Who is Plan B? And why do they call themselves that?
Plan B began with the Good Food Box and evolved from there. A need was seen to offer low cost fruit and vegetables in the Lanark Highlands, so in partnership with the Lions Club in Smiths Falls the Good Food Box programme was initiated in the Village of Lanark. Quickly the orders became too high for transport and a new depot was established in Lanark.
It soon became apparent how wonderful getting the community together for meals would be. We had no idea if this was possible. If it was feasible. If anyone would come. We decided on a 3 month trial basis beginning March 2015. The dinners have been a huge success. We began to notice a trend in our efforts. If Plan A doesn’t work, which it never seems to, go to Plan B. This seems to be true when approaching the problem from any angle, so we resolved to try Plan B first. We would then proceed through the alphabet until we arrived at whatever it took to get the job done.
Plan B became a very loosely organized group of people who took on whatever interested them at the time. There are no prerequisites, and no real commitments, only a desire to be involved. We began to spread our wings a bit and become involved in issues that we felt needed to be addressed. We make no claim to be other than who we are, a grass roots community organization advocating for our community.
We are actively promoting women’s issues through a variety of mediums and methods and always exploring more innovative and relevant means. Our women’s group has been running for a couple of years very successfully.
We have begun the Jamboree programme which is an exploration of food preservation techniques open to anyone interested and operates at no cost to the participants.
We have the CropSharing program which includes the distribution of donated fruits and vegetables in season as well as the maintenance of a one acre community garden.
We promote healthy families by linking with support agencies in the county and offering resources to parents and children in ways that are meaningful to them.
Inadvertently we have begun an informal network of advocacy. By listening and sharing we have found that the resources and knowledge we have in our midst is phenomenal. Often linking resources to questions within our community leads to solutions we never would have dreamed of.