Hello and welcome to Smooth Cooperators, a Belfast Community Co-op program.
I'm Emily.
I'm Alessandra.
And we are here to talk to you about the Cooperative Business Model, the Belfast Community Co-op
in particular.
Today we are going to continue our series on Cooperative Principles with Cooperative
Principle number four, autonomy and independence.
But first we're going to do a little check in and see how our summer is going, particularly
what have you been eating lately?
Oh, the food at the co-op has been delicious.
The deli has been able to get their hands on a lot of fresh produce recently.
And so their cucumber and onion salad, this vinaigrette dressing, is just so good.
Just really hitting the spot lately.
And I think the recipe just kept secret.
So I just have to go in there to get my fix.
But it's like fresh cucumbers that are sliced up and fresh red onions that are sliced up.
And then it has this vinegar oil dressing on it that when I'm finished eating the salad,
I just kind of drink it down because it's so delicious.
What are you eating, Emily?
I basically live for cherry season.
I think they might be my favorite things in the world.
I say that about a lot of stuff.
So just add it to the list.
I love cherries.
And the cherries right now have been particularly delightful.
The other thing that I really love are white nectarines.
They don't come around very often.
I definitely romanticize them for the rest of the year.
But right now I've been putting them on my breakfast cereal.
It makes my day awesome.
I was just orienting a new person this morning who's going to be a cashier.
And I was telling them about the Farm Fresh Rewards program.
If you shop at the co-op and you use Snap, the EBT food stamp program, and you tell
the cashier that you're paying with EBT, they will scan a coupon.
And it gives you 50% off the fresh fruits and vegetables that you're buying.
And he was like, 50%?
That's wild.
And I was like, yeah, it's super it.
But it's like, when you think about buying cherries, you're like, oh, maybe it's too
expensive or I can't buy so many.
And it's like, if you have food stamps, you can go buy cherries and get 50% off them.
And I just think that's super cool.
That's awesome.
It's such a good program.
Big shout out to Maine Farmland Trust who started it and Good Shepherd Food Bank who
took it over and is partnering with them.
It helps so many of our community members.
And we're really happy to be able to participate in that.
Come into the store and check it out.
Yeah.
Okay, cooperative principles.
So just to give you a quick reminder, we're on cooperative principle four.
Cooperative principle one is open and voluntary membership.
Number two is democratic member control.
Number three is member economic participation.
And number four, autonomy and independence.
The International Cooperative Alliance defines autonomy and independence.
Cooperatives are autonomous self-help organizations controlled by their members.
If they enter into agreements with other organizations, including governments or raise
capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by
their members and maintain their cooperative autonomy.
So what does that mean?
When I think about it, I think about how sometimes co-ops look the same or feel the same or smell
the same, but that for the most part, all the food co-ops that you've ever shopped in,
they're all separate organizations.
So we all work together.
We all align ourselves with these cooperative principles and values, but we're all designed
and governed to serve the communities that we're in.
It's kind of how I was thinking about it before we started to research for this episode.
And now I kind of think about it as the whole reason that you're a cooperative and that
you stay autonomous is so that you're not bought out by a huge corporation.
That is really what I think that that principle was there for, to be like, look, you're not
going to look for this best deal for your shareholders.
You're not going to try to make money at all costs.
You're not going to be a part of the extractive capitalist economy.
You are going to be a business that is governed by your community, that serves your community,
and that your community in the end is the biggest benefit factor.
And that's like pretty radical in this day and age where we have companies, corporations
and CEOs who are literally vacuuming money out of our local economies to national, international
banks.
That money doesn't come back.
We work really hard for it.
It's taken out of our local economy and we don't get to get it back.
And I think with the co-op, obviously some of our money leaves the county and leaves
the state because we're buying product, you know, we buy apples from New Zealand.
There's that exchange, but for the most part because our management and our workers and
our distributors are relatively local, that money is staying in our economy.
So that's kind of a little bit more about how I'm thinking about it.
Well, and it makes sense too because you have a business that's being started by the people
who live near it and they're starting it because they have a certain set of needs that they
would like to meet.
This principle ensures that it stays in their control, that decisions aren't going to be
made, that jeopardize the autonomy of the business, that somebody can't come in and sweep that
up like all those other little grocery stores we've seen throughout the years.
It's so interesting to me that the co-ops that are commonly thought of and commonly
founded in our country are food co-ops because when we think about all the things that we
need to survive like as humans, we need shelter, we need water, and we need food.
And so many things like public transportation and drinking water and roads and even our
first responders, those services are governed by organizations or by the public because
they're so important, but our food isn't.
When we know that, when the food is kept away from us or when the food is not healthy, that's
when people really turn to the cooperative model to say, hey, we need a little bit more
say here.
This food is really important to us.
