A Rummaging Success!

The Co-op Rummage Sale on May 19th was a huge success!  Thank you to all the members who contributed items, shopped and helped out with the event. This event raised over $1100 for the co-op and provided an excellent opportunity for members to come to the co-op, interact with other members, and purchase treasures they could not live without!  We look forward to making this an annual event so before you rid your garage of unwanted goods keep us in mind for next year.  As a steady stream of donations came in on Friday and people flocked to Burns on Saturday to help with signs, pricing, or just a smile- it was apparent that the Missoula Community Co-op is truly about cooperation. Thanks again!

-Julie Ehlers

A Visioning Session For Missoula

As houses and roads spill out over the hillsides surrounding Missoula and westward toward the river, subsets of our community are all pondering what the future of this city has in store. For developers, entrepreneurs, farmers, ranchers, planners, concerned citizens and elected officials, growth in this valley is a most urgent topic of conversation.  And as we look at one another across this table, as the stakes are weighed, the question begs, “Where do we go from here?”

The time for this discussion has come.  Providing the inspiration, the forum and years of insight into growth in the Intermountain West, The Sopris Foundation will host this year’s annual Innovative Ideas for a New West conference July 13-15 in downtown Missoula at the Wilma.

Gathering the aforementioned stakeholders with speakers from around the globe, the conference stimulates a dialogue and a dynamic exchange of ideas.  And in the interest of regional food security,one of the Sopris Foundation' s most pressing concerns is the loss of agricultural land. This year’s conference features locally produced energy and agriculture models as well as transportation, workforce housing, land-use planning, and community design projects.  Speakers include Mayor Jaime Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil: Professor David Orr of Oberlin College; Wes Jackson of The Land Institute, and Gloria Flora, renewable energy advocate.  

“We build a family of decision-makers from around the West who are interested in putting these good ideas into practice,” said John McBride, founder and president of the Sopris Foundation. Following last year’s conference, the Mayor of Park City and other local leader implemented a new street design that gives drivers incentive to drive more carefully while protecting pedestrians and bicyclists.  And we might ask ourselves what tools will we employ for economic growth, preserving local character and building strong neighborhoods? What kind of foresight, collaboration, and creativity would strengthen our economy, build vital and beautiful neighborhoods, and preserve our regional sustainability through land-use, transportation, and energy innovation?

The Sopris Foundation couldn’t have chosen a better place to harness the “grit and imagination” intrinsic to the Western spirit. And there’s no time like the present to share.  To find out more about the conference, including agenda and speakers' biographies visit the Sopris website.

-Kate Keller

Joe Holtz on Park Slope Food Co-op

Missoula Community Co-op members, meet Joe Holtz, a founder and the General Coordinator of the Park Slope Food Co-op, the model for our store. With over thirty years at PSFC, Joe brings his heart and wisdom to sharing vision, challenges, and advice with us.

Q: Can you briefly explain when and how you got involved with the Park Slope Co-op?
           In 1972, I was 22 years old and living with 3 friends. My friend Donnie came home one evening in September or October told me that a group was forming in order to start a food coop and there was going to be a meeting the following week. We thought that was great so we attended the meeting and became part of the founding group.
           The Coop functioned without any employees from the time we opened in February 1973 until I was hired as the first General Coordinator in June 1975.

Q: What is your inspiration for staying there? How has being a member affected other aspects of your and other members’ lives?
           My inspiration for staying here all these years is the same as my inspiration for wanting the Coop to exist from the very beginning. As a founder I was excited about the ideas of:

• making excellent food as affordable as possible so that it would be within the economic reach of as many people as possible.
• people working together for something that is owned by and controlled democratically by those who the Coop serves.
• the idea that cooperation literally means working together and that one of my observations of life is that too often our time is too filled with striving for individual success and not enough time is devoted to building something together that strengthens our sense of community. Even though none of the official cooperative principles specify that cooperation means working together, I think cooperatives should have that as a principle whenever it is possible.  In my opinion, consumer food cooperatives are an ideal setting for adhering to the principle of “cooperation means working together”

           In addition to providing a way of working on the above beliefs/principles/ideas, I realized that this job at the coop was perfect for me because it involved a large of amount of working with people and a large amount of planning and implementing those plans and a large amount of dealing with numbers. These were all things that fit very well with my abilities and strengths and joys. I also stay in this job because whenever I step back and look at it, I continue to find what I do both interesting and challenging.

