PROGRESS
It is also important to monitor and evaluate your progress and if necessary further develop your activities.
Most of the information in this toolkit relates to the things you need to do when setting up your food co-op, however, once its up and running there is still a lot of work to do to ensure it is sustainable in the long term.
Sustainability is all about ensuring that your food co-op is able to keep running. This is highly dependent on economic factors i.e. can the food co-op bring in enough income to cover its running costs. It is therefore important to monitor the success of your food co-op by keeping a record of customer numbers and sales of produce.
The long term success of your food co-op also relates to social factors, such as whether the volunteers involved are happy and whether the food co-op meets customers and members' needs, for example is it on at a convenient time. It is therefore a good idea to survey both customers and volunteers to find out what they think. To find out more about monitoring and evaluation click here.
In some cases it is a good idea to offer volunteers training to enable them to feel more confident in fulfilling their roles. This section includes more information about training.
