By Marilyn Scholl, Art Sherwood 170 January - February 2014 Great leaders demonstrate how to be a force for good in local communities and beyond. Our cooperative heroes—the Rochdale Pioneers—were striking weavers who opened a grocery co-op in 1844 in Rochdale, England, to help themselves and others get free from indebtedness to the company store. The Pioneers asked and answered some compelling questions: Shouldn’t [...]
By Marilyn Scholl, Joel Kopischke 171 March-April 2014 In the January/February 2014 issue of Cooperative Grocer magazine, we introduced the Four Pillars of Cooperative Governance as a model for the co-op sector to steer our cooperatively owned enterprises toward economic, social, and cultural success. It is the culmination of many years’ work with co-op boards of directors, seeking to answer this question: How can [...]
Marilyn Scholl, of Columinate, (and not too proud to call herself the "designated co-op old fart") provides a succinct recap of the food co-op movement in the United States through history in order to glean lessons and learnings from the past. Scholl addresses the questions relevant to food cooperators in this new era of competition: How did we get here? Will we survive? The [...]
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 [...]
Bill Gessner likes working with people, and most of the time, you’ll find him wherever groups are creating plans for the future. Throughout his career, Bill has worked with hundreds of food co-ops and many development organizations. It is not an exaggeration to say that his ability to work with diverse groups of people has helped the food co-op sector grow and thrive. He [...]
Alysen Land, general manager, Ozark Natural Foods: “Bill has helped our cooperative grow and continually improve. Bill has helped me weather difficult times in my career, and has proven to me again and again that he is a good friend and fellow cooperator.” Jeanie Wells, operations, expansions, and startup consultant, CDS Consulting Co-op: “I first met and worked with Bill in the 1990s and [...]
By Thane Joyal 158 January - February - 2012 When many retail food cooperatives were formed in the 1970s, the distinctions among worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives and not-for-profit corporations were not considered to be barriers to doing business in a culture of cooperation. Regardless of the legal form used to organize the business, in retail food co-ops across the country, members commonly worked, carrying [...]
Bill Gessner likes working with people, and most of the time, you’ll find him wherever groups are creating plans for the future. Throughout his career, Bill has worked with hundreds of food co-ops and many development organizations. It is not an exaggeration to say that his ability to work with diverse groups of people has helped the food co-op sector grow and thrive. He [...]
Looking to the Cooperative Principles, it is clear that cooperatives are by design set up to be empowering organizations. From the first principle to the last, from open membership to concern for community, all aspects of the cooperative’s control of resources are to be a model of trust and transparency. This is achieved when the people involved at all levels know their roles and [...]
By Marilyn Scholl, Joel Dahlgren, Bruce Mayer 148 May - June - 2010 Creating solutions begins with building the foundation for the future you want. One of the remarkable things about cooperation is that mutualism encourages solution-oriented growth, built on a vision of the common good. How profitability and capitalization are handled in cooperatives is an indicator of how much the co-op is actively [...]
