The LocalFiber Quarterly Meeting

Community is the foundation on which LocalFiber is built and quarterly meetings are a vital component of building that community.

Meetings build community and drive purpose

According to the EPA’s Public Participation Guide meetings; “bring diverse stakeholders together for a specific purpose, engage participants in information sharing and discussion. Meetings can be used for an ongoing means of engaging public involvement, and help build a feeling of community“. This is exactly why LocalFiber hosts quarterly meetings; to bring the community together, to work together, and to create and reach common goals.

What we do at quarterly meetings:

Every quarterly meeting has 3 components: Education, Community, & Action.

Education –

Quarterly meetings always begin with an educational component, be it a speaker, or a panel discussion, or a round table. The topics are chosen by the LocalFiber community and the ‘guests’ come from a variety of disciplines. They can represent a component in the supply chain, a related community organization, or experts on a given subject.

Community –

Building community means having time to get to know each other; being able to have unstructured conversations and make organic connections. We make time for this at every quarterly meeting. After the speaker (or roundtable, or panel discussion) we break for lunch and encourage the participants to get-to-know each other, meet someone new – someone they haven’t met before. Often times the connections made in these moments go beyond the meeting. The participants become resources for each other, they become ‘community’.

Action –

While education and community building are valuable, the primary reason people attend the LocalFiber quarterly meetings is to affect change. Therefore, during the last hour-or-so, we talk ‘business’: note upcoming events, create action plans, share ideas and what has been going on over the past few months, and identify and address our shared supply chain challenges. It is during this part of the meeting that we experience the strength of the community that we are building.

Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing more about ‘Action’ and what goes on behind the scenes to make it work.

If you are a fiber producer or enthusiast in the Finger Lakes/CNY regions and are interested in getting involved with LocalFiber contact us, the more the merrier (and the more effective of a community we can be)!

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller