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Date: 6/27/2022
AMHERST – The Common Share Food Co-op announced it has entered the pre-construction phase and celebrated adding 85 members in the last year at its first in-person event since the start of COVID-19 in June.
“It was a really important moment to jumpstart our efforts and get people excited again,” said Board of Directors Member Monica Garcia. “We had been working through the [coronavirus] pandemic, but it’s hard to have that visibility when you can’t meet in person, or you can’t have events in person. We were definitely working towards the back-end stuff during the [coronavirus] pandemic, and we did have Zoom events, but this was exciting because it was in person.”
The Common Share Food Co-op will be a full-service grocery store on a bus route near downtown Amherst. The store will feature local, organic and conventional produce, meats, dairy products, bulk foods, frozen foods and other grocery store items including cleaning products.
The project follows a hybrid ownership model where it is collectively owned by its member- and worker-owners. According to the cooperative’s website, four of the nine seats on the Board of Directors will be reserved for worker-owners.
“What’s important for people to know is that we do want to make it as accessible as possible, so we have a low-income option for folks who are self-identified as low income,” Garcia said. “We also have a payment plan option if folks want to or can pay the full price, but they need more time to pay it, and then we also have a free share specifically for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) folks in the community. That’s one major way we try to make it as accessible as possible and recognize historic minequities in not just in our specific community but more broadly in the U.S.”
Garcia said member-owners get to vote on issues, join the board, receive discounts and possibly dividends when the store becomes profitable. They ask for donations to the Solidarity Fund to offset the cost of the discounted price points, which can be found along with information on how to become a member-owner on the cooperative’s website.
The project’s pre-construction phase was initiated when the cooperative surpassed 850 members, and the next step is narrowing down the site search for a store location.
“We are firming up our business plan as we do that so that we know exactly the parameters that we need to keep in mind when we’re looking for the ideal site, and we are finessing and, in some cases, creating more governance structures for the co-op,” Garcia said. “Figuring out how exactly the store will be run and managed, especially because we have a hybrid co-op model meaning that we have consumer-owners who will be shopping there and worker-owners who will be running the store.”
Garcia encouraged individuals to participate and become members not only to enjoy the aforementioned benefits but because it is what keeps the project going, saying that they are “trying to get to 1,000 members before entering the next phase of our development.”
Garcia has been on the board for about one year but has been involved in community organizing for over 20 years. She described herself as being passionate about cooperatives and their role in a solidarity economy that places people over profit. To Garcia, this project is an opportunity to build relationships not just with Amherst and the surrounding municipalities but also with the other cooperatives in the area. Additionally, the directors are aiming to make the store a gathering space for anyone, regardless of if they’re a member-owner or shopping at the store.
“It’s really integral to our mission of building community essentially,” Garcia said. “There’s a vanishing of common space all over the U.S. There are less spaces in which people are encouraged to gather and be with each other for different reasons. It’s important to have that space as a meeting space to build community. There are parks and libraries that often serve that purpose and we want to add to that so that people feel like the cooperative is a community institution.”
Garcia added, “We call it the third space. It’s a place that’s not home and it’s not work. It’s the third space where people can gather.”