We need to figure out how our community can be served.
So it's like when you take care of a water system, you're not taking care of your water
system for the company that's on the other side of the country.
You're taking care of it for the people who are in your community who are drinking it.
And I think that in that way, the board of directors and the management, they're like
stewards of the food economy in this community to keep this food that we all need to eat
available and safe.
It was really interesting to go down this research rabbit hole.
There's a guy, his name is John Steinman.
He came and did a talk with the co-op, maybe last year or whatever.
He wrote a book called Grocery Story.
He drove around the country in this van visiting food co-ops, all of them autonomous and independent.
But notice a lot of similarities.
And I think out of those travels, he decided to develop this app that's called Food Co-op
Finder.
So that way you can go traveling or whatever and you're like, oh, I need to buy some food.
You can go buy your food from a food co-op and support that local organization of where
you're traveling to.
And he thinks that there are probably 325 individual food co-ops in North America that
are established and over 100 that are in more of the startup category.
So basically they have owners, they have a board of directors, but they don't have a
story yet.
I just read an excerpt from his book and I got chills.
I was super inspired by just reading a little bit about the story of food and about how
taking that autonomy back and supporting your local food co-op and your local economy is
kind of groundbreaking.
It seems life-changing for him.
And he talked a lot about who owns your grocery store.
So he has a website which we'll put in the description for the program that's grocerystore.coop
which is co-op backslash who-owns-your-grocery-store.
And you can just go and see your local big box grocery store has a name, but it's owned
by a different company that has a different name.
The chances are super high.
And the chances are even higher that that company's headquarters are out of this country.
Definitely.
And so it's like people who are not living in this country, they don't have any skin
in the game for making sure that we all have consistent, fresh, healthy food.
You all should read this article.
It is totally inspiring.
We'll put the rest, we'll put the article in there too.
Absolutely.
It's like really disempowering to me to think about those big corporations owning food that
like I need for myself and my loved ones to survive.
And so maybe part of why the co-op is so inspiring and motivating to some people and why they
like choose it as I say as a lifestyle, like the co-op isn't just a job, it's your lifestyle,
is because there's empowerment there and there's like accountability to feeding your
community to supporting the producers and the farmers and like getting to know your
distributor truck driver who like they're superheroes.
The stuff that they can do with huge trucks is amazing to me.
Boggles the mind.
Every time they get into our parking lot we are astounded and we say, that's a job I
could never do.
I hope they get paid a lot of money.
And it makes me want to like clap for them.
And I'm like, I know this is just their job.
They do it second nature.
It means a lot to us though.
It does.
It's super cool.
Yes.
It's also fun being autonomous and independent means that we can go out and meet our local
farmers and our local producers.
We don't have to go through any specified distributor, although we do obviously have agreements
with specific distributors.
But if you are shopping at the co-op, you are bound to run into somebody who is delivering
some sort of produce.
Those people, they live in our community.
They are bringing the food that they grow directly to our store.
Because of being a cooperative, we are able to do that.
And we then develop those relationships.
And there's so much more than just the transaction of like, we buy your produce.
It turns into help us design our flower boxes or you know, something happened to your land.
We're going to raise money for you.
We're going to help support cleaning up PFAS or when people have had their barns burned
down or something bad happened to their animals.
We know that the way that we're eating is because these people are producing food for
us so we're going to help them.
It's a relationship.
So the other part about being autonomous and independent that I just wanted to highlight
is the fact that our board of directors has a role in keeping us autonomous and independent.
One of the ways that we have made that possible is by using policy governance.
And I know that we've talked about policy governance in the past, but we're just so
pleased to have it that we want to talk about it all the time.
Because our board of directors is not necessarily trained to run a grocery store, what they
do is they hire a general manager or a general management team.
In this case, we just have the one general manager at the moment.
Shout out to Doug Johnson, who's awesome.
Oh my gosh, so right.
So our management team runs the store, but they are held to the policies that the board
sets.
So the board is not actually running the store per se, but they make sure that the management
team is doing what they're supposed to be doing.
And that allows us to stay autonomous and independent and fiscally sound.
After I tell somebody, oh, congratulations, you're an owner or whatever.
Now you have rights and responsibilities.
It sounds kind of, you're like, oh, wait, what did I sign up for?
And it's like, no, it's cool.
But a huge responsibility is voting for the board of directors because those are the people
who are setting those policies that are guiding the general manager.
And also the board of directors, they're like the people that look into the future and say,
why do we exist?
What's this for?
And they answer that question.
And they recalibrate our cooperative compass to walk in the direction that we think that
the organization should be headed towards community, which is towards connection, which
is towards sustainability, both of the environment and also of the business.
So that is such an so crucial for the owners to vote for those people.
Sometimes elections are so big that you feel like your vote doesn't count.
