Lyttleton Stores Food Cooperative

In late 2017, we received this email:

Hello gorgeous VEG team. My name is Manu. I am part of a relatively new makers/growers collective called Lyttleton Stores in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to let you know that I have been using the incredible holistic management resources you put together and made available online. Thank you for making these fantastic resources available for other businesses to access. I wanted to ask you if you are ok with me borrowing a few of your quality of life statements as they are perfectly in line with ours (eg. adapting to a lower energy future, and two others). If we share these on social media, we will always make sure we mention/reference you guys, but if you would like me to reword the statements, that’s cool too! You are an amazing source of inspiration to us.

I replied:

Greetings Manu and thanks for your lovely email! It is not everyday someone calls our team gorgeous!
Go for it – then let em change over time if they want to. I remember once a non-profit called Growing Abundance originally copied “We are professional, organised and unrushed” then after a while realised that for them, “We work within the chaos of social change in a balanced and manageable way” was a better fit for their context. But that said, if they are a perfect fit maybe they’ll stick around as is too. Please do keep me posted on how you go with it all!

My very best and thanks again for checking in,
Dan Palmer

Manu then kindly let us reproduce this little further snippet of their story from this blog:

About a month ago, we decided to consolidate our little collective and come up with a holistic management structure. We were deeply inspired by the work of Very Edible Gardens in Melbourne, and the amazing resources they made available online for anyone wanting to apply holistic management to their system.

All members of the collective sat down, brainstormed and came up with a statement of purpose, quality of life statements (eg what we do), and enabling actions (eg how we do the things we do).

We talked about ways in which to increase the community outreach aspect of our business, and came up with the idea of the Lyttleton Hub: a space where people can meet up, read from our reference library of books and help themselves to a cup of tea or coffee by donation. This gives locals the opportunity and space to get together, build community connections and allows us to share our massive combined collection of books on permaculture, art, design, craft, preserving, cooperative systems of management and more. We are very excited to have made this idea a reality with a budget of zero dollars. This was possible through re-purposing, recycling material, furniture, whatever we had at hand, and here it is! Come and enjoy the space.