You can't expect new members to be OK with illegal substances. What if a potential new member is a bike riding police officer? What if potential new members want to bring their whole family (A family that smokes together, rides together?). ;-)

While you, yourself, don't have any issues with it, you have to ask yourself if this potentially off-putting behavior will affect the chances of success for your collective. If you want your entire community (not just the counterculture) to embrace your efforts it might be wise to rethink open drinking/smoking at meetings.

After all, there is plenty of time for engaging in those activities outside of the collective. If you know what I mean... and I think you do.

--sam
Volunteer, The Bike Project

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 11:51 AM, maintenence collective <bikefarm@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey from Bike Farm in PDX,

We recently had our first meeting back from Bike!bike! and it was incredibly successful. At meetings we usually allow beer-drinking, and its not a huge deal, though has been in the past. This last meeting I noticed someone passing around a pipe. Though that doesn't bother me as an individual, it was slightly distracting and could be a little off-putting to new volunteers (we had 4 newbies at the meeting).

What do other shops have as policies surrounding illegal substances..... what about legal substances?

Also, we're doing some winter programming and came up with a "winter weatherization class". Does anyone have a ciriculum for this sort of thing.. (ie. best types of tires in the rain, fenders, lights, how to be safe in crappy weather etc).

Any other one-to two day classes would be helpful.... and does anyone know of a particular company who might donate, like 30 fenders to us?

thanks for all your help!,

RaRa

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