Cortez Farmers Market, Montezuma County, Cortez, Colorado

Cortez Farmers Market

Minutes from the February 26, 2008 Market Committee Meeting

 

Minutes from Feb. 26 meeting

 

First, a couple of dates:

* The spring meeting will be Tues., April 8 at 7 pm at the extension office.

* Our appearance with the county commissioners will be Mon., March 10 at 11:30 am, upstairs in the west wing of the courthouse building. ***should we have our next meeting afterwards, instead of March 11?***

* The bake sale is Saturday, April 19 at City Market (time? 10:00-2:00?)
 

Marketing

  • I had a great chat with Fiona King, the illustrator, a couple of days ago. She would like to work with us, and will email me some images to get the ball rolling in about a week. We tossed around the amount of $250, and some additional compensation in the form of crediting her when possible, produce… maybe one of our grants could help pay her?

  • Fiona was cool with the idea of using the poster image as our logo, but we agreed that that would only work with the right image, that being one that is simple and would read well small and in black and white. I’ll know more about that when I see her poster ideas. If that’s not gonna work, I’ll go ahead with the image that we chose at the last meeting.

  • Michele – any news from Rosie regarding putting the “free sticker” coupon on a flyer for the Agritourism booth at the Ag Expo? I’ll need to know by Mar. 5 so I can get flyers to the Expo on the 6th. If no, I’ll just do something catchy to remind people about Farmers Market.

  • Laurie will do a production schedule for the recipe book, Chele is gathering recipes, let’s all brainstorm on other content we’d like to see in the recipe book.

  • Looks like the production of the courthouse building banner will be under $300.00.

 

Fundraising

  • Start working on a “Patrons of the Cortez Farmers Market” idea – initially targeting area businesses. We may produce an “I support the Cortez Farmers Market” window sticker.

  • Chele handed off some grant info to Barbara for a matching funds grant. Laurie forwarded an email from Tom to the committee about another grant opportunity. Barbara, can you have some action items for us for the next meeting?

 

Music

  • Chele is writing the letter to city council for paying the musicians

  • We agreed at the last meeting to do a “seeking musicians” ad and flyer within a month, and maybe get an article done in the paper.

 

Events

  • Regarding the indoor pre-season market at “Picaya”, we agreed to stay out of helping to organize it.

  • With input from the committee, Laurie will work on ideas for the Farmers Market’s involvement in the local food awareness fundraising dinner at The Cabins at Bear Creek. The dinner is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 6.

 

EBT/info booth

  • Laurie is meeting with Tom and Ashton (the building administrator) on Mar. 14 to see about storage space for the tent, table, chairs, etc.

  • We’ll all start compiling ideas, information for stuff to make the info booth interesting, appealing, and informative for our shoppers. The booth needs a banner, I think we can make it. Woohoo!

  • Kim will keep us posted on any administrative work that needs to be done in preparing for EBT. She reminded us of the (approx) $50.00 fee that we’ll owe.

 

Friends

  • A couple of people from the Growers Club meeting were interested, but I feel like we need to be more proactive about getting this together. How about setting a preliminary meeting date, letting our prospects know about it, running a community events notice to attract others, and hopefully get between 5-10 volunteers out of it? Can we each come up with a couple of prospects to invite?

  • We agreed that the Friends will be doing the work out of their love for the farmers market, and to show our appreciation we will run a thank you ad at the end of the season, and maybe put together produce baskets as gifts.

  • We hope to have the Friends committee together by the end of March (yikes!)

 

By-laws, formalizing rules and regulations

  • Laurie handed off a stack of paperwork from the Agricultural Law Center and the Durango Farmers Market to Barbara for her to distill whatever might be helpful in creating our documents. Kim will research other farmers market’s by-laws so we might have a model to work from.

  • We want to be sure to include: participation in the EBT program is mandatory; permanent vs temporary space guidelines, period of time that a vendor can be absent before losing their space. What else?

 

I think that’s it. Have a great day!

peace, Laurie