 Summer Stride is not just for kids, it's for all ages. So if you do your 20 hours reading, exploring, going to programming, you will get your free, iconic SFPL tote bag. And to do that, there's trackers back there. You just fill them out, take it to any of our 28 locations or bookmobile, and you'll get your tote bag. So do that. Summer Stride is almost over, but you can collect tote bags up until mid-September. So don't worry. So we want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Ram Yutush Ohlone peoples for the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ram Yutush community. And I'll just shout out Sigourte Land Trust, which is a great women-run organization out of the East Bay who is working in land back, land rights movement. So check them out. Also we have lots of reading lists that you can check out. Some announcements coming up. We have two reading campaigns that I'm gonna tell you about. One is called On the Same Page, which is a bi-monthly read we do. Our readers advisory committee selects a book, and then we encourage all of San Francisco to read this book at the same time. This July and August, we're celebrating Beverly Jenkins, which she does romance writing, but it has a historical twist, as well as feminism and family planning. So it's not just your average bodice ripper. Beverly Jenkins will be in conversation on August 23rd. So check it out. You can pick up this book anytime right now. And then coming up, we have our hugest literary campaign, which is One City, One Book, and we have selected This Is Ear Hustle, which is based on the podcast This Is Ear Hustle, Unflinching Stories from Prison Life. So check that out. The books will be hitting the shelves mid-September, book clubs in October, main event with Erlon Woods and Nigel Poor, moderated by Piper Kerman, who wrote the book Orange is the New Black, November 3rd, and then two months of programming aligned with the book. So November and December, we have some amazing programs about incarceration, reentry, abolition. So please come check that out. It's our hugest campaign, so there's a lot going on with it. All right, without further ado, we are all here to hear about food co-ops in the Bay Area, the past, present, and future. So today we have with us, we have Celia Lobono-Gonzalez from Other Avenues, Sue Lopez from Eris-Mendi Bakery, Paula Schnees from Cultivate Community Food Co-op in Benisha, and Jamila Lane from the Deep Grocery in Oakland. And today is gonna be moderated by one of our favorites, and who goes to lots of libraries. Everyone loves Shanta, yay. And Shanta is not only a founder of Other Avenues, but also has written many books, which you can find in our libraries. Other avenues are possible. Legacy of the People's Food System of San Francisco Bay Area. All right, without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over. Hello friends. Today I'm the moderator of the panel, the past, present, and the future of food cooperatives in San Francisco Bay Area. I will start with just a brief discussion on the past, so that portion will be kept short in order for us to listen to more about what's going on with the thriving co-ops, such as Eris-Mendi, such as Other Avenues, and also the future co-ops to be, that is Pola and Jamila will talk about that. So historically, food co-ops have emerged and flourished during economic hardship, as well as in middle of the prosperous times. The causes of emergency, all these co-ops being different. Sometimes food cooperatives came about and thrived for economic necessity, other times for social change and cultural needs. One example is the food co-ops during well, during well during economic hardship was during and after the depression when food was rotting in the field and people didn't have anything on the table and they devised system where they could actually buy their food, so they created co-ops for that reason. And in the 60s and 70s, the co-op moment was, this is something we are going to be talking about today, was born out of the need for big change, social change. It wasn't just that we wanted a different kind of stores or different kind of food distribution system. We wanted the whole society change around how we eat, what we eat, how we package, how we grow, and so on. So it was a big change that came out of the 60s. And we all know that the 60s and 70s were very invigorating and promising time. So the unique nature of the past of the food cooperatives was that we learned from other moments because we were overlapping and totally connected and networking with moments such as civil rights moments, such as the women's movement, such as the queer people's movement. And we actually exchanged a lot of our techniques, especially about governance, how to govern our groups without having one leadership or having bosses. So that was really important, why we prospered and we became the way we became, which is what we call new wave cooperatives. Now, the new waves were different from the other cooperatives that were there. The old waivers, the importance for them was particularly size and how much food they sold and the membership. Whereas with us, it wasn't so much about the size, it was more about how we govern ourselves as well as what we carried in the shelves. I came to the 70s, to San Francisco Bay Area. There were no co-ops in the 70s, early 70s, and there were no Trader Joe's, there were no Whole Foods. So we shopped at Mom and Puffs health food store, but we also went to the Almeni Farmers Market that is where we met and we formed kinship with people who believed in forming groups, learning from each other about how to change the way we ate, how to change the way we distribute food. So we formed clubs called Food Conspiracy. The food conspiracies got so big that we had to start stores and we started stores from practically nothing like garage sales and things like that. It's hard to imagine now how you can start a business with garage sales, but we did that, one store would open up another store, would open up another venue, pretty soon we had about dozen storefronts as well as about that many wholesale venue that deliver us with different goods. Can't go too much into that, but I do want to share one thing which was our personal hardship, my personal hardship in the 80s. In my group, which was other avenues, there were 12 people in the staff and six of them were parents and we had no way to have childcare and that was a personal as well as a group hardship challenge, but we actually managed to solve that problem by forming a cooperative within the cooperative or parenting and we shared a lot of the childcare. Even the non-parents joined us and helped us out. So that was something I wanted to mention how one can or many people can together solve the problems of hardship. So now, without further delay, I'm going to turn the mic to Celia who's going to talk about other avenues where I worked for more than 35 years. I also wrote a few books, including other avenues, they're possible so if you wanna know more about the past and how and why the movement prospered and why it flamed out in just a few short months. It's a good book and it was written by interviewing a lot of people. So without further delay, Celia, from other avenues, my favorite co-op. Hi everyone, my name's Celia. So I work at other avenues. I'm a current worker owner and we were founded in 1974 where a worker-owned cooperative grocery store born out of the San Francisco Food Conspiracy Network that later became the People's Food System. And so we try to cultivate a truly democratic business that empowers workers to steward their livelihoods and we're committed to serving the community by offering accessible nourishing and regenerative natural products that