Gathering Feb 22, 2011

Save the date!
The next gathering of the "Food Coalition" has been scheduled for:

Tuesday, February 22nd
6:30 - 7:30 pm
KIB Keep Indianapolis Beautiful -Large Conference Room
1029 Fletcher Ave. Indianapolis, Indiana 46203

First of all, I would like to thank those of you who were able to attend the January 29th gathering. We had over 30 attendees at last count and with much concerted effort were able to form a mission statement and vision statement for the group. We must also thank our facilitator Carmen DeRusha, an employee of the Purdue extension, for her excellent work that day along with the rest of the volunteer facilitators and planners! Due to all of your hard work and resolve (it was intense!) the day was a success.

We decided on January 29th that we needed a meeting at the end of February to continue discussing "where do we go from here". We had a long day Saturday; after going through the strategic planning exercises we needed some time for our decisions as a group to "sink in" and also so time to figure our individually where or how we fit in to the group.

Meeting notes, will be sent out shortly. Basically three big decisions were made that day.

The group decided to adopt the current Indianapolis Food, Farm and Family Coalition (IFFFC) as the organizational structure of the group. Instead of creating an additional new organization the plan was to develop a mission and vision that was more inclusive than what was originally conceived in the IFFFC. The purpose for this action was to make sure everyone's perspectives and values were recognized and accepted, so that everyone working in the Indy food system is able to understand each other and work well together. During the strategic planning process we created a revitalized mission, vision, and group values for a membership-based coalition with April as the first paid staff.

Our newly formed mission statement is:

"Our mission is to enhance the health of our community by advocating for improving the food system and increasing access to resources and nutritious food."

At the end of the meeting, we created sub-groups "working groups or action teams" based upon our strategic directions. We will be working on defining and sculpting these at the February meeting. They are listed below:

Information Group: Share information among participating organizations and the general public.
Advocacy Group: Influence public policy in issues related to our mission.
Education Group: Educate the public about growing and eating healthy food.
Collaboration Group: Strengthen relationships among participating organizations to improve the impact in the community.
Support Group: Support growers and producers by providing access to resources that enhance their capacity.
Organization Group: Create a new structure for the group by analyzing the process by which we want to make decisions and understand how all of the moving pieces work together so that in the end the organization can have the greatest impact possible in the the community.

We will discuss more about these different sub-groups at the February Meeting. If you would like to join one, simply send me an email.

As always please feel free to pass on this invitation to anyone who may be interested in attending.
If you do, please Cc my email, so that I can keep track of the email addresses or send me any names/emails of people who should be invited. I'm slowly compiling of list of new people to invite to the meeting and will be writing personal letters of invitation explaining what we are doing.

Hope you have a great weekend =)