This November started off with a very pleasant but low-key afternoon of garlic planting and garden bed prototyping with some club members. We welcomed Kai to our admin team, passed our first official motion as an incorporated board (to open a bank account), and about mid-month Sonja and Eric attended a huge conference for cooperatives in Vancouver. The conference lead to conversations with a lot of supportive people and we came away with pages full of notes and a long list of awesome contacts. We also settled on a bed design which has been long in the works and is finally ready for trial installations. We haven’t had installation-ready beds since we abandoned our square designs in 2020 so it’s with pleasure that we conclude this long period of uncertainty about such a central part of our project. Finally, we attended a great workshop for new board members by Cooperatives First that covered cooperative governance, policy-making, insurance, and taxation.
This month we also
- set December 10th as the date of our first Annual General Meeting,
- documented all of the things we’re now responsible for as a cooperative (e.g. AGMs, record-keeping, and annual reporting),
- read through a bunch of rules to figure out which CRA program accounts we should register for as part of an ongoing effort to acquire a business number,
- made a big list of stuff we need to do and organized it into a dependency graph to help us prioritize our work,
- discussed opportunities for more club engagement (e.g. specific member roles, design challenges),
- started plans for another food preservation workshop,
- moved the primary board communications to Discord,
- made good progress on our logo design, and
- met with a member of GVAT to discuss possible use cases for a piece of software that would facilitate community deliberation and decision-making.