Hi UME Master Gardeners,

The UME Master Gardener State Office has been busy this January. As you are aware, this has been a time of organizational transition. We appreciate your patience during 2019 as we take a closer look at our operations and set new goals to help strengthen our statewide program.

We have two important announcements that we would like to share with you. Please continue reading this email for details.

There are many opportunities for our program to grow in coming years and we value the guidance from all our UME Master Gardener Volunteers and UME Master Gardener Coordinators to help build our statewide program.

We have developed a survey that we would like you to participate in which will assist the UME Master Gardener State Office to set programmatic goals based on the needs of our statewide program.

We invite you to participate in this survey by Thursday, February 28th.

The survey is anonymous, but we do ask that you include the name of your county/city program in the survey so that we can better analyze the final

results. The survey has 14 questions and should take roughly 10-15 minutes to complete.

A password is required to complete this survey. Please use the link and password found below to access the survey.

https://umdsurvey.umd.edu/jfe/form/SV_7OgznAEiLvwacct

Password: umemg

We thank you in advance for your time to complete this survey. Your guidance is greatly appreciated!

The UME Master Gardener State Office would like to take this opportunity to announce that after careful consideration, we have decided not to host the 2019 UME MG/MN Annual Training Conference.

We understand that this is a very popular event and we will take that into consideration as we reassess the event for 2020. For now, we have included a section on the survey (found above) as a way to provide your input regarding these decisions.

We greatly appreciate your understanding and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Thank you for your volunteer service and for your continued support!

Best regards,

Steph and Beth