Q: What is one of the most exceptionally positive experiences you have had in  your time at Park Slope?
            Several years ago, I remember a member who upon joining was very skeptical about the Coop. She asked questions that showed quite a bit of lack of trust. Like: okay we each own the coop you say, but who really owns it?  Where is the money really going? Who is getting rich here?
            I lost track of this member for awhile but about a year later I noticed she was the squad leader of one of our shopping squads ( a shopping squad runs the checkout area, entrance desk, exit desk and childcare room). I chatted with her and was amazed at the transformation. She was totally a coop advocate. For me, it was very gratifying.
            In general, when I see a member who joins just for the savings(and there is nothing wrong with that) and then that member goes on to appreciate and feel connected to the coop on other levels as well, those are my most positive experiences. Lucky for me, these occurrences are not rare.

Q: And negative?
            My most negative experiences have to do with something that I would not change the essence of. It has to do with a free and open and transparent press that is run by members who get work credit. I totally support the coop having a member run and controlled press. In a coop with such wide member involvement in the day to day work, in our New England town meeting style direct democracy and where there are ten open financial reports made each year, it is essential that we print virtually anything and everything. True transparency is essential. We have a newsletter that is published every two weeks that prints everything unless it violates the newsletter committee’s fairness policy.
            However, there are things that have been published that contain unfair allegations and attacks written about me and other staff over the years that comprise my most negative experiences. Although these are not every month or sometimes even every year occurrences, they can be very discouraging. Nevertheless, the suppression of voices would have worse consequences for the coop than the negativity I at times have found so discouraging. But, where in fact some improvements have been made in this area over the years and perhaps we can make further improvements. 

Q: Explain your model, why it works, how your members and the greater Brooklyn community feel about it. What motivates people to be active members?
            We require all members to work and only members can shop. Every cash register receipt here has printed “Good Food at Low Prices for Working Members through Cooperation since 1973”. Of course, if a member is disabled either permanently or temporarily then we make provisions for not working. We do that also for new parents when they either adopt or give birth to a baby.
            The way that members can take maximum responsibility is primarily by learning to do specific jobs on a consistent 4 week (28 day) schedule with the same group of people throughout the year. That way, knowledge of the jobs and of the people you work with can be retained and we can hire fewer staff than we would if the groups of members had never established a routine and an ongoing relationship and group leaders. For group leaders to emerge and help the group take responsibility. Without a consistent schedule, the groups would never become groups and then member leaders would rarely if ever exist.  We can really rely on the members of a specific group to take specific responsibility.
            We have a few exceptions to the 4 week schedule, the most notable of them is FTOP (future time off program). But I think the explanation of that program is for another time. About 90% of our members work every 4 weeks. When that schedule is no longer good for them they change to a group that better suits their life’s schedule.
            I think the model works because it provides our members with something smaller to belong to in addition to being a member of the entire coop. It works because many of the members develop a pride in their own and their group’s work.
            It also works from the standpoint of accomplishing our original principles. If you want good food to be available as inexpensively as possible and if you think cooperation means working together and if you want to build community connectedness among members, then this system entwines all three together. If you have a group of members working as a team they can reduce more of the biggest expense of a food store-paid labor- than if they did not work in concert. Therefore the food can be sold for less. It also makes it so you might just show up next time because you don’t want to let your group down. It’s all tied together.
            I think the greater Brooklyn Community does not know we exist because we are tucked away in one neighborhood of maybe 100,000 with another 500,000 or so in surrounding communities. The other 2.3 million people have barely heard of us. But in the immediate and surrounding area the coop is probably both known to many and not known to many as well.
            There are many in the community who have great respect for the Coop. For example, the local soup kitchen is very thankful for the 60 or so members who fulfill their coop work requirement by working in the soup kitchen. The Park Slope Civic Council has thanked us for sending about 40 members to help clean up the neighborhood during their twice year community sweeps.
             
