the responses below.
How We Organize
The Cooperative Gardens Commission (CGC) is a grassroots organizing collective. We are open, transparent, non-hierarchical, and committed to consensus-based decision-making. Most of our work happens in our every-other-week Organizing Call.
Register to join via our home page.
Seed Distribution
The Seed Distribution Working Group meets when we can organize 3+ people familiar with the process, or motivated to be involved. To join the group and participate in meetings, please click here.
Coop Gardens Organizing⭐️
Functions as the combination of Facilitation/Admin, Media/Communications, Tech, and Outreach. We could use help, we’ll just be honest about that. To join the group’s online listserv, please click here.
The Working Groups of the Cooperative Gardens Commission 2020-2022
Facilitation, Fundraising, Climate Adaptions, Policy, Education, Anti-Oppression Study Group, Accountability, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color BIPOC, Media, Outreach, and Herbalism. If you have been one of the many volunteers who invested time, energy, and effort in one or more of these groups and want to see them continue, please add one of these as a topic for an Organizing Call.
During 2020-2021 working group participants sometimes spent 4-8 hours per week on zoom calls. We worked on developing the massive structure of information, developing ideas, and learning from one another. Over the course of this organization individuals and groups have grown into new capacities, sometimes continuing with CoopGardens, and sometimes getting involved in new efforts. During 2021-2022 participation dropped off significantly in all groups except for Seed Distribution, and Fundraising from November - January. So we have developed this new method of continuing our work and supporting one another!
If folx want to create new working groups, or revive old ones, we are happy to empower people to do so. This will involve taking on the role of meeting facilitation, reminders, note-taking, etc. We share our Zoom channel with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance. Scheduling meetings using that channel will involve coordinating good times with UCFA, or starting a new channel for communicating.
Please bring ideas to the Organizing Call where our consensus-based decision-making happens.
If you are new to the Cooperative Gardens Commission
Please sign up for our Organizing Calls before joining a working group, so you can find the best fit for you! We are now meeting the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month to continue with our work of growing food sovereignty!
“It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.”
— Dr. George Washington Carver
Carver was a leader in reviving Afro-Indigenous regenerative agricultural practices such as cover crop planting to prevent soil depletion. He worked at Tuskegee University in the early 1900s.
Working together to co-create food security
Your energy, talent and time is appreciated. If you’re not involved yet, we invite you to participate in any way you can. We are grateful for any support you can offer!
“They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds.”
— Dinos Christianopoulos