Our chapters, and their areas

A chapter is a team of students at one school, meeting weekly at lunch.

Between 8 and 12 students, one room, one 45-minute session a week at lunch, and a Teacher Advisor copied on every outside message. Six roles run a chapter: Chapter Lead, Deputy Lead, Outreach Editor, List Builder, Follow-up Clerk and Records and Hours Clerk. A new chapter starts with three, Chapter Lead, Deputy Lead and Outreach Editor, and grows into the rest. The chapter belongs to its own school, with the principal’s written approval, which is why it can keep going from one year to the next. Members are unpaid and the session is a standing one: a role is held for the season, not for a single afternoon.

HQ assigns each chapter its area in writing, by county, regional district, municipality or census division, with the date recorded.

Once HQ has assigned the area, the List Builder builds the area’s farm list from published sources. Every entry carries the source it came from and the date a student checked it, and the record is kept. That list is the chapter’s working ground for the season: it is added to, corrected and closed off as farms answer, and it is the reason a chapter can say exactly where it stands.

A short set of rules decides who works where. They exist to make sure one farm hears from one chapter and one chapter only.

One. An area belongs to one chapter at a time. Two. HQ assigns the area in writing, with its date, and keeps a shared do-not-contact list across all chapters. Three. No chapter sends more than 40 first contacts in a week. That is a ceiling, not a target. Four. Every farm on the list is a commercial farm business, recorded with the source and the date it was checked. We never ask about produce from backyard, home or community gardens. Five. A farm that asks not to be contacted again is added to the shared do-not-contact list that day, and stays on it. The rules are short because they do one job.

Every chapter keeps the same record: the farms on its list, every contact, and the outcome of each one. The Records and Hours Clerk owns it, and the Outreach Editor signs off every farm record. A chapter that knows exactly where it stands can hand its area on cleanly at the end of a school year.

The record is what lets a chapter keep working whoever is in the room. A farm that said yes in September is still on the record in October, with its outcome. Chapters hand over between year groups, and none of it depends on anyone remembering. Written down, dated, and kept. Every figure we publish about our own work will come out of these records, once chapters are approved and reporting.