Wednesday, 21 May 2003
BERKELEY, Calif.
Wahoo! Guess who we recruited today to join our Greening Ethnic Restaurants project? Vic's Chaat Cafe. This restaurant is intensely popular both with the "desi" (South Asian) community and with non-South Asians. They had refused to join us once after a phone conversation, and had been known for non-compliance with a Berkeley ordinance that prohibits the use of Styrofoam in eateries.
This time, we visited Vic's Chaat Cafe with a business owner who knew the managers. Strategy No. 2, and it worked. I am thrilled to have them on board! And I am pleased with this exciting new trend, where restaurant owners participating in our program contact other restaurant owners they know and tell them about how we've helped them. This approach is fantastically successful in getting the new restaurants to agree to join. As things stand, 90 percent of the restaurants we ask to join our program say yes. Now, we are reaching the other 10 percent. So far, we have 32 restaurants in our program in Alameda County, and we'll get a total of 60 this year.
In other good news, we've sent internship announcements out and have received a few responses. Exciting, exciting! And then I had this brainwave. You know how I'd been trying to diversify our funding stream to include individual donors? (Of course you don't know that -- but I have been working on that.) My brainwave was this: We'll sell memberships to Thimmakka, starting at $10 per year. In exchange for that minimal cost, our members will receive a 10 percent discount all year at our participating restaurants! Isn't that wonderful? Our restaurants get the publicity they need, we get memberships, and our members get discounts!
In the media department, we were interviewed by NPR and by Voice of America. The VOA interview, which is going to be broadcast internationally, was conducted in Hindi. I am doing what I can to get the word out; now if only we can get office space, I'd be really happy. We've been working out of my home, with one staff person (me), and I'd love to expand our operations. Thimmakka is going to grow a lot this year, and I want to make sure we have the room to do so.
What I really want to do is create a standard for restaurants. Just as there are indicators of quality and cost, I want to have another measure: how environmentally friendly the restaurant is. Our program is in a position to implement such a standard; we offer equal outreach to everyone, regardless of the size of the restaurant and the language they speak. And of course, our environmental measures help save money, so even if a restaurant's owners don't care about the environment, they certainly care about saving money and increasing their profits!
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