NEMF 2023 Samuel Ristich Foray — Help Needed

The Northeast Mycological Federation is busily preparing for this year’s foray that is to be held at Soyuzivka in Kerhonkson, NY September 14-17, 2023.

NEMF is a group of mushroom clubs in an area extending from Québec through New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. The sole function of the Federation is to hold an annual foray.

The Covid pandemic shut us down completely in 2020 and in 2021 we held a virtual foray. In 2022 our foray was in Jolliette, Quebec as guests of the hosting club, the Cercle des Mycologues de Montréal.

This year the hosting clubs are the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association, the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, the New York Mycological Society and the Long Island Mycological Club. https://www.nemf.org/nemf-2023/nemf-2023-home/

Today I am turning to the Society for help in hosting this foray.

These are some areas of responsibility:

1. Do you have a guest room to house a faculty member? The location should be in the Kerhonkson area.
2. We are hosting the Friday night social, an evening meet-and-greet held after the evening program. We will be serving light prepared finger food. Drinks are provided by Soyuzivka. Any ideas for mushroomy (or not) snack items that can simply placed in bowls distributed around the room? There is no prep area so this needs to be kept extremely simple. There is funding for these provisions.
3. We can use people to pitch in to help with the registration table during reception hours, Thursday afternoon, evening, Friday morning, Saturday morning.
4. The foray needs emcees to introduce faculty presenting their programs Friday and Saturday, mornings and afternoons.
5. We need Walk leaders to check foragers onto the buses and take attendance at walk’s end.
6. The sorting and display areas require people to manage clutter, signage, materiel, and to shuttle identified collections from the sorting tables to the display room.
7. Clean-up detail.
8. Technical, A/V type expertise would be really helpful.
9. And a biggie: I have volunteered to lead a beginners microscopy workshop. We will need loaner microscopes and knowledgeable people to serve as assistants. The emphasis in this class is to de-mystify the microscope for the intimidated beginner. 

Please indicate your interest in any of these chores to Paul Sadowski pabloski1@verizon.net