support the health of the people and plan it for present and future generations. So we do our best to offer staples, you're cooking staples for everyday needs as well as more fun things that you're looking to cook. And we source from local independent vendors. We offer 100% organic produce that's something we're really proud of. And we also source seasonally from local farms. So you'll see some things are available, some parts of the year and others are not and that's kind of the fun of it. To see what you can cook and what you can come up with seasonally. So we source from regenerative organic and fair trade as well as upcycled foods as much as we can and we favor glass and compostable packaging when we can. We do our best to meet a diverse set of grocery needs both for cuisine-wise, diet-specific and we're always welcoming product suggestions. So I learn a lot from the community requesting things and asking for certain products that really also informs my knowledge of what the community wants. We emphasize local, independent and family-owned brands and we highlight products from indigenous and black-owned businesses. We also strive to discontinue and replace certain familiar brands that have sold out to larger parent companies that do not align with our values or the regenerative organic movement. And we try to make this transition while being mindful of product quality and affordability. So this is a big challenge that I personally trying to navigate. We're also solar powered. I think we installed those in like 2018, 20, I forgot the year, but not too long ago. And we're also proud to have received the San Francisco Legacy Business Status in 2018 for historic small businesses that have operated in San Francisco for over 40 years. And we don't have much if any food waste as all the cold produce ends up being taken home by workers or we put it in these fun little $5 second best bags which always fly or we donate it to community organizations or we just put it out for community members to be appreciated. So currently we have 18 worker owners and we all share all the responsibilities of running the business that were open every day. We're open every day at 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. except for on MLK and May 1st. Those are the only two days that we fully close. And so this includes sharing all the shift work, anything from cashiering, restocking things, moving around the store and helping customers, answering phones, all of the day to day front end of the store, everyone shares in that. And we also share, we also have different roles in buying. So we all buy in different departments. I buy for the grocery department. Other people buy for bulk or produce, chill. There's some departments that have maybe three to four buyers. Some departments maybe only have one or two, but we try to support each other in our buying decisions and inventory and stocking and all of that. But everyone has a role as a buyer as well. And further, everyone has also administrative roles. So we participate in different committees. We have a DEI committee, diversity, equity, inclusion. We have the Ecology Committee, other things like store front end, the store making sure it looks pretty, refrigeration, finance, promotion, payroll, accounting, personnel, all of those things. So everyone kind of takes on different roles within all of those aspects. And we all support each other through that. And then most importantly, we meet once, sorry, twice a month as a board. So everyone who is a full worker owner is a board member. And that's how we make all of our business decisions. We operate through a consensus model. So we all have to agree to move forward on anything really. And that might seem challenging, but it does end up working out really well because it makes it that we really think through what we want the business to move forward into and make sure that everyone's comfortable with that. And it's really well thought out. So that's how we make all of our business decisions all together twice a month. And anyone can bring proposals to the board and have them considered and voted on. So it's really empowering to be able to be in that kind of control with a whole group of people because also you don't feel isolated. You have support to kind of work through things together. And we pay ourselves by the hour. So we work a minimum of 30 hours a week. And then we also share the profit at the end of the year. So whatever we make at the end of the year that's not invested into the business then gets distributed to all of the workers based on a portion of hours worked. So it incentivizes people to work but also creates flexibility and we've been pretty successful. I would say give or take it's before taxes probably like 45 to 65,000 a year which is really amazing for being in this industry where other folks maybe who just do work at a grocery store or Safeway or whatever. I don't know if they're making that much. So and we also have full benefits. We try to support each other. We don't pay anything for medical expenses. We have other supplemental benefit programs. We just started an IRA. So there's a lot of support that we're able to care for each other in those ways. And that's all thanks to the community. I don't think we would be able to be here without the community support. There has been many occasions in the past. I wasn't there but that the co-op had to take loans from the community. They were able to pay them all back even ahead of time. And ultimately we were able to buy the building that we were in. So that has been really great. And yeah, and we're able to also donate to local organizations. We started paying the UNICAN Land Tax which we encourage everyone else to look into and do. And a lot of the organizations we support for Indigenous health, for abolition, environmental justice locally and reproductive justice. Those are some of the issues that we participated in this year. But yeah, thank you all for being here. And I'm happy to answer any questions about anything that come up. And I'm really inspired too by all of the new cooperatives that are coming forward because that's, like I said, the community really needs to support these initiatives. So next will be Sue from Arzmandi and save your questions after the panelists are finished, okay? Thank you. Thank you, Shanta. Is it on? Yes. Thank you, Shanta and the SFPL crew for hosting us today. I'm Sue, as Shanta said, and it was an excellent presentation. And I'm gonna try to concisely cram about 55 years of cooperative history into about eight minutes. So if there are questions or you don't wanna talk afterwards, please feel free. And I'll put it in the mic, okay. And so, so my story starts with, I'm a baker at Arzmandi Bakery 9th Avenue, which is the second Arzmandi bakery that was established. And okay, let me know. Does that a little bit better? Yes. Okay, so I'm with the second Arzmandi. I'm one of the founders of the second Arzmandi as well as a baker owner, a member owner there. And the Arzmandi Cooperative is part of the Arzmandi Association of Cooperatives. We were started by the cheeseboard. So in order to start this whole story, we're gonna tell a little bit about the cheeseboard, which is a very important cooperative bakery and pizzeria in Berkeley, across the street from Shea Panisse and what's known as the Gourmet Ghetto. So the, in the cheeseboard was established in 1967 by a young couple, a young, very idealistic couple who opened a cheese shop and they hired a small crew of friends and after a few years, they had, I think Celia's just gonna run through some random images that we have of the different bakeries and the groups. So the cheeseboard opened in 1967 and over the first four years, they