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It’s Time to Enroll in CBLD 2024! Early Bird Enrollment Now Open Our Cooperative Board Leadership Development (CBLD) team is looking ahead to another great year of supporting your organization’s success through our award-winning CBLD program. Now in its 20th year, CBLD provides an annual program of board support that includes monthly consulting, facilitated board retreats, a wealth of online webinars [...]
Our culture has a lot of beliefs about money that range from its worship to seeing it as the root of all evil. Food cooperatives especially have been historically conflicted about capital, once seeing it as the cause of destructive economic practices, to the point that raising money was once practically shunned. This left many cooperatives under-capitalized and some of them had to close [...]
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Ten years ago, the Assabet Co-op Market recruited its first member-owners in the small mill town of Maynard, Massachusetts. Today, the co-op boasts more than 2,100 member-owners from 40 communities, and this spring they'll celebrate the grand opening of their 8,000 square-foot grocery store along the Assabet River. "It's been a pure grassroots effort from the beginning," says Lorne Bell, the co-op's operations coordinator. Bell estimates that he and co-op volunteers have "tabled" at more than 500 farmers markets, festivals, and community events over the years.
Raising capital is especially important for cooperatives, which don’t have a typical ownership structure that banks or lenders are used to. Mobilizing the co-op’s membership to raise funds through an owner capital campaign can be an excellent strategy.
The Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op is uniquely situated in small town Middlebury, Vermont. When they were ready to expand, they reached out to Columinate for assistance with a member capital campaign.
Research suggests that public speaking tops the list as the number-one fear-inducing activity for most people. Put that together with asking people for money, and you’ve got a potent combination for high anxiety.
The town of Astoria, Oregon has a strong independent streak. While other nearby areas are overrun with chain stores, their town has not sustained that level of attention or development. That doesn’t mean the 10,000 people who live there don’t want nice amenities, efficiency and convenience. The difference is that they are willing to create those opportunities for development from within their own community.
It seems like many co-ops are either in the middle of, just finished, or are about to start a project. And all of those projects need adequate capital to be successful. Raising money from co-op owners has become a standard component of project capitalization and the amounts co-ops are raising has been growing.
