Kickstarter

Here is what we have been up to and we hope to have a ground breaking soon.

 Hello Everyone.

 First a little garden news. The garden is fully planned out, we have blueprints, and we are just waiting on some paperwork to start construction. We know its been a long wait and we are really excited for the day that we can finally start to plant our vegetables, which hopefully will be very soon. 

We keep planning on a date, and it turns out there always seems to be more paperwork to fill out. We are working on a short video right now with a surprise guest narrator to give you a little peak of our area.

 News about the shirts:

On Wednesday of next week, UPS is bringing our new shipment for everything but the Michigan Hoodies and the Rising Helmet shirts. Those two are overprint styles and taking a little longer for the reprint, but should be here within two weeks we hope. 

SPRING SCRIMMAGE/ SHIRT PICK UP 

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it up to Michigan for the Spring Scrimmage game because I am going to be down here in Pahokee at a community event explaining to people about our #EATING garden. 

We have fliers and bands and want to let people know what we are doing and sign up to be apart of our project. At the game, we did want to set up and give out some bands and fliers so that Michigan people who don't know about our #EATING project or our backers can come by (email us if you are waiting on an order you would like to pick up at the Spring Scrimmage). Vincent Smith and I will be in Pahokee doing the same thing that Saturday so we think its a good way to connect our communities. So if you have any suggestions on where we should be or how we can go about that or want to host us for a few hours, please shoot us a message.

 Thanks everyone for being so patient, its getting more exciting as everything is getting sorted out, 

TAE ODOMS and RHH

Hello everyone.

We wanted to check in and let you know that the garden is hopefully being installed in mid March.  We are doing the last of the paperwork that we need to make everything in line to put in the garden and start work.  We have all the plans and are putting together the volunteers and our schedule and working on a video.   

What we have done with our kickstarter really means a lot to a lot of people and has touched a lot of people.  Now Vince is doing a kickstarter too because he felt inspired by what we are accomplishing with #EATING and he chose to make signs for the plots and plants that you all chose for the garden.  It is called C2C (community to community) Vincent Smith teaches painting and we wanted to continue connecting the wolverine community with the Pahokee Community.  It is really amazing to us what we have been able to do so far and we thought it would be a good way to bring some of the kids from Pahokee to connect with the garden and see that they can accomplish things too if they work at it.

About the rewards.  We are still waiting on our reorder.  We sent out as much as we could and we are apologize its been taking so long.  There are a lot of factors that are out of our control and we really wanted everything to be here a long time ago but sometimes things don't work out as planned and we are working on it as fast as we can.  There is only two of us so we would like to thank you for your patience and if you got the wrong size please email us.  We are new to this whole process and not everything is going to be perfect the first time around but we can work on it.  We are hoping to have everything out by the end of March/ early April.  We ran into a few hang ups along the way but have gotten everything straightened out and are back on track.  We really wanted things to be different and we have learned so the next time we do this we can have everything out on time.

Thanks

TAE ODOMS and RH

#EATING #GOBLUE

I know it has been awhile and everyone has been asking for updates but we didn't want to update until I had confirmed some of our plans for the Garden.  I just met with our partner Roger from Urban Greenworks about the layout of the garden and talking to the land owner about getting the land. A big part of setting up the Garden is to get the land approved by the city as a place we can do the project and also we needed to reach an agreement with the land owners about the use of the land.  

We also drove around Pahokee through the different projects where I grew up because an important part of the Garden is involving the community.  I want each garden bed to be a representation of a project in Pahokee.  In the next few days and weeks we will have blue prints of how the garden will look to share and a timeline of when the garden is being planted and how we are going to do it.  We will post some of the garden plot names soon because I know people have been asking.

Just so you all know we received all the rewards but the shirts are missed printed so we had to send them all back and get them done correctly so please stay patient with us. We apologize for the delay. We wanted to have them a lot sooner and this is taking a long time and we know that it can be frustrating but we are working our hardest and sometimes not everything goes according to plan and all we can do is keep working hard to get everything right.

Hi Everyone,

We just wanted to check in and let everyone know what is going on.   The short answer is that we are aiming to have everything packed and shipped by the end of this weekend.   We want to thank you for your patience.  

For a more expanded explanation, there are many factors affecting the shipping of rewards.   When we designed the rewards, we wanted to offer lots of options, including women's sizes and a variety of prints.   So, one unexpected delay (that we didn't even think of) was that we had to wait for all surveys to be turned back, so that we could order in bulk.   We think that we can all agree that the rewards are the bonus, and our real focus is the Garden.  Therefore, we were faced with putting in smaller orders and paying more, or waiting and putting in one big order.   We decided to wait and put in one big order, and suprisingly, this is the difference of thousands of dollars.

Another thing we wanted to take in to account was your feedback.  We received quite a few requests to avoid using certain brands of shirts due to the makers factory conditions.  We wanted to use as much American-Made and Fairly Traded merchandise as possible.  Also, we wanted to still have a high quality t-shirt that fit well.  We listened to the voiced concern over fit and ethics of human rights violations for certain manufacturers, and we actually found a private label willing to work with our small specific order.   The men's shirts we chose are an athletic fit (long enough as an XL and no "girly sleeves" (as was requested by quite a few people)) and the cotton is American, processed with fair labor laws in Mexico and then distributed through California.   

Overall, this is our first Kickstarter and first project of this size.  We are so appreciative of your patience.  We really wanted to get the shirts out faster, and we have learned so much about Kickstarter and merchandising.  We are confident that you will be happy with your shirts, which we thought was worth a little extra time to address everyones concerns, and the little wait to save some money for the garden by ordering in bulk.  (If any of our backers have other questions email us, or if you want to know more about rewards and Kickstarter, we are happy to share all the small and large lessons we learned so far).

We are sorting and packing the rewards as fast as we can (which also is surprisingly a lot more time consuming then we estimated).

Once again we apologize and are so grateful for having such supportive backers and members of our community.   Thanks again.