001[Music] get a meal in the middle somewhere and i guess [Music] hello and welcome back to around the clock i'm your host yolanda grieves we are here at the ashland famous metro west famous farmer's market with julia chase the chair of the ashland farmer's market board julia welcome to around the clock thank you i'm happy to be here um yeah sorry no no i got it i got it um so 10th year and anniversary 10th year celebration how did you get involved with the market so about 11 years ago i was reading the ashland directions we used to get a mailed paper every month and there was a little notice in there asking for if anybody was involved in um starting a farmers market in town and i had been to the natick farmers market
002for years i had a young family and decided to just go and get some information and when i went to the meeting there was um a few people that you've seen today uh we had steve mitchell was there and rob mullenbeek and florence seidel and uh some of the founding members the the marshquist were there and it was just really like a grassroots let's get this started do you think people will come how can we compete with existing farmers markets um and then we kind of just took off from there and started soliciting vendors and sponsors and it formed into this like community wide essentially small business incubator every saturday so it's been great so 10 years now what we see today what was the first couple of years like was it similar was it
003a little bit different so i would say the energy was definitely the same um we always one of our missions was to have a community event not just a place where you go and pick up your produce for the week and go home we wanted it to be a community gathering space with music events um kids corner so all of those elements have been in our mission since day one what you will see today that's different from years ago the first few years we have more vendors so where we started with about 20 vendors every week we now some weeks we'll have upwards of 30. um and another great part of what's happened is that we find vendors come to us now asking to be part of our market um just other vendors will share
004what a good experience they've had um so we we have to do less with the marketing now because we have so many people that already know what a great space this is um so it's been great we grow every year you offer you also support community i remember there was a number of years the select board were here and then we you branched it out we worked to do community committees and everything like that that has changed a little bit yeah so we still do uh last year with kovid you know uh we we took the market down to bare bones but now uh we're back to having a community tent so every uh every saturday a community organization can um apply to have a tent at it for free so they can come and
005share with the community members what's going on with their organization um another thing that has really uh grown and changed over the years is our snap match so we one of our missions is to help get you know food to underserved communities so members of our community and surrounding communities can use their snap benefit card they come to the market and we match a pers we match up to what used to be twenty dollars now is twenty 25 so we have one of the highest matches in the community um and that really assists people especially during you know coveted times and in food insecurity times and how do you match that snap so how does that get done a portion of our budget goes to that every year so what vendors pay uh what sponsors
006pay and then there's also um the metrowest foundation gave us a grant so we have an amazing grant from them that allows us to match 25. so it's the second day of the 10th anniversary but with an organization like yours i know you guys are already thinking what what can be different what can change what might people see differently toward the end of this season or into next season so we definitely want to uh we we need to keep an eye on you know covid and and how people are comfortable gathering uh we do want to have more events we also want to have potentially bring back some kids activities that may have to wait till next year depending on what the climate is like but basically we just still want to continue with the
007musical acts and with our community groups we want to make this just a fun gathering space it was so wonderful to see everybody you know come out and smile at each other and talked to neighbors they hadn't seen in 13 months so we want to keep that going good well julia congratulations on 10 years thank you so much for what you do as was said in the senator's speech she talked about how ashland is really volunteerism and i think our farmers market is a true example of that definitely thank you to all of our volunteers we could not do this without the tireless work behind the scenes and on the ground floor so thank you to all of our volunteers well julia thank you so much for talking to us congratulations on 10 years of
008the ashland farmers market that's going to wrap it up here at the market and thanks for watching around the clock