We're Back! Food Bucket Signups Available!

Hey all! Hope your holidays went well. I was able to get some good rest, which for me usually involves starting 12 new craft projects 🤣 If I tried to explain all of them in one email, we'd be here all week, so I'll be working them into multiple issues of the newsletter over the next couple of months. For now, I'm going to start with our top announcements, and then see where we can go from there.

Sign up for your food bucket shift!

Over the break, Nate and I were able to take care of a lot of the logistical side of our upcoming Emergency Food Bucket project. We got all the food pre-packed into bins with the bags, labels, and oxygen absorbers that we'll need to pack them for long term storage. I made the signs you see above, so that it would be a little easier for folks to tell what they needed to do with each food, and most importantly, I got the sign-ups up and running.

The event itself is going be over MLK Weekend, from Friday Jan. 16th to Sunday Jan 18th. We've got shifts available as early as 9am and as late as 7pm, so hopefully you can find one that fits your schedule. We have special shifts for kids and elders (decorating food bags and telling stories, respectively) so everyone can find a way to participate.

For those of you who haven't been following along with the Emergency Food Buckets project, we bought a little over a thousand pounds of bulk dry staple foods, and we're hosting a community event where we work together to get it into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers to give it a 25+ year shelf life. Each food bucket share will contain enough food to meet the basic caloric needs of an average adult for two weeks, takes about $50 in materials, and takes about 2 hours of work to assemble. So if you would like a bucket of your own, you've got three options:

• Sign up for one 2-hour work shift and give us $50
• Sign up for two 2-hour work shifts, and give us $0.
• Sign up for zero work shifts, and give us $120.

Buckets will be available for pickup and delivery starting on Jan. 18th.

2026 Theme: Sustainable Expansion

We got a lot done in 2025, and I'm very proud of the work we did. Also, my brain basically quit functioning sometime in October, and I'm still trying to dig my way out of the paperwork and communications backlog that created. So this year, my main goal is to get Montague Commoners on a stable footing, both financially and in terms of people power.

On the people power front, we're going to be growing the behind-the-scenes team here at Montague Commoners. Many of you have seen the great work that Mickkayla has been doing over on our Facebook page to counteract my tendency to organize cool things but completely forget to tell people about them 🤣. We're going to build on that this year by bringing on Micki Wyngard to help with knowledge management and distribution, and Lizz Reid to help with foraging and retail management. We're still in the very early stages of our journey from a sole-propriatorship to a workers' co-op, but we're looking forward to tackling it together and building something cool over the next year.

On the financial front, we're setting a goal of bringing our income at least a little closer to our expenses. Between rent for the Artisan Market cabin, rent for the storage unit, digital hosting costs, and materials and equipment for projects, Nate and I spend about $750/month keeping Montague Commoners going. We don't have kids or fancy tastes, so we can afford it, but it's not an ideal situation long-term.

So this year, we're going to be widening the variety of products we offer in the shop, and exploring other ways to raise some revenue. This newsletter will always be free, but we might be adding some additional video content that's only available to premium subscribers. I've been learning to record crafting videos using the head-mounted Go-Pro I use for protest security, and I think it could be fun to build a library of "craft along with me" video that we can offer as a membership perk.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! And the nails I did for the winter solstice, since I was really happy with the way they turned out.

Have a good week, stay dry in this unseasonable rainy weather, and if I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next Thursday.