2026 Workshops & Networking Events

Date: Friday, March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Culinary Tourism Alliance

A practical one-day workshop for farmers’ markets, restaurant and food business operators, chefs, Indigenous tourism operators, and DMOs. Explore how to attract culinary and agritourism visitors, design memorable multisensory experiences, and tell your unique “taste of place” story. Includes a hands-on workbook packed with tools, frameworks, and strategies to strengthen your offerings and grow meaningful tourism partnerships.

About the Culinary Tourism Alliance:

Established in 2006, the Culinary Tourism Alliance is a national, membership-based not-for-profit organization. They work with their member communities to grow food tourism in their destinations through our destination development services, consumer marketing channels, and our various programs and events.

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: BCAFM (Farmers’ Market Nutrition Coupon Team)

Join us for an interactive workshop introducing BCAFM’s Accessibility Toolkit and Self-Assessment Guide. This session will explore how markets can identify barriers and implement practical, affordable solutions to create more welcoming and inclusive spaces for all community members. Through real-world examples and guided discussion, participants will learn how to use the self-assessment tool to evaluate their market’s current accessibility, prioritize improvements, and build stronger connections with diverse shoppers and vendors. Whether you’re just beginning to think about accessibility or already making changes, this workshop will give you actionable next steps and resources to take back to your market. 

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Karen Curtis, KICS Lemonade

Every community has a food story to tell—and one of the most powerful ways to share it is through cooking. Cooking demonstrations don’t just teach recipes, they connect shoppers to the farmers, the harvest, and the flavors of the season. In this engaging one-hour workshop, food educator Karen Curtis will show market managers how cooking demos can add a dash of excitement at the heart of their farmers’ market.

Karen will cover the sweet and salty —where to find skilled presenters, what kinds of demos resonate with market-goers, the permits and equipment needed, and how to contract presenters with ease. She’ll also share inspiring ideas for workshops that transform local produce into simple, crowd-pleasing dishes and spark conversations that shoppers will carry home to their own kitchens.

The session includes 30 to 40 minutes of insight and storytelling followed by 20 minutes of open Q&A, giving managers the chance to dive into their specific questions. Participants will walk away with practical tools and inspiration to weave food knowledge into their markets and create spaces where community stories are told—one bite at a time.

Resources will include:

• Sample Cooking Demo Equipment Checklist
• List of Demo Ideas
• Where to Find Food Educators
• Educator Agreement Template

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Meg Railton (The Collective Markets)

Data isn’t just for big business! Farmers’ markets can harness the power of simple, effective data collection to tell their story, track their growth, and strategically plan for the future. This workshop will dive into approachable, practical ways markets of any size can collect meaningful data, from tracking shopper numbers and vendor sales to capturing seasonal trends and customer feedback.

We’ll explore methods for gathering shopper counts (from clickers to digital tools), capturing vendor sales data, and identifying other relevant stats that matter, like product trends, weather patterns, or event attendance. Most importantly, we’ll show you how to turn that data into action: using it to secure grants, attract new vendors, improve customer experiences, and advocate for your market’s economic and community impact.

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Darian Kovacs (Jelly Digital Marketing & PR and Jelly Academy)

Want to spend less time chasing down shoppers and more time building community at your farmers’ market? This hands-on workshop is designed specifically for market managers, board members, and volunteers who want to learn how email marketing and automation can help grow their audience, increase attendance, and build stronger connections—with less manual effort.

You’ll learn how to start and grow an email list, set up simple automations like welcome emails and event reminders, and use data to improve your outreach over time. Even if you’re short on time or tech skills, this session will show you how to make email work for you.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why email lists are essential (and how they outperform social media)
• How to build and manage a permission-based email list
• Best practices for engaging, accessible, and effective email campaigns
• Simple automations to save time: welcome sequences, reminders, and updates
• Recommended tools for low-budget, small-team operations
• How to measure results and improve over time

Interactive Elements:

• Live demo: building an email sign-up form and automated welcome email
• Group exercise: write your market’s “welcome email” together
• Peer review: bring one email or newsletter for feedback and tips
• Real-life examples: what’s working at other markets

Post-Workshop Resources:

• Downloadable email campaign planning template
• Sample welcome email and newsletter templates
• List of beginner-friendly email tools and automation platforms
• Access to a recorded tutorial: “How to Set Up Your First Email Automation”
• Curated reading list with articles, videos, and case studies
• Optional 1-on-1 support session (limited spots available)

This session is perfect for anyone looking to stretch their marketing capacity and boost their market’s visibility—without burning out or breaking the bank.

