Ollie’s Notes going in:
Kelowna Community Fridge Reorganization meetings 2024
Wednesday March 13, 6-8pm Thursday March 14, 2-4pm
online at bit.ly/kcf-meet in person at Naked Café (571 Lawrence Ave)
Meeting Agenda:
Land Acknowledgement
Mutual Aid Review
Comm Fridge timeline
Finances
Organizing Organizers
Next Steps
Mutual Aid Review – found at this finely crafted link, or ollieo.art/kcf
Comm Fridge timeline [fleshed out at the Wednesday Meeting]
- Organizing started in 2020 by a group of 6 or so, grew enough to do a physical location
- was first hosted by the Kelowna Unitarian Church April 2021.
- that location closed December 2022 because of accessibility renovations
- Burke Hair Lounge hosted the fridge from February 2023 to end of September 2023. Continued hosting weekly markets until winter hit – seems to be a better structure for that space!
- Some of the main challenges faced were scarcity mindset, lack of cleaning and garbage management, lack of maintenance response causing pain and demotivation, overall lack of adequate communication, coordination, and organization.
- Some of the main successes were feeding hundreds, even thousands of people through both permanent and pop up outreach, creating more community connections by making space for people to come together. healing relationships with food and fellow humans, sharing the work! celebrating both giving and receiving – physical and emotional; all around, being part of interconnected community action
- Space for everyone to share a few sentences about their experiences :]
Finances
~$1400 in the bank account (~$900 in OpenCollective, but that is what amount has gone through there – not additional funds). Several people still contributing monthly, and have had some one-off donations as well.
Organizing Organizers
Committee Structure
some ideas at: bit.ly/kcf-roles
what are the minimum requirements we have? What roles do we need?
- Meeting organization
- volunteer welcome/structure
- Financial organization
- event organization
Next Steps Next Meetings? Forming Committees? Community Cooking? Pop Ups? Permanent? Locations? Rotating them? communication and outreach – email, website update, social media
What roles do people want to take on? What tasks do people want to do?
Kelowna Community Fridge Meeting – March 14th at Naked Café 2-4 pm
Minutes by: Joanne & notes from Ollie (please let me (Joanne) know if I have missed anything or changes are required)
NEXT MEETING: tentative week of March 25-29th. Probably Tuesday 26th. To be Confirmed. Keely offered to Host, with Ollie assisting. (ed. note: Ended up being an open discussion meeting, as Keely was not able to host)
Attendees: Ollie, Joanne, Keely, Madi, Erica, Denise, Terry, Valentine
Land Acknowledgement: Ollie started the meeting at 2:15 with the Land Acknowledgement, that we live and organize on syilx land.
Mutual Aid Review: Everyone at the meeting had a good understanding of mutual aid framework. Additional document with more information was shared at the meeting.
Community Fridge Timeline – Ollie prepared a document with a timeline of the Kelowna Community Fridge. We talked about the fridge and gave everyone an understanding of where it started.
Finances – Ollie stated that we have around 1400.00 in our bank account, coming in thru Open Collective monthly and adhoc. A new recent donation of 250.00. Good to see. We use Open Collective, and we have a bank account. Currently Ollie holds the bank card. We will work toward a finance type committee with more individuals.
Organizing Organizers – a lively discussion with many ideas. Here is a summary.
We discussed the importance of coordination, communication, and organization. We all agreed that Communication is one of the most important contributors to success.
We discussed what was necessary as a bare minimum to get the fridge going again.
- Meeting Organizers – who will chair the meeting and take minutes? This is key and it would be great if we had a group that are willing to share Chairing the meeting and taking minutes.
- Communication and Outreach – another important group to help get us started and to be successful
- Volunteer organization/Welcome group
- Financial
- Media – Erica mentioned she would like to be part of this group – as well as Valentine assisting with Emails.
- Other groups would be Cleaning, donation seeking, and event organization.
We discussed a new fridge location. As part of this discussion, Ollie mentioned that we have had individuals come forward either offering a used fridge, to buy a new fridge, so that is not a limiting factor.
There are 3 location options on the table:
- Madi brought forward the potential for OKGN Lifestyle to host the Fridge. They are downtown on Cannery Lane next to Sprout Bakery. The staff has a vision board which includes a community fridge! They already engage in community culture with an open hangout policy for the shop, so welcoming people to the Fridge would be an easy extension of that. There’s disposal close by that garbage bags could be put directly in, which would make cleaning much more approachable! Given the general interest in this location at the meeting, Madi will be approaching the owners to see what next steps would be.
- The United Church on Bernard and Richter was in talks with the fridge back in October. Joanne reached out to Keith and he is still interested in talking and discussing the options with us.
- Ollie also heard from Erika about the Baptist Church on Bernard and Richmond whose minister expressed interest in hosting KCF in December 2022. Might be an option to pursue.
No decision was made at this meeting. We hope to have more information at the next meeting.
It was decided that we would continue to use WhatsApp as a communication platform until we can find a better solution as it was felt that WhatsApp doesn’t give us the flexibility we want. For now, we will use the following chats on WhatsApp. Some at the meeting have already joined a few of the groups.
KCF General Chat – if you haven’t joined this, please check with Ollie to get an invite.
KCF Media Team (this will also hold the Communication Team for now) – ask to join if you are interested. Be patient as Ollie is currently the only one that can approve, and they may not see it immediately.
KCF Cooking/Food Preparation Team
Keely talked about Discord as a possibility for communication and organization, and Valentine mentioned that meetings could also be done using Discord. Ollie also suggested Brightest. (Brightest.io). The solution should be easy to use, easy to organize documents etc, and maybe have a volunteer schedule that can be used as well. We also have a website that we can be reviewed.
It was suggested that people could take a look at the 2 communication options and we can discuss and decide at the next meeting. Any other suggestions would be welcome as well.
Final Thoughts:
We will reconvene in a couple weeks – the idea is to start reaching out and forming commitees in the meantime, thinking and practicing how they might work, as well as reaching out to more people through social networks and such, so more people can take part and hopefully collaboratively set up a very stable framework for the Fridge.
Kelowna Community Fridge 