Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Building Community Through Food: The Missoula Community Co-op

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 1-29-08

	The Missoula Community Co-op. BELOW: A drawing of a remodeled Co-op.

In the fall of 2007, a small portion of an old shipping depot on Missoula’s Westside was scrubbed clean and given a new coat of paint. Volunteers made curtains and built shelves to hold staple items like olive oil, cheese, eggs and recycled toilet paper. New plants by the front steps started to take root, and so too did the new storefront of the Missoula Community Co-op.

Across the country, similar food or grocery cooperatives, better known as co-ops, have become an increasingly popular way for a community to gather around food, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest. Food co-ops can be buying clubs or an actual store, and to shop there, an individual or family pays a membership fee to the co-op and becomes a “member-owner.” The member can then order food through the co-op or shop at the store. Food often comes in bulk amounts, which reduces packaging and cost, and because it is ordered through and often delivered to the co-op, the person who orders the food does not pay shipping costs. The idea is that members will also volunteer their time at the co-op to reduce the costs associated with running a store, and keep costs lower for all members…hence the use of the term “cooperative.”

The Missoula Community Co-op was originally founded in 2001 by two Missoula residents who formed a food-buying club that gave residents better access to bulk and local food. By 2006 that buying club was managed by the North Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC), and had grown to dozens of members who participated in a pre-order buying club, ordering monthly from two natural food suppliers. Once a month, members would order food one week and pick it up the next.

As membership rose, the Co-op expanded its services in 2007 to include the renovated store in the Westside, with items that are always stocked, including local cheese, milk and eggs. According to Kate Keller, the Missoula Co-op’s general coordinator, membership at the Co-op rose from 280 members to 420 since the store officially opened in December. While Keller doesn’t expect such incredible membership increases in the near future, she does think it will continue at a steady rate because as she says, co-ops are, “a very old mechanism for altering people’s lives for the better and taking control of resources and surroundings.”

Because the Missoula Community Co-op’s members are “working” members, Keller has had no problems filling the three hour shifts at the store. Keller trained 85 volunteers in the month of December to serve as cashiers, stockers and planners, allowing Keller the time to organize and manage the operation. So many workers has meant that Keller must formalize the operations at the Co-op and create manuals for processing membership payments or distributing food orders. But for Keller, the Co-op has been successful because of the diversity and energy of volunteers. “So many people are involved in so many facets. With a working membership, everyone that comes in brings their own ideas.”

Having so many volunteers also allows the Missoula Co-op to buy more local food. Larger stores usually have one or two people coordinating local food purchases, and those people must buy large quantities of food in order to meet demand. But with so many volunteers, the Missoula Community Co-op is able to buy smaller quantities of food from local producers. As Keller says, “Because we have working members, a lot of product research can be done and the Co-op can organize more purchases from local growers.” Subsequently, the Co-op can buy smaller quantities like a bushel of apples--a quantity that larger stores are unlikely to purchase.

Many co-ops, like the one in Park Slope, New York, use members as volunteer workers. But unlike most co-ops around the country that expand into stores, the renovation of the space at 1500 Burns Street, is a part of the larger vision held by NMCDC. The organization uses community strengths to revitalize the area. In the Westside neighborhood, it hopes to renovate the old shipping complex into a bustling center of the neighborhood.

The nonprofit purchased the large shipping complex where the Co-op is housed in 2006 to build the Burns Street Complex. The project will include an expanded Missoula Community Co-op, a commercial-kitchen and restaurant with public meeting space, and seventeen affordable homes for income-qualified buyers. (Click here for a full PDF of the schematics.)

To keep the homes at an affordable price, the land will remain part of the NMCDC’s Land Stewardship Program, a community land trust in which NMCDC owns the land and only sells the actual homes.

The Co-op is a central part of this development because NMCDC believes that affordable, healthy food is a central way to empower lower income communities. Residents living in the neighborhood that surrounds the development have a median household income that is $7,000 less than the rest of Missoula. In turn, twice as many households receive public assistance than in the rest of the city.

Low-income neighborhoods like this one do not often have access to fresh, local food because they do not have grocery stores nearby that provide such staples. The Prevention Institute provides a brief synopsis of research on this topic, stating that a 1995 study found thirty percent fewer supermarkets in low-income areas than in higher income areas. In turn, low-income residents had limited access to grocery stores because they did not have a car or adequate bus service. Such unequal access is also an issue in poor rural areas. For example, in 1988, wealthier rural areas had four supermarkets per county while poorer counties had three.

In 2006, The Nation reported that New York City’s, “wealthiest residents have five times as many square feet of grocery-store space as do the city’s poorest.” In other states, low-income neighborhoods had half as many supermarkets in 2006 than wealthier communities, but four times the number of convenience stores.

For NMCDC, the Missoula Community Co-op is an opportunity to provide access to lower income community members. Subsequently, those who want to join the Co-op but who rely on public assistance, are students or who make a lower income, pay a reduced rate for the membership. The Co-op is also a part of a larger strategy to encourage healthy eating and the planned, attached community center will be the location of a subsidized meal program that will serve neighborhood kids. NMCDC also intends to use this model to better connect rural and urban Montana by providing a new market for local farmers and ranchers.

Through this work, NMCDC and the Missoula Community Co-op will, as Keller says, “connect people through local food.” Burns Street will become, “a clearinghouse for all of the food projects that are happening now in Missoula. We hope that CFAC (the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition in Missoula) will meet there and that Farm to School programs will utilize the kitchen to process foods for the institutional market. We are hoping that we can draw all of that together in one place and be able to share that space as a center for local food system development.”

While encouraging this local food community to grow, Burns Street will also reinvigorate the larger community by increasing access to healthy and local food. The project is slated for completion in 2010, and as the buildings go up for the homes and funding is secured for the expansion of the Co-op, Keller believes that the project will, “restore a heart to the Westside,” and provide the momentum for the community to flourish. 

The store is open Tuesday to Friday from 12-7 and on Saturdays from 10-3. For more questions call the Co-op at 728.2369.

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By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 1-29-08 | comments (6) | email story | print story

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