2022 Meeting of Owners Recap
Hello Cooperators!
As many of you know, we just held our Annual Meeting of Owners (MoO) to elect our Board of Directors and vote for our 2023 slate of Round-Up for Good organizations on September 29th.
The meeting went well and I just wanted to send out a recap for those who could not make it. Thank you so much to all of our attendees and the great questions that were asked!
Our outgoing President JP Goguen spoke about our attempts to return to normal, in person meetings, but due to COVID that has been delayed. He also spoke about the Board's work including a Market Study and Financial Audit to help us begin researching future plans for the Coop. He spoke about communication with owners. He informed the owners that the Board approved paying off the remainder of our 2012 expansion loans! He also spoke about how we are recapping previous Board meetings and previewing our next meeting with "Board Bits." This is signage located in front of the checkouts. JP then introduced our candidates for the Board.
I spoke about many things including the Supply Chain Disruptions that we have experienced since the beginning of Covid, local farm closures and transitions, global warming, water shortages in the Southwest United States, the fragility of our global food economy in relation to the Russia/Ukraine war and how all of this is feeding into the extreme food inflation we are now experiencing. I also addressed questions that I have received regarding whether or not people should be stocking up on items that may soon be in short supply and, if so, what those items should be. I spoke about some ways to maximize your food budget and how Common Ground can help with that. I continued with updates on our staffing situation which has much improved over the past year, and the difficulties of handling the upcoming minimum wage increases. I spoke about being committed to doing all we can for our Staff in the face of slightly declining sales and the possibility of an upcoming recession which could cause consumers to shift spending towards less healthy conventional food and away from the fantastic organics that we are committed to. I spoke briefly about the coop ordering a little extra of a few items that we feel may soon be in short supply. I ended with information regarding excessive Credit Card Processing fees (we paid out over $150,000 last year) and legislation that has been introduced to increase competition that will hopefully lower those costs for businesses. Please remember that we do not pay these fees on cash transactions and that CASH is COOPERATIVE!
Our Marketing Manager, Sarah, spoke about our community impacts, cultural cuisine classes, upcoming classes, farm tours, turkey preorders and our recently reopened Cafe!
Our Outreach Coordinator, Liz, spoke about our highly successful 2022 Owner Drive and referral program, our Food for All program, and gave an update on our Round up for Good statistics (Almost $529,000 has been raised since we began the program in 2012!) She also spoke about our decision to devote 2 months from Round Up for Good to Food For All, our food access program, that is becoming so popular this step needed to be taken so we could continue to support it.
We wrapped up the meeting by taking questions from our owners.
Thank you all so much for reading, thank you again to the meeting attendees, and if anyone has any other questions regarding Common Ground please feel free to email me!
Take Care,
Gary