decided that they actually wanted to work with their group and not actually be bosses. So they turned into a cooperative in 1971. And if you fast forward to the mid-90s, so 30 years later, the cheeseboard has become a very prominent business, a very prominent worker cooperative. They're featured in Chanta's book. They're probably one of the oldest and longest, most respected cooperatives in the Bay Area. So in the 1990s, they're doing very well. They're in their fourth decade and there is a book club that a young idealistic lawyer called Tim Hewitt. He's a cooperatively focused lawyer and he was in a book club with Steve Sucher who was what I call a cheeseboard lifer. He just recently retired from the cheeseboard. So Steve Sucher and a retired sociology professor that was interested in cooperatives. He actually had helped founded cooperative apartment buildings and also the TNDC here in San Francisco. So the three of them came together and they wanted to replicate cooperatives in the Bay Area. They were looking at the same issues that Chanta has looked at in her books, like how did cooperatives start in the 60s and the early 70s and why didn't they survive and how did the cheeseboard survive? So they decided that they wanted to approach the cheeseboard which was the one that was the most successful that had lasted that long and to see if the cheeseboard would help replicate another series of cooperatives for the Bay Area. So they approached the cheeseboard in the 1990s and if you put yourself in the cheeseboard's place, the cheeseboard is they decided not to, they were doing very well, have always done very well and they decided not to expand outside of their neighborhood. They're a local business. They had probably grown to about three dozen people. They do excellent vegetarian pizzas and sourdoughs and bakery and they did excellent reputation and they just wanted to keep it local. So they didn't want to expand themselves. So they have these three people that come to their business meeting and ask, can you help us create more cooperatives in the model that you guys are doing? And that's something that I try to emphasize is kind of like the golden moment for the Ares-Mendi collectives because they considered that, like we have these three people that are interested in growing more cooperatives which is basically growing the competition and they said yes and they not only said that we would help you with all the know-how but we would also help you financially. They helped with loans and they interned people and they trained us with all of the recipes as well. So they basically had done this thing that you don't really learn in business school which is like help your competition open for the good of the sector, of the cooperative, the worker cooperative sector. So that was in 1996. And these three founders had decided that to keep a cooperative going or the network that they were hoping to create that they needed to create an internal support system. So that internal support system was the first cooperative that they started with the help of the cheese board. It's called the Development Support Cooperative. And the Development Support Cooperative is an internal support cooperative that helps with everything from legal to finance to logistical assistance to help create these co-ops. Because we know that like it's really challenging to open a food business and a food co-op is especially challenging because you have a group of people and there's no boss and how do you get on the same page? So they wanted to have this internal support cooperative. So they created the DSC and within a few years they had a founding group for the First Bakery. They opened the First Bakery with the Ares-Mendi Lakeshore, which is right by the Grand Lake Theater by Lake Merritt. And that was in 1997. And the launch was super successful. Three years later, in 2000, they opened Ares-Mendi Ninth Avenue, which is the store that I helped open. And then three years after that, we were able to open a third store in Emeryville, which is San Pablo, on San Pablo and 43rd. So all three of these bakeries are doing their thing. The cheese board is helping as much as they can as a support system, kind of what I call the mothership, our cheese board. And we took a pause because we could see the landscape in the Bay Area had changed so much because of the tech industry. So we had to take a pause and kind of refocus all of our energies into these three businesses and make sure that they were gonna survive. So we did that for a while. We continued. We had our development support cooperative. We have Lakeshore. We have Ares-Mendi Ninth Avenue and we have Emeryville. And not until the year 2010, we were able to open two more bakeries, which are the last two Ares-Mendi's, one in San Rafael and one in Valencia. So right now we have five Ares-Mendi's in the Bay Area. We have one cheese board because the cheese board did share everything except their names. So there's always just one cheese board. I also want to touch a little bit about just kind of the democracy, democratic work aspect of the job. And I think what's important about these jobs is that one of my mentors, one of these guys, Tim, always calls it like we're a democratic demonstration project because we are showing that there's a different way to do things like Shanta's book where other avenues are definitely possible. And the way that we have set up our co-ops and all co-ops are a little bit different is we have an internal policy council, which is kind of like a house of reps where we have equal representation for each co-op including that development support cooperative. We all have two members that go to a policy council and that policy council votes and directs what work the support cooperative will be doing. And the way that we fund this is that we all pay fees into a pot. So all of the businesses pay fees into a pot depending on their success and their profits. And what's interesting to me is that if you think about franchise people think Arizona is a bit of a franchise but we are using the best part of a franchise which is the branding and the sharing and the support. But the way that we pay our fees is that the better you're doing the higher fees you're paying and that means the less support you need. And the support is going to the businesses that are actually not doing very well and that means they're paying less fees. So it's all each according to their need and each according to their ability. And I know that sounds a little familiar to some people. So and again back to the democracy and the workplace you know we also, did I see, are we doing time okay? Okay, so what's important also for me to share is in co-ops or in our co-op also there's no hierarchy based on each business, each business based on their finances they pay their wages that they can per business. So we don't pull our finances each business is an individual businesses. But within each business and across there is Mindy system every business everybody gets the same wage. So I've been at my place for 22 years and somebody that's actually gonna start next Wednesday is getting the same benefit package and the same hourly wage as I will. And that's a good motivating factor for us to have people that are really interested in the co-op that are gonna stay, that are gonna invest themselves and you know the most important thing for me is for folks to understand that this engagement with their job hits their wallet and that's where it counts. And the most important also thing for me you know it's all relevant is that we're creating businesses that are very financially viable businesses that are doing living wage that we can create a living wage for people that they're just businesses that are