The Board Role in the Accountability Stream
By Marilyn Scholl 130 May - June - 2007 Boards of directors are the critical link between owners and management in the accountability chain for a cooperative. If boards don’t have a good understanding of [...]
Capitalization Strategies for New Co-ops
By Bill Gessner 129 march - april - 2007 Where we gonna get the grubstake? The 300 food co-op stores in the United States, owned by more than 400,000 consumers, face the continuing challenge of [...]
Market Study Toolbox
The purpose of this guide is to provide volunteer board members of new or expanding food cooperatives with an accessible tool they can use to better understand their market potential. A market study is a [...]
Closing the ‘Gap’ – Using co-op data to achieve improved store performance
By Mel Braverman 126 September - October - 2006 Many cooperatives struggle to find appropriate operational benchmarks and to set challenging yet attainable goals. Without the use of external data to help them understand how [...]
Monitoring the Manager
By Mark Goehring 123 March - April - 2006 There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is commonly known to directors and managers. It is a dimension open to interpretation—potentially as vast as space [...]
Rebating Superdividends to Members in the UK
West Midlands Co-operative Society (WM) and Oxford, Swindon & Gloucester Co-operative Society (OSG) have recently merged to create the fourth largest co-operative society in the UK: The Midcounties Co-operative. They currently operate co-operative funeral services, [...]
Home-Grown Talent: A guide to promoting from within
By Carolee Colter 122 January - February - 2006 Promoting leaders from among your existing staff offers a lot of advantages. Surprises are minimized—the person’s strengths and weaknesses are known quantities. Furthermore, you can reward [...]
Co-op Expansions Raise the Bar
By Bill Gessner, Patricia Cumbie 121 November - December - 2005 Every expansion is unique in some respect, but the universal truth is that building a larger facility includes taking on a bigger role in [...]
Case Study: Strategic Growth by Acquisition
LaMontañita Co-op Food Market Founded: 1976 Members: 12,000 Number of Locations: 4 (Albuquerque, Gallup, Santa Fe) Number of Staff: 200 You don’t have to travel far on the sun-baked streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to [...]