Thank you, volunteers! Enjoy lunch on us!
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We wanted to take a minute to thank all of our volunteers for their continued hard work! Ongoing volunteers are the life-blood of the farm. The main challenge with managing so many volunteers is the training involved. With ongoing volunteers, we're able to give them the proper training to complete a variety of tasks properly and efficiently. Some volunteers, such as Workday Leaders and interns even help with managing other volunteers. A key element of a successful volunteer workday is having a sufficient number of trained workday facilitators, including ongoing volunteers, in proportion to the untrained, new volunteers who are participating.
Volunteers have been especially helpful with harvesting since there is so much harvesting to do. For a harvest day to go well, we need a team of 10 committed volunteers who are willing to learn how to harvest and process a range of different vegetables. Many of our ongoing volunteers have these skills at this point, so it's easy to send them out to harvest tomatoes, cucumbers or some other crop with minimal supervision.
On the days we are short on volunteers, the work is much harder. The farm crew needs to work much faster, which is physically demanding in the heat, and sometimes end up working longer hours. Our farm is organized around there being lots of volunteer labor for us to be able to farm at a high intensity and produce a lot of food. Continuing to build our volunteer base is very important to our success.
Mark Medeiros
Farm Director