financially viable that are being run cooperatively run. So it's not a co-op that's trying to run a business but actually we're doing very smartly run businesses and it's the way to stay alive in order to make sure that this example of this business can thrive in the community. So if you're done with time there's a lot more information. If anybody wants to chat afterwards feel free or look us up and thank you for coming today. Hi everybody am I next? Oh yeah okay good. Hi everybody my name is Paula Schneezy and I'm the founder of Cultivate Community Food Cooperative. We are an up and coming food cooperative in the Benisha Valejo area which means we don't have a store yet. In this day and age the co-op model is a little different than it was back in the 70s where you started a little bit smaller and you got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now we need the owners and we start out big. Start out big or go home right? Because the grocery industry is so competitive and so you wanna be able to compete. You need the owners. So first of all our store is a consumer owned grocery store ours is a little different than everybody's here. Everybody's here is a worker owned cooperative. So the workers own it, ours the consumers own it. So we are in Solana County and near us in the counties right next to us is the Davis Food Cooperative as well as Sacramento Natural Foods and both of those were started back in the 70s and both of those are consumer owned cooperatives. I just wanna briefly say a little bit about so before we can go forward and really talk about the food co-op movement and sharing how wonderful co-ops are we also have to kind of take a step back and talk about the existing grocery store industry. Lots of people do not know what goes on behind the scenes in grocery stores and we ought to know there's too much so much going on in our world today that the benign grocery store like what? I just go in, I shop, I go home. There's some people don't have a lot of information about what goes on behind but let me tell you the power and the greed, the exploitation that's involved with big grocery store it's mind-boggling. Most of our food is owned by just four companies in the United States. They get to control what goes on the shelves of our grocery store. There's a bottleneck, we have all this wonderful food. There's a bottleneck from these big grocery stores and they choose what goes on the stores and there's their slotting fees, their shelves you have to pay the grocers to get your product on the shelves, you have to have perfect food in the produce area so the farmers have to grow so much more food than what the grocery store will put on the shelves. Just when things go on sale in grocery stores it's not the grocery store that's taking the cut. No, it's the people that provide the food to the grocery store. That's not the business model that I wanna support. And so while we are familiar with how to eat healthy and what clean foods, organic foods we also have to think about where we get our food and what business models do we wanna support. And so by knowing that I'm not a big sales person I don't like to push things but I am so passionate about food cooperatives and I could go on and on. They're just such a wonderful business model. And food cooperatives, there are seven principles and values that all co-ops kind of follow and one of my favorite is principle number six and it's about cooperatives helping cooperatives and so just what Sue was saying how like the cheese board is helping Eris-Mendi. It's just such a wonderful business model where especially with the startup co-ops. Can I take a look at your business plan? Can I take a look of how you helped support low income people in your store and what kind of programs that you have? The cooperative community is just so positive and empowering and I just love being a part of it. So I just wanted to share a little bit about that and then also so we're a startup cooperative we're looking for real estate at this time we have 507 owners, we're looking at we need 1,200 owners to have doors on our store and those 1,200 it will not only bring the needed equity that we need but also the backing of the community so when we do go out to get funding they know the lenders know we have 1,200 interested people that want this store. Also we'll have loyal customers on day one and that's really important because as you all know in the food and grocery industry there's not a lot of cushions so you need to have shoppers. It's more than just getting the store open you need day to day shoppers. And so anyway I just wanted to share that cooperatives right now they are there's some positive activity happening with the growth of owner of cooperatives. We are working with an organization outside of Minnesota called the Food Co-op Initiative and they help consumer owned grocery stores get opened and so a couple of things that they said they just recently have an annual report they were just talking about how a lot of grocery stores in smaller towns or rural areas that are closing because they're owned by small mom and pop owners and they're offspring or they don't have people stepping in but a lot of those businesses are going to the cooperative model so that's really exciting that the stores don't close. Also early on a lot of the co-ops were in college communities progressive areas but now they're popping up in rural communities a lot of black and brown led startup efforts are happening all across the country. The pandemic has really amplified the grocery industry the distribution chains. So cooperatives buy from a more local system so a lot of the co-ops the communities with co-ops throughout the pandemic had a lot, their shelves were full they didn't have a lot of problems with that. So yeah, so it's exciting times people are kind of are getting more knowledgeable they're understanding that they don't like the corporate business model they're paying more attention to the food that they eat and they care about where they shop where they get their food. I started the co-op when my family and I we moved to Benisha back in 2013 and I won't go into all of that detail it's on our website about who the board is but I just decided we need only 30 miles so I lived in San Francisco went to other avenues when I lived there back in the 90s then moved to Berkeley went to the cheese board it was right down the street from where we lived then we moved to Richmond and continued to shop in Berkeley at an independent store called the Monterey Market which now they were the impetus of the two Berkeley Bowl stores in Berkeley great independent stores we moved 30 miles to Benisha and we were appalled at the lack of choice and so that's why I started the co-op I wanted choice and just so I didn't realize I was a foodie until I moved away from these great places with food and so I'm thinking there has to be more people that think this so I brought it to the community in January of 2016 can we do this? and 65 people showed up then a couple months later I learned about the food co-op initiative this national organization they do yearly conferences so I flew to Indiana for a four day conference I thought if I'm gonna do this I need to learn right from the beginning the best practices so did that yeah then I learned about the co-op business and it took me a year and a half to find the board cause I didn't know anybody in Benisha so it took a year and a half and from the advice of Stuart the executive director at the food co-op initiative he's like Paula take your time get the right people it'll you know so we incorporated in 2017 started selling shares online and at the farmers market and yeah so we've been going since then they say typically it's like