Funding for Farmers' Market Envisioning and Design Process

Greetings to all who are interested in seeing Lane County Farmers have a year round indoor-outdoor market in Eugene.

The year-round farmers market has been in and out of popular discussion for several years now, but has lacked focus and sustained energy. The Willamette Farm and Food Coalition has decided to host a series of facilitated discussions to move the conversation forward with the purpose of drafting designs and creating a business plan.

The Lane County Farmers' Market is happy to have the Willamette Farm and Food Coalition (www.lanefood.org) taking the lead and plans to participate in the discussions.

Local citizen activist Erin Ely is trying to help us with our effort by using the Internet. Advanta Corporation sponsors an online "idea" competition at their www.ideablob.com website. The best idea of the month, determined by the votes of website visitors, wins $10,000. Erin Ely entered this competition two months ago with the idea for a permanent Farmers' Market for Eugene. She lost the contest by a mere 20 votes! She is trying again this month—May 2008.

If Erin wins, she will donate the $10,000 to Willamette Farm and Food Coalition to facilitate public discussion of farmers' market options, and to draft a preliminary presentation of 2 or 3 designs as well as a business plan. So we want you to help us help her win!

This is what you need to know about voting in the competition:

1. You will need to register on the www.ideablob.com site by creating a username and password and email address. This takes about 3-4 minutes. (You do NOT have to give your physical address and they will not spam you with advertising.) If you already registered and voted before, you will not need to reregister but you do need your username and password to get in to vote again.

2. Once you have registered, Ideablob will send an email with a link that you must click on to confirm your registration.

3. Now you get to vote, which takes all of 30 seconds. When we submit the idea on May 15, we will email you the link to click on to go and vote for the Farmers Market idea.

4. BUT, you have to vote twice, once during this time period from May 15 to May 21, and again at the end of the month from May 22 to May 28.

If Erin's idea gets swamped with votes the first week (May 15 to May 21), she gets bumped into the finals round, which requires that we all vote a second time (May 22 to May 28). Think of it like voting in the primaries and again in the general election.

We will need over 1,000 votes to win, so we need everyone to register and vote if we want to make this a reality.

We will send you the reminders with a link straight to the idea for voting!

We just wanted to give you a heads up that they will be coming, and the details of what it's all about. Take a moment today to register, and then you'll be ready to vote next week. www.ideablob.com

You do not need to live in Eugene to support and vote for this project on www.ideablob.com

Please pass this around to your networks so we can maximize our exposure.

Thank you for your support.

Erin, Lynne and Dan