Farm-to-table idea gains momentum with Old Town Cape

Through the efforts of a team from the Leadership Cape class of 2016, a farm-to-table event is being planned in downtown Cape Girardeau.

Leadership Cape is an annual program offered by the Cape Girardeau Area Chamber of Commerce, designed to help local professionals build leadership skills and discover what Cape Girardeau has to offer.

The team — The River City Builders — concocted a plan for a signature event to highlight local agriculture and attract visitors to downtown.

Janet Jansen, a member of the team, said the initial idea was to create a community event to bring people in the area together.

“I’m from Leopold,” Jansen said, “and we have community picnics, where people bring food from their garden.”

This served as the initial inspiration for the event.

The team met with Marla Mills, director of Old Town Cape, and discovered the organization had been considering ways it could engage the community in supporting the market.

“This idea surfaced with their group at the same time,” Mills said.

Discovering Old Town Cape was working toward a community event altered the focus of the group.

“We wanted to build something so Old Town Cape could pick up our report and just go from there,” Jansen said. “They could pick up our checklist and have something they could follow to make things a lot easier for them.”

“I appreciate that they developed a doable project that could have a really good community impact,” Mills said. “Now it’s up to us to take what they developed and see how well that concept will really work and where we go from there.”

In their Leadership Cape project, The River City Builders created a stylized menu of locally sourced produce and meats, incorporating a variety of businesses. Funding through four levels of sponsorship would support the Cape Riverfront Market to assist with the EBT matching program and the Cape Marketeers Club.

Whether this is how the final event will play out remains to be seen.

Details are scant as far as the upcoming fundraiser is concerned.

“At this point, we know we want to do it, so we’re going to do it,” Katie Amrhein, marketing and events coordinator for Old Town Cape, said.

The organization is forming a committee to oversee the event. Once the committee is finalized, details of the event — including the menu, the date and where fundraising efforts will be directed — will follow.

Members of The River City Builders have been invited to be on the committee.

“I told my group members, ‘I’m in if you guys are in,’” Jansen said. “We’re definitely going to help.”

The event could take place in September as the team proposed, but it’s possible it will be a spring affair.

“It’ll happen sometime in the next year, whether it will be this market season or the 2017 season,” Amrhein said.

Kim Voelker, membership coordinator for the Chamber, said the farm-to-table event, is not the first project to be presented at Leadership Cape that came to fruition. The dog park in Kiwanis park, Discovery Playhouse and Cape Splash all were ideas presented by leadership teams in the Leadership Cape program.

“I’m just excited that an idea we put together as a project could benefit someone in the community,” Jansen said.

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