March 2012 Wilson GF Support Group Updates & Meetings

Hello Fellow Wilson Gluten Free Folks!

I hope you are all doing well and have had a wonderful winter (well, if you can call it a "winter"!) I have finally finished the gluten free slow cooker cookbook and it will be available next Fall in bookstores nationwide along with Amazon and Books A Million! I plan to start having bi-monthly meetings again in May 2012. I think this will be easier to plan for than monthly meetings and I think it will also encourage more attendance to only have them every other month. I also want to have planning meetings with those of you who are interested in helping to plan future meetings. We will talk about how we can better the meetings and we we can split up duties of preparing for the meetings!!

A few things we all need to keep in mind for future meetings:

• -- We will be speaking with a renowned registered dietitian, who specializes in gluten free and allergen free diets: Mrs. Cheryl Harris of Harris Whole Health and GFGoodness.com 
• -- we need to decide WHEN we want to speak with her and how we can advertise this to have as many people attend as possible. 
• -- Creating an online gluten free guidebook for the Wilson/Rocky Mount/Greenville/Goldsboro area -- How can we add more members to our group? I know we have MORE and more people in our area who are starting to follow a GF diet, I've heard about them and run into people in public. 
• -- How can we raise money for our group to create things like official banners, work on an official website, etc... who will be volunteer to be the group's financial officer, etc... I will need other people to take over leadership roles like this, if we choose to have them. 
• -- Do we want our support group to join a national organization such as the Gluten Intolerance Group or the Celiac Sprue Association. Remember that joining a group like this would mean we would not be a "free" support group anymore, we would have to have membership dues, follow the guidelines for the national groups, meaning we wouldn't have quite as much freedom to decide how to run our own group, etc... 

Please check out our real-time calendar to see dates for upcoming coffee breaks and ROCK parties!