Grozone Friends Group Minutes of Meeting Wednesday 12th March 2014
Andy thanked all for attending & introduced Julie, Fe and Pete
Sarah presented Cynthia with a card and present from everyone. Thanks Sarah!
Actions from last meeting –
Lots of new ideas and systems for doing things. Pete, Fe & Julie have loads of experience of seeing what works and what doesn’t. Some things may take a bit of getting used to, but all will be worth it I promise. If new ideas don’t work, we change them.
We’ll be opening 6 days a week from Monday 31st March, and will focus each day on different activities and training opportunities. This will give everyone with particular interests and skills the opportunity to get more out of attending each session.
New raised beds – CWAC apprentices
Mitchell, Jo, Hollie, James, Taylor, Liam, Daniel & Charlotte started the beds Monday and did a cake sale for Grozone raising £180. Part of a national apprentice competition.
Dogs
A couple of incidents recently have highlighted the need for better supervision of dogs on site. Please make sure that you keep dogs on a lead at all times, and don’t let them foul anywhere in the garden. If they do, you have to clear it up completely and dispose of the waste at home or in the bins in the park. We can’t have dogs fouling vegetable patches
Rubbish – We need a better system for dealing with waste on site, one that is easier for everyone to understand and keep to. We think we should trial a system where all rubbish, recycling and compost goes into different wheelie bins, and that the recycling bins then get sorted as a regular volunteer task when they need it.
The value of aluminium cans is not as high as we thought, so from now on, please recycle cans, and all your paper and card at home, not here. We don’t need cardboard (newspapers work better and between us, the staff can provide all the paper we need).
Andy will hire a skip for a week to clear all the rubbish around the site and in the sheds that we don’t need, and from then on, we should all be able to keep the whole garden free of rubbish, & looking better and safer.
In short, please don’t bring anything into Grozone (apart from yourselves, your enthusiasm and energy, your lunches, and cakes of course) without prior agreement with me or Pete. Otherwise I might have to ask you to take it away again.
BJ noted that there was some corrugated scrap material on site - possibly asbestos. This was checked after the meeting and was found to be corrugated iron.
Inductions – from April we will start running monthly induction days when new volunteers get a fuller picture of what goes on and how everything works, including the toilet, Kelly kettles, waste management system, composting etc. We think it would be a great idea if all of our existing volunteers also took part in one.
Andy needs to update the volunteer records that we have in the office, and the new funding provides a great opportunity to do this, so from April we’ll be asking everyone to complete a new updated volunteer form and risk assessment, and also to take part in the project evaluation that we need to do. That way we can count all of your efforts towards the new project outcomes.
Training ideas? Chris suggested the idea of running some mindfulness training on site, which Andy will look into
Grozone website/blog/facebook –. We can’t access them due to lost passwords. Cynthia knows the one for the blog which she will pass on to Andy. Vince at Groundwork office is looking into the problem, as is Beth! Simon offered his help
AOB – Andy’s schools project funder has agreed that he can buy a couple more picnic tables – everyone agreed that they liked the ones purchased with the WREN funding, so Andy to order two of those. We will put one by the brew area and the other at the Forest School end of the Garden.
Growing ideas – we’ll discuss at the next meeting different crops that we’d all like to grow
Cynth – thank you again from us all
Date for next meeting - Wednesday 9th April.
Andy thanked all for attending & introduced Julie, Fe and Pete
Sarah presented Cynthia with a card and present from everyone. Thanks Sarah!
Actions from last meeting –
- Waitrose – Denise picked up a form to complete. Thank you
- Ramp to compost toilet – Ian will not be able to devote as much time to the project due to his new job – congratulations Ian, so Pete will now oversee the construction and link it into some form of training if possible
- Cooking Project – all of us – who wants to be part of a separate planning group?
Chris, Sarah, Simon, Ian, Amy, Mike, Cynthia, Robert and Denise all expressed an interest.
- New raised bed - Sam to advise after meeting?
- Improved firewood system and axe training from Pete
- Tin for firelighters/matches – we now have one
- Reorganising sheds – this has now mostly been done – should now be much easier to find what you need. We’re still working on it, and we need to re-label some boxes
- PV cells – batteries were stolen
- Bluebells - Simon to check with CWT & Pete with Norley to see if we can transplant some. We need to remove our Spanish varieties
Lots of new ideas and systems for doing things. Pete, Fe & Julie have loads of experience of seeing what works and what doesn’t. Some things may take a bit of getting used to, but all will be worth it I promise. If new ideas don’t work, we change them.
We’ll be opening 6 days a week from Monday 31st March, and will focus each day on different activities and training opportunities. This will give everyone with particular interests and skills the opportunity to get more out of attending each session.
New raised beds – CWAC apprentices
Mitchell, Jo, Hollie, James, Taylor, Liam, Daniel & Charlotte started the beds Monday and did a cake sale for Grozone raising £180. Part of a national apprentice competition.
Dogs
A couple of incidents recently have highlighted the need for better supervision of dogs on site. Please make sure that you keep dogs on a lead at all times, and don’t let them foul anywhere in the garden. If they do, you have to clear it up completely and dispose of the waste at home or in the bins in the park. We can’t have dogs fouling vegetable patches
Rubbish – We need a better system for dealing with waste on site, one that is easier for everyone to understand and keep to. We think we should trial a system where all rubbish, recycling and compost goes into different wheelie bins, and that the recycling bins then get sorted as a regular volunteer task when they need it.
The value of aluminium cans is not as high as we thought, so from now on, please recycle cans, and all your paper and card at home, not here. We don’t need cardboard (newspapers work better and between us, the staff can provide all the paper we need).
Andy will hire a skip for a week to clear all the rubbish around the site and in the sheds that we don’t need, and from then on, we should all be able to keep the whole garden free of rubbish, & looking better and safer.
In short, please don’t bring anything into Grozone (apart from yourselves, your enthusiasm and energy, your lunches, and cakes of course) without prior agreement with me or Pete. Otherwise I might have to ask you to take it away again.
BJ noted that there was some corrugated scrap material on site - possibly asbestos. This was checked after the meeting and was found to be corrugated iron.
Inductions – from April we will start running monthly induction days when new volunteers get a fuller picture of what goes on and how everything works, including the toilet, Kelly kettles, waste management system, composting etc. We think it would be a great idea if all of our existing volunteers also took part in one.
Andy needs to update the volunteer records that we have in the office, and the new funding provides a great opportunity to do this, so from April we’ll be asking everyone to complete a new updated volunteer form and risk assessment, and also to take part in the project evaluation that we need to do. That way we can count all of your efforts towards the new project outcomes.
Training ideas? Chris suggested the idea of running some mindfulness training on site, which Andy will look into
Grozone website/blog/facebook –. We can’t access them due to lost passwords. Cynthia knows the one for the blog which she will pass on to Andy. Vince at Groundwork office is looking into the problem, as is Beth! Simon offered his help
AOB – Andy’s schools project funder has agreed that he can buy a couple more picnic tables – everyone agreed that they liked the ones purchased with the WREN funding, so Andy to order two of those. We will put one by the brew area and the other at the Forest School end of the Garden.
Growing ideas – we’ll discuss at the next meeting different crops that we’d all like to grow
Cynth – thank you again from us all
Date for next meeting - Wednesday 9th April.