Planting seeds in Mount Vernon & La Conner
By Izzy Marvin
Cindy and Izzy had another day of outreach work together! On Thursday, July 20, The two ladies visited two new locations that had not previously been visited during last summers outreach work: Mount Vernon and La Conner. These two small tourist towns are about an hour drive from Seattle, going north on Interstate 5, in a rural farming area known for its tulip fields.
Cindy and Izzy first visited the Christian Science Reading Room in Mount Vernon, which is in a great central location. They visited with Jane Burns and got a tour of the Reading Room.
After receiving a few tips about the best places to visit in the area from Jane, Cindy and Izzy started going around to retail businesses handing out sample copies of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly and offering gift subscriptions. Mount Vernon is geographically a great location for outreach work due to businesses being really close together. The ladies placed one gift subscription in Mount Vernon.
Most of the businesses were open to receiving free Monitor Weekly sample copies, and many businesses said they would have their manager check the magazine out and possibly scan the QR code to get a subscription later.
The Mount Vernon commercial area was pretty small in comparison to other outreach locations our team has visited, so it allowed for Cindy and Izzy to visit another area, La Conner, which is about a 20 minute drive West from Mount Vernon. Once Cindy and Izzy arrived in La Conner, they ate lunch at a restaurant that had a beautiful view of the river and marina from the outdoor patio — and great fish and chips. Just across a narrow canal from downtown La Conner is the Swinomish Tribe’s reservation, which has a small fishing and seafood operation.
After lunch outreach distribution continued. One amazing encounter the ladies had was at a retirement home. They offered a gift subscription, but the retirement home declined, not because they did not want the Monitor though, but because they already had it. The woman at the front desk recognized the Monitor Weekly and said that one of the members on the home subscribes to the Monitor and shares it with the whole community by putting it in their reading area. One gift subscriptions was placed in La Conner.
Overall this was a very successful outreach day in which two different small cities were visited!
Cindy Safronoff had this to add to the report:
It was great to witness Izzy at work engaging with people at various retail businesses. She has a lot of experience doing this work now, and she has developed a clear sense of which kinds of businesses are most likely to be receptive to the Monitor Weekly. We didn’t go into every store, but those we did go to almost all said “yes” to sample copies, and we gave more copies to each of them. So we went for quality, rather than quantity. We still gave out 100 copies that day, placed a normal number of gift subscriptions, but we heard fewer No’s than normal, which was kind of nice. I have great confidence in Izzy’s judgement.