Kitsap Harvest’s Grow-A-Row project is intended to connect home gardeners’ excess garden harvest to Kitsap County’s vulnerable populations without access to nutritious food, prevent food waste from home producers and farmers markets, and build community capacity for food production and sharing. Kitsap County gardeners, connected by a network of donation stations, distribution volunteers, and our aggregation station, can deliver fresh seasonal locally grown produce to feed communities most at risk for food insecurity and malnutrition and build regional sustainability and resilience through grassroots community care.
The growth of the program will require coordination of many volunteers, destinations for donated produce, community gardens, farmers market donation stations, as well as building the framework and capacity to grow in the future. Establishing this network will require a number of skills and responsibilities to be shared across a committee of dedicated volunteers.
The Kitsap Harvest Grow-A-Row program will be facilitated by a working committee consisting of 6 volunteer members. The meeting frequency of the committee will likely vary over the course of the calendar year. Certain categories of responsibilities will have more to do in some seasons than others. The committee will need to be adaptable and collaborative.
These are initial conceptions of the needs of the committee and the different responsibilities that can be grouped by skill set into roles for individual members. In reality, committee members can flexibly collaborate and share skill sets, time and energy amongst themselves as a group according to the emergent needs and goals of the program.
Grow A Row, for yourself, for your neighbor, for your community.
The categories of responsibilities/intended roles of these committee members are as follows:
Committee Role 5: Committee Facilitator
This member will facilitate committee meetings and coordinate closely with all other members of the committee as well as the board of Kitsap Harvest.
Responsibilities will include:
- Coordinate between the different members of the committee
- Schedule and facilitate committee meetings
- Take minutes/notes for committee meetings
- Track time for committee meetings
- Follow up with committee members after meetings on any remaining questions, needs, or action items that come up.
- Track other ongoing activities to ensure supportive collaboration
- Develop and expand new programming under Grow-A-Row in order to meet the evolving needs of the program.
- Seek external funding sources, write, and apply for grants to support ongoing and newly developed programs.
- Coordinate with other committee members including the communication member, volunteer coordinator, data manager, gardening resource guide, and accounts manager.
- Regularly communicate and coordinate with the board of Kitsap Harvest.
