Hi folks,

I have decided to resign as organizer of this meetup group after being involved with running it, or helping to run it for almost a decade. Recently I was told that some people, or at least one person, thinks that I am being self-serving by being the organizer of this group as I own several vegan businesses, which are Loving spoonful LLC, a very small vegan food manufacturing company, the vegan event center Arcadia Lodge, and I also manage the Dharma Farm Animal Refuge project.

I never perceived that any of this was a conflict of interest and I tried my best to never be self-serving, but instead I did my best, as did my husband, Will, to serve you all by hosting events here and by trying to engender a sense of community and camaraderie. Still, this comment raised a red flag for me and I feel it is time to pass the torch. Steve Peterson would like to be the organizer of this meet-up, so I feel that since he wants to take this on, I should pass it on to him.

I have created another meet-up site where I will focus on our personal environmental and vegan activism work. This new meet-up group is called "Arcadia Lodge & Dharma Farm Animal Refuge Vegan Events". I will post our activities on this new meetup group site and I welcome you to join us on there as well. In doing this, I will no longer be the dominant voice on the Triad Vegan site, which I never wanted to be; people have always been reticent about volunteering to host events even though I always asked folks to do so. Maybe now others will take more initiative and that will spur everyone on to bigger and better things in order to generate more awareness and enthusiasm for adopting, as much as possible, a cruelty-free lifestyle.

Please support Steve in his new role and also try to get involved and host events.

I hope to see you out here at the lodge in the future!

All the best,

Maria