Leadership Day – GIG Conference 2009

Update: Check the bottom of this post for an update on the chicken nuggets.

One of my favorite things about the GIG Conference is the leadership day, the day before the conference officially begins.  If you are a leader of a GIG branch and have never come, you should really consider coming to next year’s leadership day.

We always share things with each other that work well for our local groups, and ask questions of each other for help.  I think everybody always leaves with new ideas for helping their group.

This year, Andrea Levario, of the American Celiac Disease Alliance, spoke to us about ways for us to get better involved with advocating for Celiac Disease.  She took a few members of our group to the state legislature offices to meet with a senator and representative (hopefully I can get someone to share about that with you).  Advocacy is something we all need to get involved in, and it can be really simple, too.  Just go to the ACDA’s website, follow the links, and fill out the form.  You can leave the form letter as is, or change it to suit your personality and situation.  There are currently multiple issues to write about.

As usual, the leadership dinner was such a fun time!  Check out the pictures (#1-34 are leadership day).  Every year, I make more wonderful friends at the leadership day.

I have to brag a little.  Out of the 45 attendees of the leadership day, 11 were from the various groups in Texas.  After all the discussions throughout the day and meeting with some vendors about various issues, we decided that we should form an alliance (of sorts) of all the support groups in Texas, including the CSA, CDF, and non-affiliated groups.  It’s a big state, and there are a lot of us asking for donations from the same companies at the same time of year, and we want to spread that out better and be more involved with each other.  We want to make a statewide calendar of events.  We are just getting this started, but if you are a member of another support group in Texas, please contact me (or Betty if you know her info) so we can get this going and get everyone involved.  We don’t want to end up with neighboring cities having their walks on the same day (like we did with Dallas this year).

Oh, did I mention the chicken nuggets?  We had some excellent chicken nuggets at the leadership dinner. (I’m working on finding out the brand.)  They were the crispy, crunchy outside, white meat on the inside kind of chicken nuggets.  I think I need some of those right now…

Chicken nugget update from Cynthia Kupper: The chicken nuggets were from GF Naturals…and they are healthier than normal chicken nuggets. They are lower in total fat, made from real chicken pieces (not fabricated chicken pieces) and best of all they meet the requirements to carry the Whole Grain logo! check them out at http://gfnaturals.com/ourfoods-products.html

And tell them you want to opportunity to buy them. right now they are only sold to food service. If you offer to buy in large packages, this might help.