five to 10 years for a startup food cooperative from idea to open doors so we're right on track they didn't anticipate a two year pandemic which really halted things it through as everybody knows it affected everything so yeah so right now we like I said we're looking for locations we're looking for like three different areas and then we have our consultant all lined up to do a market study based on the locations that we find soon we'll be starting a capital campaign where we'll go back to our owners and give them opportunities to be more involved with the finances of the co-op and yeah we participate in these national conferences we participate in the California conferences and we just you know are moving along the benefit the pros and the cons as far as starting this it feels good that I'm doing something that I'm making a difference if not me who if not now when I can't complain and say why don't we have a food co-op so that's why that's what I step forward and I had teenagers and I wanted them to see how to participate in the community how to get to know people and how to have a vision and reach that and as far as the setbacks well it's a little more harder than I thought you know and it has taken some time away from family I'm not cooking as much Hi Rene I'm not cooking as much so we need a co-op and one last thing I just want to say is the co-operative I'm just so excited so Balejo as I understand it it's one of the most diverse communities in the country and we need the food in our store to reflect that in our deli, in our grab and go we ought to have you know couscous, tabouli, you know Indian food all different kinds of foods as opposed to just the potato salad and the macaroni salad you know like let's really bring it all to the community all of the wonderful diverse food if people had a clue as to how much diversity is out there again the grocery store is controlling what we eat so as a co-op we can buy from so many different food vendors and have a lot more choice and so that's exactly why I started the co-op to get more choice thank you okay next will be Jamila from The Deep good co-op thank you hi everyone I'm Jamila Lane founder co-founder worker owner of The Deep Grocery Co-op formerly known as East Oakland Grocery Co-op EOGC and The Deep stands for Deep East Oakland empowering the people and that name came about because when we look at Oakland and East Oakland our community has a history of you know being violent you know from in drug affiliated and things like that and it's very important that we give people another view or another vision for us to look forward towards our future and so we started in 2019 I heard that there was a call to join the co-op and I was at the time working at an after school program and East Oakland were called to elementary and there was a friend who said oh they're opening a co-op out here in East Oakland and I was like I want to sign up so I signed up in the summer of August 2019 and it took about maybe six to eight months like the next year like February where I heard back from the former project manager and I applied and I was onboarded in February of 2019 as a first member so then maybe two or three months after that we formed seven other individuals who were the founding cohort members and it came down to four owners and now me being the only active member who stayed on board so why, how did the project get started? In 2009 there was a community survey that was by the communities for a better environment and the results showed that 33% of East Oakland residents surveyed that there wasn't a full service affordable supermarket in the neighborhood and at the time there were only four, no nine supermarkets in the Oakland Hills and only four in the Flatlands and this is important because when you look at East Oakland there's so many liquor stores like almost on every corner, every corner and there's this term called the food desert or food apartheid which is a more appropriate term because these communities have been blocked out their marginalized communities where we didn't have access to organic natural foods. The reason I joined is because working at the school I would see kids coming from recess, tired after recess from eating hot chips, tacos, all these sugary drinks. I even had a food club at the school where I taught students how to make smoothies and small dishes like collard green wraps, seaweed wraps and the kids really enjoyed those things so when the pandemic came in the summer, well the summer came first, the pandemic came I was also working at Three Stone Hearth and I remember in June of 2019 they were going under construction so I was laid off from that job and then I shortly did substitute teaching and I was laid off from that job because of the pandemic and I thought it was, the universe was like giving me this opportunity to start, fully start the co-op and believe it or not our group worked through the entire pandemic with no break and we did a host of food distribution serving the community in East Oakland hosting food distributions at Actinon Verba's Farm where we were getting residents to fill out surveys like would you like a grocery store and how do you get to your grocery store? So we did a series of those things and I kinda skipped but we got incorporated in September of 2020 so we were officially a co-op. We started an online grocery store in April of 2020 which didn't last very long but we tried it out at a commercial kitchen, Dickey Farms which was our first try of practicing the workload and certain people ordering for certain departments. I was a produce buyer which was difficult because you have to learn how to do your price margins and all that so that was a good learning lesson. Mandela Food Co-operative in West Oakland has been very instrumental in supporting our co-op and helping us grow. We actually did a 12 week training there at the beginning to kinda get the tools and skills of how to operate and run a grocery store. Yeah, so fast forward. And oh another thing I wanna add is that this store will be a black and brown owned grocery co-op and the reason being is because that's the major majority of folks that live in East Oakland and to me what I see is a new way out to, as you see there's still remnants of the war on drugs, if quote unquote and there's also been a war on food I feel like because I remember growing up not having anything to eat. Eating like maybe one certain food like the whole day and that's we shouldn't have to live like that because when you think of how your body is supposed to develop as an adult, your brain and all things like that we need to have access to healthy foods. So that's one reason why I'm doing it. I feel like it's my responsibility and that's why I didn't decide to take a break or leave. So some of the personal rewards has been the beginning of the cohort training, building our team, everybody seemed to be very excited about the process so there was a lot of dedication and a lot of vision to what we were doing and I think that reward was good for me because it's show me how I can work with other people. I also have another business that I do solo so going from like doing my juice business to a co-op has been different in the sense that you're working in a group, y'all make the same decisions and then my juice business, the mission of that really fits into the idea of the co-op so I really thought that was, it was a great match, a good fit. Making it through candidacy was also really a really good reward because we made it through the hard part of getting all the bylaws written, the articles which is very daunting because there's a lot of language that I don't understand but just to kind of break it down and have the support from CELC and the support