Q:  Please address some of the different community feedback on both “members-only” and “work requirements.”
             On the one hand there are wonderful people in our neighborhood who have chosen not to be members. Many are very comfortable  with that.  But a few are resentful that we do not allow non-members to shop and think that the policy is an affront to them.
            Usually we do not get the opportunity to explain that it is not out of some desire to be an exclusive club that we choose this system. Of course, with 12,800 members with four open new member orientations a week it's hard to make the argument we are an exclusive club. If we were the only store for miles around our working members only policy should be considered questionable in terms of fairness. But in a city situation, there are plenty of stores to buy food from.
            We try to explain that the reason for policies on membership work has to do with making the coop strong by not creating divisions between members that might be based on how much money you have. A more positive way to say it is that there is a certain unity that is often felt by knowing that your fellow members all are giving a certain minimum toward the effort of making this place work.
            On average our members believe in the system but an average, by its very definition, includes members who think the work requirement should be optional. Those members are often the ones who are most likely closest to resigning. Mostly we lose members who move away. We also lose members who believe in the system but no longer have the time in their lives to do their share. Many of these members intend to return. But we also have members who leave because they don’t believe in the work requirement and resent the rules we have had to adopt in order to protect the huge base of members who reliably do their work. We also lose some people because they can only shop when we have our most crowded shopping conditions.

Q: What are people looking for in the co-op? Why do they join? Who are they?
            It's all over the map. Save money, make friends, meet people, have one aspect of your life be less in tune with big corporations, support local farmers(we do this a lot), help build the community, feel more connected to others, fresher food, honesty about what is for sale. Our members are diverse but we don’t keep track of who they are.

Q:  Where would you like to see it improved?
             I would like us to be clearer and more successful in our effort to educate members about what the work is that we need them to do. When I shop I see a million things that could be better about the way the place is running. On the hand I know that it runs pretty well and the reasons people leave rarely include the words “poorly run”.
            Also better education about why the coop does everything we do. Communications everywhere should be better, including how we make decisions about the food. Do we do what makes more money or do we do what makes members happiest and what’s straight forward and honest. We do the latter but we are not the best at letting people know.

Q: What have been your most persistent challenges?
            Educating members about their coop. Controlling theft. Keeping up with all the details while keeping the big picture right there in front at the same time.

Q: As a smaller community Missoula will have different challenges and advantages, what would you venture that they might be? What is your advice?
            My advice is to be inclusive and transparent. You need to immediately welcome and include new people who want to get more involved. When we were small and had just opened and many of the founders slipped away it was the new people who made sure the coop survived along with a fraction of the founders. You need to be extremely in touch with the financial situation so that if anything is not working it will be known and steps can be taken until the situation turns positive again. If you don’t know there is a financial problem until it's been there for awhile your chances of fixing it in time to survive are greatly diminished.
            I also advise not to be totally dogmatic about which foods to carry. The most important thing about a person as far as the coop should be concerned is their willingness to cooperate in the work. Then the coop should try to meet that persons food needs. If the items a persons wants sit for long periods on shelf without moving then clearly those items should be discontinued. But as little as possible should be eliminated because it's not politically correct. On the other hand, we only carry grass fed beef, which is expensive. If people complain, I say eat less meat and buy the right stuff with your meat dollars. The membership had a vote on this policy.
            I also advise to keep prices low and focus on buying what people really want. Many coops have way too much invested in inventory. As soon as you can, try to mostly carry items that take no more than a week to sell a case of. If you can do this, you will have fresh food and your money will more likely to be freed up to pay your suppliers on time. Which is something you should try very hard to do. I could go on, but these are some of the highlights of advice.
            One more thing, come up with a governance system that’s in the open. If members work in the coop they will have opinions and those opinions must be heard when the holders of those opinions are ready to speak. Our Board is required to invite members to all meetings of the board and they are required to allow the members to give advice. No executive sessions. Boards that think they are have a corner on wisdom are destined to lead their coop to fail, sooner or later. We have a town meeting each month, which is part of the Board meeting. We call it the General Meeting. 

If you are still curious, check out the Park Slope Food Co-op member manual.