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Vegbox held its 2020 AGM on Thursday 18th June 2020, our first held as an online Zoom event. A total of 59 Vegbox members joined us for the meeting: thanks to all who joined and took part.

Key outcomes from AGM:

We presented our 2019 Annual Report, which you can download here:

https://vegbox.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Vegbox-Annual-Report-2019-reported-in-2020-1.pdf

We elected a new Board of Directors for the 2020-2021 period:

Africa Alconchel-Guido, Thomas Cuenot, Mariangela Giuliani, Conrad Langridge, Carla Ranicki, Ross Robertson, Ruth Soroko, Tom Steele and Ann Wong.

We described the need for a small price rise on the Small and Small+Fruit bags, which regularly go over budget. This will be 25p on the cost of the bag and will be implemented in August.

Further detail from AGM

We discussed and voted on some interesting points relating to ideas for reducing food waste:

For those with the fruit supplement, there was notable support for pausing the UK-grown apples when their quality goes down near the end of the season, and replacing with a high-value veg item instead. This would be for one or two months around March or April each year while we wait for the first new UK-grown fruit to arrive.

We highlighted that Vegbox is currently working to introduce swap boxes at some of the collection points to allow members to give away items they won’t use and take something else instead.

We confirmed that Vegbox donates excess food to worthy causes. One of our team collects most of the leftover bags at the weekends, and sends useable food to Life After Hummus, the emergency food distribution project in Somers Town.

We voted on the top three ideas for what Vegbox could provide to help members reduce food waste:

  1. More recipes on using up scraps or overlooked parts (e.g. carrot tops).
    2. Provide advice on freezing and preserving.
    3. Hold a monthly online ‘creative cooking clinic’ to share ideas on using up leftovers or problematic items.

There was also support for resuming Vegbox events and other ways to engage members; these may need to be online events while we are all still in partial lockdown.

We talked about volunteering. We really welcome Vegbox members volunteering with us and if you do you receive a discount on your weekly bag of veg. Most volunteers help us with packing produce at the Vegbox yard on Wednesday morning or afternoon, but there are also opportunities to help in other ways, particularly helping us recruit new members to the box scheme. Do get in touch if you’d like to help out!

We also briefly talked about the possibility of creating a patchwork farm of dispersed gardens, allotments and growing projects that could supply Vegbox. This would require a significant investment of staff time, but it is something we are interested in. If you have a glut of produce from a garden or project, feel free to share it with your fellow collection point members by putting it at your collection point with a sign about it.

Two new videos

We showed off two new videos that we’ve made recently.

The first – ‘About our scheme’ – features some cool drone footage of Ripple Farm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LeAtDWVqJI

The second – ‘We are Vegbox’ – showcases our members from the St George’s Church collection point: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=670732423771158

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