Year of Shares
Since 1995, marketumbrella.org has spent its efforts on running, studying and encouraging public markets In New Orleans and beyond. Before August of 2005, the 4 weekly Crescent City Farmers Markets, a holiday fair trade market called Festivus and the seasonal shrimper road show known as the White Boot Brigade kept the organization busy, as well as fielding informal calls and emails from other markets. From 1996-2005, over a dozen regional markets and another dozen nationally used the examples and insight from marketumbrella.org staff to build their knowledge.
In 2008, these informal chats moved into a fully realized program called Marketshare.
Marketshare's goal is to build the field of public markets through analysis and the creation of tools for market organizations. These include the tools of Transact, which measure economic, social and human capitals, and now also include Shares. Shares are single-subject outlines or a "best practice report" from a successful market program or just useful advice. Shares can be a document, video or a podcast and are found on the share tab of marketumbrella.org's website.
In 2009, Marketshare Director Darlene Wolnik and technical writer Leslee Goodman published 22 Shares, ranging from "Advice from Founders", to "The Strategy of the 4Ms" to shares on risk, weather policy for open-air markets, to useable forms like "Mystery Shop".
Marketshare (along with filmmaker David Aman) also published 32 videos for markets and vendors found on the organization's YouTube channel. The videos, funded by the W.K.Kellogg Foundation, give insight on subjects from how market staff check temperatures of seafood sellers to fishers explaining their ecological innovations and direct marketing techniques.
In the next month, marketumbrella.org will unveil its new webpage that incorporates all of the already published shares, tools, and updates from the field of public markets. More Marketshare Shares will be published in 2010, and other goals include assisting in the implementation of programs within peer markets and an ongoing analysis of flagship markets with the Market Portrait tool.