from Mandela's and Actin on Verba really kind of helped us get that going and then also working with Community Ready Corp so Community Ready Corp is a Black self-determination group and they focus on nine areas of self-determination and what they have done with us so in the last eight months we distributed 4,000 bags of produce, no 4,500 bags we have 400 more to go but we've been doing a series of those to schools, senior homes, recreation centers and they like pay for all the produce even help us with logistics of dropping the food off so we're doing like 250 bags a day ordering large amounts of produce, getting it from Mandela and bringing it to bag up so that's been very rewarding for me because it also tested my will and my capacity and I feel like I've gained more capacity just kind of making doing things on my own I don't like to work alone though, it's not easy and then seeing the smiles and affirmations on people's faces has been another reward because at first I don't think we were like pushing it like we should have as far as letting residents know there are a lot of people that haven't heard about us so just to be out there and in the community and like sharing with them like oh we're opening a grocery store for us you know you can join and things like that people feel empowered by that they feel like you know we don't have a grocery store like that's really cool like where are you guys looking where and when is it opening so just to hear folks kind of approach that approach and them feeling positive that they see their people like really pushing towards something different and we're not on the street selling nothing bad so it's really changes that dynamic some of the challenges have been making group decisions I think that's a big one when you're working in a group cause other folks are in other places their vision might not be how you see it but that's been a big challenge but it's definitely doable because I find myself saying yes to a lot of things and if they go with the flow I say yes yeah our online store that was another challenge because we didn't really have customers you know we have a certain target market and of course that's like low income and folks who you know don't eat healthy foods and that's why the nutrition education point is really important and I feel like that didn't really work well because we were on the top of this hill in San Leandro at this farm and folks either have to come we did have a delivery service though which was good but there were folks who you know had money or you know they might be new to the community but they know the importance of having an organic grocery store so I think we weren't really hitting the right market and the way I see or visualize that working out is if some of these like organic produce or all these you know organic products or natural products so if we can get funding to make the cost low because that's another thing folks don't want to buy expensive ingredients you know or you know it just might not fit in with their budget so just create an assistant where we can like keep those costs low so they can experience you know what it means to eat healthier would be great. Another challenge has been working solo you know for a year I mean I have support from the other groups and right now I'm doing an apprenticeship at Mandela's again just to kind of help cover shifts so that's been easy it's been better for me to come back and really see okay this is the day today you know at first I feel like the 12 weeks we breeze through it and I'm like do I want to be a grocery store worker like I was thinking that you know and right now I feel like as I'm reaching I'm in my Saturn return year that this is like the spark of my career like this can help and propel me even if it leaves me somewhere else I'm really excited to see the growth. Looking for a location has been another challenge because there's you know I don't want to make decisions for everybody so I'm kind of weighing that out till we build a new team and see what we can do also just the pricing on locations folks not want to give up their businesses or not be in the right fit or in the right area you know because there's a lot of you know it's kind of tough in deep East Oakland so it's really important that we find a prime location where people feel safe and also is you know close enough for them to travel to but I definitely think it's doable and I wanted to add another personal reward we had the opportunity to meet Miss Nimhard who wrote the book Collective Courage and Collective Courage highlights a lot of the black cooperatives that started in the South so we were able to kind of ask her questions and pick her brain about you know some of her research around co-ops because historically we know before you know folks formed the actual co-ops there were mutual aid groups and there were groups that kind of helped you know the black South come out of you know poverty whether it was like sharecropping and things of that nature so I kind of like how this feels like it's in a relation to you know where my grandparents came from and like me continuing that legacy and that story building co-ops because that's the way to go and we get caught up in like the corporate world and to be able to uniquely build your own business is really powerful and it can speak volumes to you know the youth that's coming up you know a lot of youth when they get out of high school they don't know if they want to go to college so I can kind of see co-ops as being like used as a tool in a gateway especially since most of our public schools are pushing our youth to prisons you know especially black and brown students so if there was a way to implement some sort of re-entry program even in our co-op that would be very ideal because most thing is people just want you to meet meet them where you're I mean you have to meet folks where they're at sorry you have to meet folks where they're at and that's one thing that I'm starting to see when I'm out you know folks know me from the community just working in the community but when they see me like doing what I'm doing they're like oh my god you're like just to see your growth like I'm so proud of you like I never thought I would be doing food because I went to school to be a sociologist and do social work but this is a form of social work I knew I wanted to be hands on with the community I didn't want to be you know in a cubicle and you know working in my interest has a lot to do with like substance abuse users and women that deal with mental health issues and I see the food being you know a way to that you know by providing the nutrition education back to that but I think I'm done thank you thank you so much everybody you know before I take questions from the audience I just want to say that this is just answers the questions that I have been asked in my book it is like so what is the legacy of people's food system or like why did it die out and I say no it didn't die it just evolved into things that we are talking about and I learned so much today about how Aries Mandy is so similar to other avenues and yet so different I heard so much about Paula's vision about the new kind of consumer co-op that she is working towards and Jamila opened up a whole new world for me how community could be rich and how creative ways they were still able to distribute food and start the co-op kind of on the street level during the pandemic and even now thank you that was amazing that was amazing thank you all such amazing stories too and just so you all know August and summer was kind of all about food we had Acton on Verba came and spoke with Bryant Terry and Dragon Spunk and 280 project so that is available on our YouTube and then we had a program