Equity and your Farmers Market Board of Directors
Paige Dampier, Close to Home Organics
Ruby Campbell, Director of Advancement, Faculty Art & Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University
People step forward to volunteer as board members for their local Farmers Market for all sorts of reasons, commonly sharing a desire to contribute to local food security, and to connect their community with local farmers. It is not likely that they step forward thinking: "I hope I can do this with a bunch of like-minded white people", and yet farmers market boards are often without much, if any, BIPOC representation. In this workshop, we'll explore what board governance is, and how boards can be active in engaging a more diverse representation of their community.
Participants will learn about actively recruiting and orienting new board members with equity as a guiding principle. We will shine a light on governance structure and the language used to describe it as key ways to better understand what we are asking volunteers to do, and how structure and language can act as barriers to participation.
