Wow, what stokey week…

The co-op Steering Committee has been heating things up. Rod B. kicked things off on Saturday by joining Margie and I for omelets over at Firehouse HQ and followed up on Wednesday for a caffeinated deep dive into finances. Later Wednesday eve Teke hosted Max and I at his beautiful co-working space (The Pitch over in North East, pictured below) to nail down the crowdfunding game plan and crush some egg rolls…

 Meanwhile Margie has started weaving together a plan for the Firehouse fundraising events…

Andrea drafted the beginnings of our agreement for securing use of Little Box. (She’s in Australia so I’m hoping she had some nice white wine to fuel her efforts.

Gordon and I sipped pacifico out of salty glasses on Tuesday and plotted out next steps for the Little Box yard (i.e. “stoke yard”), which he’ll be tackling along with Mr. Max.

Good Ol’ Glenn has been on speed dial this week answering daily questions from yours truly, keeping me focused and organized keeping me from stressing a mystery meeting with Surly Brewery (more on that below). And to top it all off, Teke made my week by committing to a first draft of the video script by next week!

I’ll add a shout out to Slack for helping us coordinate and follow-up on all the items above without driving each other crazy with email overload. As you can see, Slack certainly is not taking the place of good ol’ facetime but the combo (slack + meetings or calls) has been an effective 1-2 punch for moving things forward. (If you’d like to be added to the MinneSauna Slack team to help us launch the co-op, just send me an email with subject line “MinneSauna.”

If everyone keeps showing up and stepping up the way you all have been, we will knock this campaign out of the park. If we can each do even just one thing each day to help nudge things along, I am 100% confident that this project will far exceed our expectations and have an impact much greater than any of us can image.

The potential impact of this project is huge, bigger than any of us can see right now. That’s the opportunity and the gamble of the co-op approach. We’re building something that can be scaled to serve the community that wants and needs it. Our effectiveness in reaching those people will come down to the contributions of this group over the next 49 days.

If you want to get involved, please fill out our sauna society enlistment evaluation to see if you’re hot enough.

Thank you for honoring each other and this tradition with the gift of your time and efforts,

– JP

P.s. Apparently I’m not the only person who likes to be told what to do…