Home to Roost Helping city folks raise chickens!

A message from our fantastic Coop Tour coordinator, Jenny Addison. An FYI and a call for help!

The Windy City Coop Tour is Roosting for 2022! Don’t panic! You haven’t seen the last Windy City Coop Tour.

Real talk: it’s been a rough couple of years for your Friendly Neighborhood Coop Tour Coordinator here. In 2021, I had ample time to devote to planning due to pandemic unemployment (yay?) and we had an awesome Tour! But the planning process is complex and delegating tasks to volunteers without significant training is its own challenge. This means the work falls almost entirely to Yours Truly. This year, I started a new job in May (yay!), and my capacity to devote to planning the Tour is low – the bandwidth isn’t there this year.

This doesn’t mean CCE will lie fallow! Improving the Tour and CCE in a meaningful and intentional way has ben on my mind for a few years. Our supporting organization, Advocates for Urban Agriculture, and our own Chicken Educator Extraordinaire, Jen Murtoff of Home To Roost are involved and we are in agreement that the Tour needs a year off to get our ducks in a row. The impetus for this process is to ensure the Tour and CCE thrives, and that our resources and systems are clearly established so when the time comes, passing the torch be smooth and successful. I am excited to take this time instead to re-group and streamline the planning process.

With your support, we can get there! Thank you for your patience, and I can’t wait to see you all in 2023!

– Jenny –