Those elections are small enough and have a super big impact.
The fact that the co-op has been an anchor of downtown since 1976, I guess maybe it wasn't
an anchor then, but it certainly was a draw to town.
I think that that has formed what Belfast as a city is today.
And that means that our decisions that we make at the board level do have an impact
on our whole community.
Hey, I'm going to make a really big transition for a second.
Okey dokey.
Just say that the board is starting to look for candidates to run, even though the elections
in March, they will be looking for candidates now.
So if all of this sounds exciting to you, you should reach out to the board.
It's the board at Belfast.coop.
Check out the board page on our website.
It's a really great opportunity, and you could be the future.
I was on the board for six years.
They were like six very transformative years.
I was a young person who kind of came on with a lot of energy thinking I knew what I knew
and realizing I didn't and being willing to like push myself and learn new things and
get educated and understand like what governance was and why we were there.
I was like, oh, I'm not here to be Alessandra on this board.
I'm not here to make Alessandra's choices.
I'm here to think about the co-op as a whole and to think about the co-op as this child
that I'm raising but also my elder who has wisdom all wrapped up into like what's going
to be the best for the business, what's going to be the best for the community and make
decisions based on that mode of thinking, which was really expansive, really challenging
at times, but also really exciting.
Yeah.
You get to hang out with cool people.
You get to hang out with Emily.
It's really just the best.
Thanks for taking that road trip with us.
We know how much we love to talk about the board.
Is there anything else we wanted to talk about, principle for autonomy and independence?
Obviously, there's so much more to all of these principles than that.
I urge you, if you're interested, to go take a journey into the International Cooperative
Alliance website, understand why these principles were made, why they're important, and what
other co-ops do to kind of uphold these things and their day-to-day operations.
So if you have any questions, please reach out and ask us.
We would love to hear what you're thinking.
There's a few other things we wanted to talk about today.
The next thing is there's been a lot of chatter out there about the renovation and the fact
that we did not get a bid on our general contractor.
There's a story behind that, and Alessandro said she was willing to share that.
Yeah.
So I was at the register the other day and somebody was like, oh, I have a construction
friend and they told me you didn't take a bid on the project.
Is that true?
And I was like, oh, okay, I have a minute to talk to you about this because when we
started out discovering what the depth and breadth of this project could be seven years
ago, we were not looking for this get-rich-quick scheme.
We needed partners.
We needed people who were going to be committed to this, and we needed people who were going
to be willing to ask the hard questions and go deep for us and find answers because it
was unconventional.
But also for the people that we found to work with us, it was going to be an opportunity
because our architects, Woodhull, they had designed a couple of retail spaces, mostly
in southern Maine.
They are excited to design retail spaces for other places in Maine, and we were really
dependable partners to work with, really excited partners to work with, and so that was a really
beneficial project for them.
And so if we found people that we felt really secure in working with, we weren't going to
find the cheapest person.
We needed to find the dependable person and still have it be reasonable.
We're not going to run our bank accounts dry.
Building trust in a huge project like this was super important.
So same thing with the general contractor.
We have had hours and hours and hours of discussions with them to find out what's possible, to
be like, hey, we're not professional builders.
You are professional builders.
Please tell us what's going to happen.
Tell us how we're going to keep selling groceries while we go through this renovation project.
We also looked to other co-ops in the area and we said, hey, Portland food co-op, who
did you work with when you needed to redesign and retrofit this store?
Warrant construction came super highly recommended.
We started to build again that relationship and that trust, and we weren't about to break
that, especially because they were so reasonable.
They were so supportive.
So now as we've gotten into the actual building project, they do bid out all those projects.
We do find local contractor who is available and who has the best price.
Like that is absolutely what we are doing.
We're working with local people who are our neighbors, who live streets over or who are
traveling from a little bit outside of Augusta.
We are finding trustworthy people to do the best work for the best price.
We're absolutely bidding out concrete, electrical, plumbing, all of those subcontracting jobs.
We also have a position known as an owner representative.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, sure.
We have a couple local guys who are there to make sure, so they're owners of the co-op,
and they're there to make sure that everything is going well.
And they're there to make sure that people stay informed and that Doug can keep running
the store, the general manager can keep running the store, and also know everything that's
happening on the job site.
They're there to reach out to local people because they've been working in construction
in this area for a long time.
So they know the people who are available.
They know the connections.
They know who's going to show up beyond time and follow through on the work that they do,
which is really what we need.
We need to have a store that looks great.
Sure.
But that's also like, we need a store that works.
Absolutely.
So where are we on the renovation at the moment?
The renovation at the moment is going well.
Our excavators have gone, which is really sad because I really liked them.
Pendleton Street is open again, though, and that's pretty nice.
It is nice.
The flow of the parking lot is going to be sort of here and there.
