Canmore Community Gardening Society
Growing Food! Building Community! Gardening Together!
Join Our Board!
It’s 2016. We have signed the lease, built our community garden with its wildlife-proof fence, a greenhouse and a shed, and the Canmore Community Gardening Society has entered its “maintenance phase”. We have completed our big tasks. Now we need to keep things rolling along to ensure we continue to have access to our community garden. Even though we have no more major projects in our near future, we still need Garden Members to join the Board and keep things functioning smoothly. Ideally we should have at least ten Members on our Board. We currently have five. That means we would love to add at least five new Board Members this spring, both Communal and Plot gardeners. Your contribution is vital to keeping the Canmore Community Gardening Society a vibrant, healthy organization, and to keeping our community garden open and operating.
What do Board Members do? The quick answer is we meet regularly to make decisions about the Society and its projects, the main project being the community garden. The longer answer is we endeavour to provide good governance and leadership for the organization. We are also a managing board so we identify and follow through on all issues that come up as well as organizing events, meetings, and registration. This is not to say that Board Members do everything themselves. Ideally, the Board will identify items that need to happen and then delegate many of these tasks to volunteers. Management items the Board works on and oversees on include:
- Registration of new Members and registration of the Season’s Community Gardeners, collecting payment
- Taking inventory and ordering supplies, Communal Garden seeds, compost…
- Ensuring communication between the Plot Gardeners and the Garden Co-ordinator and Board
- Ensuring communication between Communal Garden teams, and between the teams and the Garden Co-ordinator and Board
- Co-ordinating volunteers and work teams, ensuring jobs get done
- Organizing the Opening and closing Work Parties, and the Annual General Meeting
- Troubleshooting disease and pests
- Monitoring the Garden to ensure that policies are followed.
- Identifying projects that are in keeping with CCGS goals of promoting community and gardening knowledge, like workshops, off-season events(guest speakers, movie nights)
- Fundraising
- Applying for grants
- Hiring, training and supervising summer employees
- Maintenance of website, blog, Facebook page
The Executive
The Board includes Members-At-Large and three executive positions:
- President: The President is responsible for preparing the agendas and chairing both the Board meetings and the Annual General Meeting. She/He also writes the President’s Report to present at the AGM. That is the President’s official job. The President also usually provides leadership to the organization and liaises with the community, government and other organizations as needed. The position of President is vacant and hopefully will be filled at the AGM.
- Secretary: The Secretary is responsible to take the minutes at the meetings, keep the CCGS’s official minutes and documents, maintain Membership records and oversee registration. The position of Secretary is currently filled.
- Treasurer: The Treasurer is responsible for keeping track of and reporting to the Board on the CCGS’s finances, compiles the budget, arranges for the audit and presents the Treasurer’s Report at the AGM. Because we do not have a budget for staff, the Treasurer also looks after the bookkeeping, banking and payroll, and filing the corporate Annual Return. The position of Treasurer is currently filled.
Benefits of being on The Board:
- Get to know like-minded people in your community by working with them.
- Have a say in how things are done and the satisfaction of keeping your community garden running well.
- Ensure the projects and programs you would like to see in the community garden happen.
- Gain experience. CCGS sends Board Members to Board development seminars and workshops when available.
If you are interested in finding out more about joining the Canmore Community Gardening Board, you are invited to attend the next Board meeting (our last one before the AGM) on Wednesday March 16, 2016 at 7pm. Please email us if you have any questions.