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FS4 Pre-season Newsletter
Welcome to Fair Shares Season Four!
We have a new newsletter format! Join us on our learning curve. Remember that you can always access the newsletter on the Newsletter Page of the website.
Those of you who have renewed your membership may find a bit of the information in this newsletter repetitive, but PLEASE READ IT ANYWAY because some of it is new information!
Newsletter Schedule
We will try to get the weekly newsletter out in a timely manner on Tuesday evenings for Wednesday pickups, and on Wednesday evenings for Thursday pickups. The amount of work involved sometimes doesn't allow us to get it out until the wee hours of the morning–especially in the summer when the produce is abundant and the organization is very time consuming. Many people request that we get the newsletter out earlier so that you may know what food you will receive beforehand, but this is impossible because we don’t always know what we will get until it shows up. Experience has shown that when a change occurs from what we say is in the share and what is actually in the share, a tremendous amount of time is spent trying to explain what happened. Because we allow trades on non-produce items, this also causes big headaches when the actual list changes after members email their trades. As we mentioned in the previous email, and again in this newsletter, you can see what will be in the upcoming week's shares by looking at the other food lists in the newsletter. We will explain trades in the first newsletter, at your pickup site, and at the orientation meeting Tuesday at 5:00, so please wait to email any questions.
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Weekly Food Lists
The food lists will be posted in the Newsletter each week. They are numbered 1-7, and members will find their pick-up site groups (FSA, FSB, FSC, FSD, FSE, FSF, KW, STC, UCA, UCB) listed by the food list you’ll receive for the week. The groups then rotate through each food list, so if you are receiving list 2 this week, you will receive list 3 next week, and so on. As was explained in the previous email that listed your pickup group (if you did not receive the previous email, please let us know), certain pickup site groups share a food list with another pickup site group, to bring the total number of members in each group up to 45. These pickup site groupings will not change during the season, and members are assigned to pickup site groups permanently. Members at the Fair Shares and U City pickup sites will be asked which group they are in since there are multiple groups at those sites. Half share members will receive the newsletter weekly, not just on their pickup week, and we encourage everyone to read through it each week for any important information you might need to know, since this is our method of communicating with members.
Although we are unable to email out the food lists early, you can still get a general idea of the food you will receive the following week by checking the next food list. We try to keep the basic, non-produce foods the same for a seven-week rotation so that each of the seven groups will have the opportunity to try everything. But, as produce comes in, we will pull certain non-produce items to fit the produce into the share budget. Meat, eggs, and pasta stay consistent in the lists throughout the seven week rotations, but other non-produce items may be pulled as needed. After each seven weeks, we switch up the varieties of non-produce items in the food lists to introduce new goodies into the shares.
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New Member Orientation: Tuesday April 12, 5p.m. at Fair Shares
We would love to save everyone some time on their first pickup and give the low down to new members from all pickup sites by offering a quick orientation at our main Fair Shares site. Full and half share members are welcome.
Where to go for your food!
Click here for directions and details about each of the pickup sites.
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The Fair Shares Team
Fair Shares employs five people (three of them are in the photo above) to handle the 315 weekly shares with over 70 vendors and four pickup sites over two days of pickups. There is a lot that goes into this complex and complicated puzzle, and we rely heavily on the help of many member and non-member volunteers (one of them is in the photo above). We could not do it alone! Thank you to our devoted volunteers for contributing to the community aspect of our Community Supported Agriculture!
The U City pickup, for instance, is run entirely by member volunteers and Sara’s husband Stephen (our one INvolunteer). We have regular volunteers on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays who help weigh, count, divvy, package and distribute all the foods at the four pickup sites. We have volunteers who help enter data and organize events--we need more volunteers for these two tasks specifically right now!
So volunteer with us! If you have any spare time to donate and would like to help make Fair Shares run smoothly, please email us at membership@fairshares.org to let us know what you can offer in the way of time and know-how.
Important note: Fair Shares volunteers get first dibs on special and limited availability items, as well as other perks! Wink wink, nudge nudge.
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Recipes, Tips and Nutritional Information
We try to include tips and nutritional information to help you figure out what that mystery item is-–and part of the fun for us is to introduce you to new things, and expand your food horizons.
We’ll include at least one recipe each week, and we try to incorporate several items from a particular share in the recipe. If the food in the recipe isn’t in your share for the week, take note, because you’re likely to be receiving it over the next seven weeks, so remember to use the past newsletters as resource, too. Ask us for ideas when you pick up--we love talking about food and sharing our experiences! Ask the other members at your pickup group as well--we have an awesome resource here.
We encourage members to share ideas, recipes and tips on the forum, which is a great community base for information. We have updated our website to include a recipe database that cross references the Fair Shares ingredients and includes all the recipes from the newsletters, as well as recipes posted on the forum, so help us create a fantastic database of recipes by contributing your favorites on the forum. We are working on the plan to make this all more user-friendly, and anyone with time to help with updating the online database can email projects@fairshares.org.
Stay tuned for the Fair Shares Season 4 Week 1 Newsletter!
sara, Jamie, Lindy, Kevin and Arianna
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