Steering Committee Meeting Minutes – May 15, 2019

Steering Committee Meeting Minutes – May 15, 2019

In Attendance: Mary B., Rice S., Ann A., Susan M., Angie B.

We reviewed Shared Effort Jobs needing to be filled which are all in the area of administrative tasks.  Currently there is a need for the following: 1) General administration –Vendor Worksheet, basic parts of Foodclub, and has access to all the Gmail accounts. Create the new cycle tabs in the Vendor Worksheet, populate yearly summary financial sheet, add new vendors/products, do basic catalog updates on Foodclub, send emails from Foodclub, adjust member orders, give credits to member accounts, backup for archiving/opening catalogs, etc; 2) Cycle Co-Coordinator – Assisting Laila, tracking orders throughout the cycle; 3) Processing Member Payments – currently being done by Mary; needs to be passed on to someone else to lighten the load Mary has been carrying; 4) CPW Catalog Updates – Currently done by Angie; needs to be passed on to someone else to lighten the load Angie has been carrying.; 5) Early Cashier – Or there was a suggestion that the cashiering job could be done by one person with hours from 1:30-5:00/5:30 pm. Will discuss with Gail, current Late Cashier.

Mary contacted several people that we identified at the last meeting as potential members to take on admin roles, but has not made contact yet. Rice mentioned that Gavin had inquired; Rice will talk with him about taking on the CPW Catalog Updates.

Upcoming Shared Effort Substitute Needs:

• Laila – Mary will do Invoice Processing for this cycle.

• Angie – Gone for much of June cycle; need someone to do CPW Order Processing – Angie will ask Faith; and CPW Catalog Updates – perhaps Gavin or Angie thinks there will be very few produce updates, so could be skipped in June.

Bag Reduction Project – Would be great to get a committee together to take this on. Would be helpful to have someone from repack on the committee an also someone who sews.

Food Stamps – Rice had been contacted by KJ about her working on getting DCO to be able to accept Food Stamps. We will ask KJ to see if she is willing to do the research and then report back to the Steering Committee to assess what needs to be done and how it would affect current systems/workload.

Mountain Rose Herbs – Need a process for updating the catalog. Ann will ask KJ for ideas of how this might be done. Also, we will no longer be contacting members to verify that they are okay with the price of their MRH items before ordering; members need to check the MRH catalog price before ordering and there is a pop-up box to this affect that comes up when ordering in Foodclub. Rice contacted Polly to let her know she doesn’t need to do this any longer; this will allow the order to go in sooner and hopefully help to have the MRH order get here in time for pick-up.

There is an issue with prices not updating during invoice processing, even when box has been checked. Need more information on which catalogs do and don’t update. Ann will ask KJ for info.

Membership Meeting – Planning to have an all-member meeting this summer. Rice will send-out a survey to SC for choosing a date, probably in July. We need to clearly express to members the current state of DCO. Need to think about what we want/need from members other than completing tasks.Susan offered to create a graphic representation of the cycle process showing each shared effort job, person responsible, hours it takes, trained subs, etc. to help members see the bigger picture of what goes into each cycle.

Future of DCO Discussion – Burnout among a few people doing a large share of work persists. We are still in dire need of more people to take on some Admin tasks. We are questioning if the current form of DCO is sustainable in light of the fact that there are not enough people willing to take on more responsibility. There is a lot of complexity in the current system. Packaged software (Foodclub) has allowed for a broader selection of products and made some things easier to administer while increasing complexity and creating a need for skilled computer work. Also, complexity increases with so many different people doing small pieces of the whole; requires a lot of communication between vendors/members/admin. There are some admin tasks that are only known by 1 person; so in addition to needing more members to take on open admin jobs, we need people to cross-train so we have substitutes for all work.  We had brainstorming session to consider ways to reduce work/complexity:To reduce work/complexity we could consider: 1) ways to scale back on products or # of catalogs; 2) ordering less often from some catalogs – comments that this could be somewhat confusing; 3) not using Foodclub – although, who is going to create a different system?; 4) not doing splits, only full cases; 5) Uploading catalogs in full and allowing ordering of any products – strong opposition to this; 6) People paying higher rate for not working – this would do nothing to help get the work done as we need MORE people doing the work not less. The end result of any change would need to be a reduction in total ADMINISTRATIVE work hours for a DCO cycle.

We also did an exercise of asking ourselves, “What would you do if DCO did not exist? What would you miss? Would it leave a void and how would you fill it?” We found this to be interesting and useful. We agreed that it would be a good exercise to ask this at the Member Meeting.

A printable Doc of these minutes can be found HERE.