Well, here we are, the gardening group, renamed the St Clair Sustainability Group six years ago, is moving into its 10th year in 2020! While I never really considered a ‘use by’ date for the group, I am still a tad surprised we are still here! So I guess it is time for a bit of a review.
What has remained the same
The venue is still the same – Autumnleaf Neighbourhood centre – and we still meet on the third Monday of the month, February through to November, starting at 7:00pm and going to whenever, but usually somewhere between 8:00pm and 8:30pm. This works out well because we hire the hall for 2 hrs and I am usually unlocking to set up at around 6:30pm, but even on the odd occasions we have gone over, no one has ever said anything.
We have had one or two guest speakers over the years but mostly it is still me, developing and running a presentation. Sometimes this gives me a chance to road-test ideas for presentation I do for councils or PSW and sometimes they are specifically for the St Clair group. My initial efforts were set up so they could be downloaded in the ‘Resources’ area of the site but over the years I have been using less wording and making more use of pictures. This seems to make for a more interesting talk (and no death by powerpoint!) but also makes for much larger files than the site can handle (2mB maximum file size) so they no longer get put up for others to use, unfortunately.
Our attendees still vary anywhere from 4 to 10 people to a session, with 6 to 8 regular die hards. There are occasional ones who come along for a while, or even just once, then drop out and we never see them again. Our biggest success story is Mick and Bridget, who saw one of our fliers in the local library and came along, stayed with the group for years, joined Permaculture Sydney West and then moved to their own farm in Tasmania, a couple of years ago!
What has changed
The Projector - Our little Samsung Pico SP-H03 projector passed on a few years ago and we now have a full size Epson EB-S130 projector which is coupled to my laptop computer with a USB and HTMI cable. This has two distinct advantages over the old one: firstly, it has much more power and so works well in daylight or with the room lights on (reducing the problem of people falling asleep during my talks) and it has a cordless remote so I can move the presentation on without having to hover around the back of the projector, pushing buttons. It is too large to be stable on the tripod, so gets set up, along with the computer, on one of the folding tables.
Social media – I now advertise each meeting on a number of local and Australia-wide Facebook groups, including our Under the Choko Tree Facebook page, as well as sending out an email to all of the regulars, reminding them of the upcoming meeting and what will be discussed.
Meeting format – The original format was an hour or so of me gabbing on, coffee, then a practical section. Over time this proved to be too hard to keep going. A lot of the subjects people were interested in were just too difficult to arrange a practical component for. We still do the odd practical session but it is only one or two a year, rather than every meeting. So the usual format now is for me to do my talk, then we have coffee and biscuits.
Also, at the end of last year (2019), I suggested we revisit some of the older topics, because we have almost a whole new crowd compared to the early days, so I drew up a list and got people to vote for their favourite ones. This gave me a list of popular topics which I was able to draw from during the year, although I did sneak in a couple of new ones I was working on too. Quite often, I would revamp an older one and include some new content to improve it.
Costs – while not huge, the cost of hiring the hall has increased over the years and now that I am semi-retired we no longer find ourselves able to fully fund the meetings as we used to, so we ask the regulars to kick in at the start of the year. It doesn’t cover everything but it helps.
So there you have it, will we still be at it in another 10 years, who knows? But the last 10 have been fun!