about Black Panther Party and their food service so this really ties in so amazing so who has a question yeah ask the question to the person that you think there would be you know answering thank you so much I shop at other avenues I live in the sunset and thank you Silvia hey for my annual membership and I do have a question for Silvia but I also have a question for Silia Silia sorry Silia question for Silia and a question for Jamila so Silia my daughter is 16 years old she's a high school student she's very interested in social justice and she would love to work at other avenues but she's in high school so she can't do 30 hours do you are considering setting up a program or maybe you already have a program for teenagers that wanna work maybe work 15 hours or 10 hours and Jamila same question for you considering that for our young people coming up that wanna participate but can't do 30 hours thanks for this question yeah definitely we've considered this so I will say that the pandemic like all our visionary ideas forget to set aside to try to keep the store open and deal with all of the stuff going on but this question has come up and we don't have anything you know set you know this is definitely something I've thought about and would like to bring some kind of proposal to the board perhaps you know we have a youth community center right next door and so we've thought about in the summer times usually people go on vacation and sometimes we need a little extra help covering shifts and so it could be a really great idea to do some kind of internship youth internship helping out in the summers we haven't really thought out like how that would all work because I think what would be really valuable is that they would get a little bit of everything just like we do a little bit of you know training with more administrative stuff you know working with produce working with buying but it's an idea and I would like to see that through in some shape or form if it's possible but yeah at the moment it's an idea I support it yeah I agree with Celia so what we've done so far like with the giveaways we actually had a lot of youth support some of those giveaways my niece she's in high school and she invited a lot of her friends to come help at a few of the giveaways but I definitely do see us like implementing a program whether it's like a short apprenticeship or internship for kids to get like skills skill-based learning because the youth are the future really and I definitely would love to add that component I do know that there are certain regulations though where youth can't be in like yeah like in dealing with food or something like that is certain things I think they have to be like 16 and older so just kind of yeah just figuring all that out and hopefully the new team will agree with my ideas but yeah yeah Shanta can I just add can I just add I know it wasn't addressed to me but I just also wanted to share something so the consumer owned grocery the food cooperative we're different in the worker owned so when we open we'll have a general manager so we'll have a general manager and paid staff and so what we're finding in the startup community is finding those general managers from cooperatives so this would be awesome starting at the teenage level and then pulling so there's not we've been told that general managers the food cooperatives are different than general managers at grocery stores because it's a totally different business model so bringing the youth up bringing the worker owned getting people really involved with the co-op working there then we'll have a larger pool of general managers to pull from so your first general manager will be a teenager yeah no by the time we're ready they will have experience the school to food co-op pipeline yes more questions so this is a question addressed to everybody I wondered to what extent you received state grants funds support and what are your thoughts about whether the state should form a community co-op bank to help provide capitalization well I support that I know that that really is a great question and Sue from Aries Mandi could tell you how Aries Mandi in Spain is a great model where they do have a bank and I think that we really could use a cooperative bank and it would be really wonderful to have some sort of state funding however I don't think that being dependent on outside funding particularly from the government is all that advisable but it'd be great to have our own pool of cooperatives who can open up a bank that's a great future dream I will say that we did benefit from the PPP loans or grants so that wasn't necessarily just for cooperatives but that there is some legislation moving through at the state level to provide more funding for supporting cooperative start-ups I forget the bill but it's is it AB something like that? I need to talk about it yeah so there's a big push for trying to get that through I don't know what it's called but definitely yeah yeah it'll be good for start-ups yeah so we received a lot of grants that I can't really remember if we did any statewide funding but we have tried to like source and ask council members about certain locations and what's going on with those locations but we did we were able to fund we'd get community funding like folks fundraise monthly on a monthly basis in our first phase capital campaign we were able to raise 150k like off of Instagram and word of mouth and sharing the link so that was actually really good just from community but I agree with Shanta like we can't rely on that cause I feel like if they they know what you know the city knows a lot of what we're doing and what we need in our communities and it's a challenge to get them to help us out so I'm so as far as decision-making process kind of thing yeah like I kind of disagree a little bit here and I believe I think that the state and the federal government should give lots of money to the co-op like I you know the grocery industry is billions and billions and billions so any support that we can get from the state and federal absolutely like the sky's the limit like I'm sorry but like I'm not thinking small with the co-ops I'm thinking big like it's just incredible so we are a for-profit business everybody is here we're incorporated as a California cooperative corporation however we do have a fiscal sponsor our fiscal sponsor is the California center for cooperative development and so we can apply for grant money to help support the co-op and we need it we need grants as a part of our capital campaign when we get a little further down the road with more owners recently our county Solana County reached out to us they have two million dollars in ARPA money that they want to spread out and the ARPA money that's the American Rescue Plan Act that was recently put into to that happened you know so and so we are looking for grant writers to help with that so if anybody in the audience or anybody on Zoom that does grant writing like we need many grant writers to help us to find this money because of the pandemic there is money out there and the co-ops we need to get out we need to put our hands out so I definitely agree with you about start of money we just don't want to be dependent on oh absolutely absolutely it's SB 1407 yeah I just want to the employee California Employee Ownership Act we have a question from Zoom and they think it's for Jamil they wanted you to expand a little bit about on the school to prison pipeline and how food cooperatives can sort of maybe help stop that or help with re-entry well I think having you know youth programs like a lot of students they might have after school program that they go to or not and I know a lot of schools have these gardening program folks come in like Moomi and