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Michelle Tremblay (MPowerLives)

This presentation offers strategies for managers, vendors, and board members to promote safety and inclusivity at Farmers’ Markets and the workplace. Participants will learn how to deal with bullying, manage conflicts, and foster respectful interactions through practical tools and techniques. The session clarifies the difference between bullying and mean behaviour, provides guidance for emotional regulation, and stresses leadership’s role in modelling respectful behaviour. Interactive exercises and resources will help improve market culture and support ongoing education.

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: BCAFM (Farmers’ Market Nutrition Coupon Team)

Tomat is BCAFM’s point-of-sale tool designed to make coupon transactions smoother for vendors, markets, and participants in the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Coupon Program (FMNCP).

By giving vendors an easy way to process coupons on site, Tomat helps reduce errors, improves reporting, and ensures participants can shop with ease and dignity. For market managers, Tomat provides accurate data to support tracking and program evaluation, while saving time behind the scenes.

This session will introduce Tomat and explore how the program worked in Pender Island, Sicamous and Penticton. Learn what we learned, plus some ideas to resolve tricky issues. The session will have a hands-on portion where you will be able to experience the Tomat card as a vendor and participant.

Date: Saturday March 6, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Kate Poirier (Cedar Farmers’ Market Agricultural Society)

This Action Lab is designed for farmers’ market managers, board members, and nonprofit staff who are feeling overwhelmed by the day-to-day demands of running a market — from vendor communication and volunteer coordination to compliance, outreach, and endless administrative tasks. We’ll begin with a focused, hands-on SWOT analysis of your organization and learn to identify obstacles both internal and external. This session will guide you to dig deeper and pinpoint your real challenges with clarity. By uncovering these operational pressure points, you’ll be able to identify where smart, targeted interventions can deliver meaningful relief and free up your time and energy.

We’ll focus on the low-hanging fruit — the small, constant interruptions in your workflow that eat up time and mental energy. These are the tasks that free and low-cost AI tools are most useful for in today’s context. When we start by clearing those obstacles, we create more space to focus on the bigger-picture goals and transformations you actually want to make at your market.

Once participants have identified their key friction points, we’ll dive into a step-by-step process to build a BC Health Compliance AI Agent together. This agent is designed to instantly answer food safety questions based on your region’s health authority, using up-to- date BC CDC and regional guidelines. After building it as a group, I will demo the agent in action and then share the link so participants can access and use it themselves.

We will also explore the Vendor Bio Generator AI Agent, which is already in use in my market’s application system. This tool helps vendors transform rough notes into polished, professional bios with minimal effort. We’ll also build an internal AI Agent trained on key documents like BC farmers’ market regulations and bylaws, code of conduct, and our own Cedar Farmers Market rules, constitution, and bylaws — making it easy to quickly and securely search and reference all the important policies and guidelines in one place.

After exploring what these tools can do, we’ll shift into guided prompt writing, showing participants how to generate useful content for things like grant applications, volunteer recruitment, conflict resolution templates, or board onboarding documents — all tailored to their actual market needs.

Date: Sunday, March 7, 2026
Time: TBA
Presented by: Kim Peterson (Cedar Fundraising)

Every farmers’ market needs funding, but to raise money from the community, you need more than a wish list. You need a story that connects with your community and a strategy that makes the most of your capacity.

Join small shop fundraising expert Kim Peterson in this interactive Action Lab where we will walk through a guided process to build a fundraising strategy rooted in your market’s unique purpose and needs. Starting with just two questions—what are your funding needs and why is our work important?—we’ll work together to identify a message that will motivate supporters and then leverage those messages with a practical fundraising plan.

You’ll leave with a clear picture of your priorities, tools to communicate your unique story, and a strategy you can implement season after season.