A couple of weeks ago I posted about Please Vote for Our Picnic and we won! Big thanks for your votes. We got 75 votes all told, a respectable number, and beat out some applications that had thousands of votes.

Entries were submitted from 40 states, over 300 of them, and there were about 10 grants awarded, $500 each.

I didn't expect to win, merely wanted the people at the state and county to see that we're creative about finding funding, not waiting for handouts from them.

I'm so pleased that I didn't commit to anything more than having a picnic so the people in our canyon can meet their neighbors with some handouts about wildfire preparedness by various agencies: no presentations, no agenda, no structure, no herding volunteers around for brush clearing projects. The county Office of Emergency Management wanted to have something like this, so I will get ideas from them, and see what they can contribute.

I have the venue arranged, Parks and Wildlife is coming as well as the streamgage people, and here is the menu:

Beef Brisket on hamburger buns
Sliced pickles
Potato Salad
Coleslaw
Brownies
Lemon Bars
Lemonade
Iced Tea

I'm getting enough for 200 or maybe 250 people, and when it's gone, we're done. There really aren't very many people living in this canyon, and most of the summer people won't be here as early as May 7 (that day is required by the grant).

Next week I'll price it all out to see if there is enough left for more than the food: brochures or little gifts like chip clips with our river coalition's name on it, or maybe the URL for our "We Survived the Flood - Now What" Facebook page so people don't forget about it.