Difference between revisions of "What to expect for WWOOFers"

Revision as of 15:27, 6 September 2015

Community

At Jacob Springs, we value community highly. As much as reality demands that we work hard and are productive, people come first here. What's the point of working long hard hours and passing up more lucrative opportunities if you can't enjoy the fruit of your labor around the table with your community in harmony?

If you're interested, it might be helpful to peruse some of the distinctive values that we hold to:

• Jacob Springs is an Organism, not an organization
• Love not law - We operate first on norms, rather than rules,
• Of the Three forms of social organization we value the communal form, and we recognize and protect its fragility.

As a Wwoofer, we are not offering you a job, rather a place in our lives through our community. Although we need you to contribute meaningfully to our common work and we ask for your respect as leaders, we do not want an employer/employee relationship in that we don't want to have to be constantly checking up on you, telling you what to do and monitoring your progress. This means that we are going to rely on you to be a self-starter, keep open good communication, ask first before going off script and let us know what's going right or wrong.

Work and Schedule

The Jacob Springs Farm schedule begins each day Monday through Saturday at dawn (see Jacob Springs dawn start times calendar) with a 15-20 minute meeting prior to chores. Volunteers, wwoofers, and farm team members are expected to attend, we expect you to wake yourself. The meeting will review the calendar and assess progress toward the goals of the weekly agenda.

Chores follow the meeting. Your daily chores for the morning will likely consist of one following:

1. Dairy assistant duty
2. Feeding and watering duty
3. Cleanup duty
4. Breakfast duty
5. Weeding and watering duty
6. Harvesting duty

Your chores will be assigned based on what's most needed, but feel free to express a preference if there is something you would like to experiece or learn more about. Keep in mind that as short-term wwoofers, you will likely be called upon to do the simpler, more menial tasks for the majority of your time at first.

Following chores, all workers, wwoofers, local volunteers and long term farm staff are invited to join in a (typically) wonderful breakfast. Over breakfast, we typically engage in an informal discussion topic. After breakfast, special projects continue until 11 or noon.

Some examples of special projects include:

1. Labeling fruit trees

If community norms are not being respected, community leaders are forced to either add to their workload, become disciplinarians and ask for compliance, or choose to tolerate an atmosphere of diluted respect and effectiveness. Please don't force us to choose, if community norms are regularly disregarded you may be asked to leave

Cautions

At Jacob Springs, we do process meats, wwoofers will be expected to participate

Guidelines and norms

1. We
2. Feel free to use the outhouse by the greenhouse or the bathroom in the Farm Kitchen.
3. Please clean after yourself and replace toilet paper if it runs out on your "watch".