About Women's Good Meat® Network

Our community members care about and work within Good Meat and often feel underrepresented and isolated within the industry. We are essential to the industry, but our contributions are not always made visible or celebrated. 

We work toward changing that paradigm by practicing mutual support, and by creating opportunities to share our experience, knowledge and skills with one another as well as with the larger Good Meat community. 

OUR MISSION

Our Women's Good Meat® Network, an initiative of our Butchers & Chefs Opportunity Network (BACON), is on a mission to build a community that practices mutual support, prioritizes learning across difference, centers the diverse lived experiences of its members, and models these values for the entire Good Meat industry.

HOW WE WORK 

We achieve our mission by:

• Facilitating peer-to-peer learning
• Aggregating and sharing resources
• Creating opportunities for mutual support
• Hosting in-person and virtual gatherings
• Inspiring collaboration through everything we do

For inquiries about our Women's Good Meat® Network, email our coordinators.

To join our online network of women, go here.

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INCLUSION STATEMENT 

Our Women's Good Meat® Network is for you, your mother, sister, aunt, grandmother, daughter, neighbor, friend. Our goal is to create a place for anyone who is trying to carve out a space for themselves in an industry that doesn’t always seem to make space for them. Our friends in the transgender, gender diverse, and gender noncomforming communities have asked us to be explicit. Are you welcome at Women's Good Meat® Network? Yes. If you feel called to cultivate a reciprocal relationship with a diverse community of people who are committed to learning and sharing across difference, we welcome you!

We look forward to continuing to build our community with you all.

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Announcements & Events

Registration for the 2023 Kitchen Table Chat Series, our monthly peer-to-peer learning series from Women's Good Meat® Network and Women in Ranching, is now open!

Being a woman or non-binary individual working in the male-dominated meat supply chain can sometimes feel lonely or be difficult to navigate. But you are not alone. That's why we're excited to announce that, beginning this Spring, we’ll hold seasonal virtual Community Calls so we can stay connected, support each other, and keep moving forward as people and professionals! These hour-long informal events will include speakers, group discussions, resource-sharing, and lots of time to talk about what’s going on in our respective Good Meat communities.

We’re going to kick things off this April 10th at 2pm PST/ 5pm EST with Jade Hennessee-Golden. Recently, after sharing an Instagram post that showcased a freshly delivered whole lamb at The Meat Hook, where she is a butcher and social media manager, Jade encountered an interesting amount of feedback from folks on the Internet about the frank depiction of the carcass. On this Community Call for Women’s Good Meat Network community members, we’ll talk about the unexpected reactions the photo sparked, how to navigate those reactions, and the challenge of determining where we draw the line, or don’t, when sharing the reality of our jobs in the meat world.

Don’t miss what’s sure to be a great inaugural Seasonal Community Call!

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that there are lots of other folks like you out there who are also interested in Good Meat, but you just can’t quite find them? Heck, you’re pretty sure they’re even in your city, town, or neighborhood, but you just can’t figure out how to plug into the network? Or maybe you’re looking for a woman-run meat business to support or learn from? Cue the Women’s Good Meat® Network Member Map.

The Member Map is a crowd-sourced networking tool that can help everyone in our community connect with other like-minded, women-identifying, trans and non-binary folk in their area who are also interested in Good Meat. The map will also include the names and contact information for businesses and organizations in our network who opt to be included.

We hope to make this Member Map a dynamic and comprehensive resource for our community, and we hope you’ll join us in building it! Do you want to add yourself, your business, or non-profit to the map?

Our Story

Our Women's Good Meat® Network, formerly Good Meat® Camp for Women, and before that, Grrls Meat Camp, was originally founded in 2011 by Kate Hill. Kate is a teacher, coach, cook, mentor, and author with more than 40 years of experience in the food industry. She travels the world giving workshops and collaborating with other thought leaders in the food world. Kate also leads cookery, butchery and charcuterie programs and courses at the Kitchen at Camont, her home and school in Southwest France. An increasing number of women began attending her meat-focused workshops and programs, many of whom were facing discrimination and other battles to earn their spot in the Good Meat world. Kate thought, "What if we could gather as many aspiring and professional meat ladies in one room (or around a campfire) and learn from one another?" Grrls Meat Camp was born.

Kate held the very first Grrls Meat Camp Rendezvous at her Kitchen at Camont, with the vision to keep it light, fun, and informal. "We'll butcher and bake, barbecue and bonfire," she wrote in the first invitation she sent to a small group of diverse women. These "original meat grrls" (or OMG's as she called them) ranged in ages from 27 to 62 and included culinary students, budding farmers, meat cutting experts, aspiring butchers, home cooks, and food writers. They came from Portland, Seattle, Washington D.C., Montreal, and St. Louis. Everyone pitched in to cook, teach, share, and learn with each other and with their counterparts in Southwest France. 

In the years since that first gathering, Kate organized many more Grrls Meat Camp gatherings in Washington, California, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and elsewhere. As a result, the Grrls Meat Camp community grew exponentially, and it continues to grow both online and off.  

In 2019, Kate, our official Grrls Meat Camp grandmere, handed the Grrls Meat Camp reins to the GMP. Camas Davis, our executive director, has attended several Grrls Meat Camps over the years, including the very first one, and several OMGs have sat on the board of the GMP. In 2020, The Good Meat Project changed the name of Grrls Meat Camp to Good Meat Camp for Women. Up until 2023, this program has mainly been centered around an annual in-person experience. And while we love those events and are planning on holding more, we’ve also been seeing a real interest and desire for MORE from this program. Over the years, we’ve gotten many emails, notes and comments from women looking to GMCW for guidance, advice, and, more often than not, looking for access to a community they can rely on and engage with consistently.

That’s why we want to amplify the deep impact of our in-person events, and develop a system of year-round support that is not centered on one-off, in-person gatherings. We want to recruit, support, and champion women, trans, and gender nonconforming folks in the meat industry who want to learn, improve their craft, make connections, and hold each other in respect. We think there is a need for such a network more than just a few days a year, which is why we wanted our name to reflect that evolution.

So, welcome to the Women’s Good Meat Network. We’re happy you’re here!

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