Let's be honest, it was like never great, and we're doing the work that we can to make
it better.
There's a lot of work being done in the basement.
We are framing out and building walls for a meat preparation area, so it'll be a refrigerated
prep area so that we can get large cuts of meat and cut them up.
That's going to save us money.
We're also having a refrigerated prepared foods preparation area.
So again, if you can be in a refrigerated space preparing food, that food's going to
have a longer shelf life.
It's going to be safer to eat, so that is also being built downstairs.
We had some moisture issues with one of our coolers.
Thankfully, the guy who's the superintendent on our job site is really resourceful and
makes changes, and things happen really quickly.
They were able to clean the underside of one of our walk-ins and insulate it and build
a false floor while the glue dries and really work with our team so that we can sell a product
on the shelves, be improving the store so that in the years to come, we don't have moisture
issues.
Some of you may have noticed that we had a large tree on the southern corner of our
building near the parking lot.
It was lovingly planted by Mike Hurley back in the day.
Unfortunately, we had an arborist come by and test it, and there was enough rot in it to
make it potentially dangerous, especially because our plans are to have a cafe seating
area underneath those branches.
Unfortunately, that tree did have to come down.
We have donated the wood to the Waldo County woodshed, which provides heating assistance
to those in need in Waldo County.
There actually are common sense recipients in the month of September.
So, as you round up your sense at the register, it'll go to keep people's homes warm.
So thank you for that.
Any trees that we do take down, we will be planting a replacement.
Probably not in the exact same place, but we will be replacing those trees that come
down because we care.
Yeah, in the accepted civil plans that we had to submit to the city.
On those plans, you have to have all the plantings in there.
So they're already anticipating replanting trees in and around the store, and we do hope
to work with our fellow co-op Fedco in planting native plants, plants for pollinators, and
also edible plants.
In other new and exciting news, September is our ownership month.
The last two years, we have done ownership drives, and they've been really successful,
and we've been very happy to do those.
This year, we are going to shift our focus, keeping it on ownership, but we're going
to talk about equity, and we're going to talk about how much equity you have, how much equity
you owe, why it would be good to invest in the co-op, and we'll be having outreach, tabling
sessions weekly throughout the month of September.
So come talk to us.
We love talking to co-op members and even just people of the community.
We are chatty.
The other really fun thing that's happening in September is our birthday.
It's the anniversary of the day that the stores doors opened.
It's September 17th.
Every year, we stand outside, or I guess pre-pandemic, we were inside, and we give out birthday cake.
This year, we'll be trying to provide apple cake because apples in September and our logo
and also because they're delicious.
So come grab a piece on September 17th.
The other things that are going to be happening this month, we've got a board meeting on September
27th.
That is the fourth Wednesday of the month.
Those start at 6 p.m.
You can join via Zoom or you can come in person.
Those are happening in the Abbott Room of the Belfast Free Library.
You always welcome owners and there is a public comment section where you can make your voice
heard.
Then one last thing, we will do a quarterly inventory on the last day of September.
Mark your calendars.
September 30th, the store will be closing early at 5 p.m. so that we can complete our
quarterly inventory.
Any last thoughts?
Yep, but I don't remember them anymore.
Common ground fair.
Oh, nice.
I forgot about that, but that's a big one.
Go out.
Common ground fair.
Also, if you shop on Fridays, we're going to have fair shirt Fridays again this year.
So every Friday, if you have your common ground fair shirt and you're a worker or you're a
shopper, you can come and hang out and be cool.
What I was going to say during my awkwardly long pause is if you would like to know about
all of these things and more, you can go to our website, Belfast.coop and scroll down
to the bottom.
There's a really handy place where you can sign up for the e-newsletter.
Every two weeks, you hear from us about what's on sale, what's the coolest thing that's happening
in the store right now, who the common sense recipients are, our whole calendar of events.
We want to hear from you.
This is a really great way for you to hear from us.
I did want to remind people that our wonderful general manager, Doug Johnson, makes a short
video every week about our renovation and is up on the Belfast Community Co-op YouTube
page.
So go ahead and check that out.
They're very short and informative and pretty fun.
We'll link that too in the description.
We'll just have a whole slew of links.
I'll just link the e-news sign up in there.
And the grocery store and then...
Yeah, resources.
That's a better way to put it.
Yeah.
Okay, guys.
If you have any questions, always reach out to us.
We love hearing from you.
Again, shout out to Vic, who runs the Belfast Community Radio and edits our program for
us.
We couldn't do this without you, Vic.
Thank you so much.
We literally could not.
Ever.
Yay.
Thank you.
Bye, Cooperation Nation.
You have been listening to episode number five of Smooth Co-operators, hosted by Alessandra
Martinelli and Emily Berry, produced at the Facilities of Belfast Community Radio.