have programming where they you know give the after school program and stipend to teach these kids about gardening or food so I kind of see that but times 10 like so if like the program like coordinator can get funding to even be resourceful and create a program for the youth that's beneficial to the school I feel like that could be a good start that could be a good start and I'm kind of thinking some more stuff I mean one thing I would add is that the difference about like worker-owned models or even consumer-owned models is that the wealth is staying in the community and so instead of these extractive models where you know shareholders or who knows where who already have all the money they need the wealth is staying in the community so there's like a exponential economic impact when you shop at local worker owned local-owned grocery stores because all the money the profit is being spent right back in the community and so it's keeping the wealth in the community and so that you know that's one way to you know improve keeping the wealth and not being extracted. Yeah and to add I think it really has to be implemented into the curriculum of the school so if there's some sort of business development that students can learn at a young age practice like you know they used to do the Girl Scout cookies or the Dollar Candy bars or you know these fundraisers for your sports team but instead like shifting that and like let's say from the garden they're able to sell those boxes as CSA boxes you know under like a co-op or something like that but just kind of getting them into the habit of like when you know to make money or make good for themselves like learning those basic life skills because a lot of times you know you're learning at school but then you're not doing nothing when you go home or you run in the streets and you know just doing stuff that's not productive so if they had a way out even to implement their own ideas of things they might want to add to that I think that can be a start. Jonah. Thank you. So I am a consumer. I shop at OA and at Eris Mandis and so they both of those places help me decide what I'm gonna eat and how I'm gonna eat which is very important to me. So I think that co-ops have a really important role to play in educating people about food and about what they eat and because so many Americans have diets that are literally killing them. So they're a force for life and for wellness and for well-being. So thank you both, thank all of you. Thank you Jonah. I also wanted to tell everybody if you have more questions we still have few minutes but if you want to just ask us individual questions take a photo of the screen and that's our contact information. I also printed that out, that's out on the table near the food but that may be not enough but this is our contact for each of us. Definitely you can find them all on Instagram and other social media. I think Jonah's comment was the best one to end on anyway so thank you panelist, amazing. Any final words? Thanks. After you. So I just, of course I'm gonna have a final word. In addition to Shanta's amazing book Other Avenues Are Possible which I've read. Available for sale. Yeah, yeah. Books are available for sale today. I also have this book here called Grocery Story, a promise of food co-ops in the age of grocery giants and this came out in 2019 and he was on a book tour and he came to Venetia and he did a book tour on it. Then he created another book of everything that he saw in North America. In any event, this is a great book, the beginning of it talks all about what I started to talk about about the grocery industry and just the power that they have on our food system and then the second half is the promise of what food co-ops can do and on behalf of Cultivate Community Food Cooperative we are gonna be donating this to the San Francisco Library so that you'll have an opportunity to learn more about co-ops and spread the word. Okay, I want to plug in my book too. It's, you can buy it here, I'll sign it but you don't come to library to buy a book. The library has multiple copies of other avenues that are possible. The library also has all my cookbooks. So, we love Shanta. Go to a lot of libraries to do food demonstrations so look me up. I'm always in the library's event pages and also in the newsletter. I have one last comment to piggyback on what Jonas had and I hope I don't open the can of worms with this but our relationship to food is really important and when you think about it, food is closely related to trauma. You know, it's closely related to past trauma. So that's why like the American diet, we, you know, we'll eat things that are not healthy for us but it's related to things that we experienced in our life, you know, and our food should be able to help us share stories like, you know, like our ancestors did and we should be able to eat foods that we have a relationship with and that relationship with ourselves and our body. So that's the last thing I want to say. Yeah. And I just wanted to add, I agree. I'm really passionate about food and food systems and with that, we don't have a schedule right now but at other avenues we've kickstarted, oh we do, we've kickstarted workshops and events and we're trying to be a little more consistent with that. So we will be having several workshops. We have some about how to make tempe, fire season, immune herbs and I'll also be doing one next year on like regenerative agriculture and GMOs and things of that nature. So keep tuned. Well, I guess we have a flyer so on the way out if you want a flyer for that to register we would love to have you and participate. Yeah, I'm really glad that other avenue has started because that was my passion when I was working there. Not just events but education in general and exchange with the community because one of my criticism with cooperative, especially work around cooperative is that there's a tendency to be club-ish and I think that the more you are open to the communities the more the community is going to be open to you and we had learned that time and time again and we needed the community's help. They always came to us because we were there and we are there for them. Sue, do you have any final? I don't, okay. No pressure, no pressure. No, we don't have any workshops but yeah, no it's been just a pleasure to hear everybody's stories and I think like you guys were saying, I think what's important, like I said points that have been a point for me and I kind of drank the Kool-Aid when I took in there as many jobs just because I wanted to learn how to bake and I drank the Kool-Aid of the co-op after learning just kind of what I got myself into and I think what's important for us and for like the areas of many folks that I know is that folks are coming to this business because there's wonderful food and people are chatting and it's just kind of like trying to teach them a little bit of politics but with milk and cookies because before you know it, they'll be asking you about the co-op and asking you what's this about? What do you mean? Where's the manager and all that type of stuff? So for us it's been really important to connect with the community like that and that's kind of how we're able to achieve that kind of success and that's the most important thing. I know there's a lot of community stuff that is super, super important and it's really important to keep the businesses alive and to keep the businesses really competitive so that we can keep the co-op model as part of this community. Speaking of milk and cookies, there is still some chai and some baked goods outside so everybody please enjoy that. Shanta does have some books for sale and we appreciate you all being here today so thank you very much. Thank you.