The Editor Notes: Co-op Milestones

The annual food co-op conference provides important opportunities for recognizing achievements and inspiring more. Milestones of service by co-ops to their communities are announced along with awards to outstanding co-ops and individuals (award winners are listed on page 7).

In recent years each annual gathering has highlighted newly 30-year-old co-ops founded in the 1970s. Only two large consumer co-ops from the 1930s and 1940s generations remain active in today’s food co-op sector: Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society and Hyde Park Cooperative Society.

Hanover Co-op and its management staff have provided decades of outstanding leadership to New England, national, and international cooperative development. Strong consumer education, staff programs, and successful stores in their northern New Hampshire region make the Hanover Co-op a continuing source of assistance and inspiration for many others.

Hyde Park Co-op, three difficult years after opening a large third store in south Chicago, has climbed most of the way out of a canyon of debt. Very few of the several hundred cooperators present at the June conference knew Hyde Park general manager Carl Waggoner when he arrived. But they loved his co-op, and at the evening of recognition and awards, in a spontaneous show of solidarity, the conference attendees joined Hyde Park Co-op by the dozens and paid their member capital on the spot, sending Waggoner home with several thousand dollars in new co-op equity.

The younger generation of food co-ops, at last increasingly united through their own national organization, has reason to celebrate as well. Congratulations are due to the following for attaining milestones of service to their members, to their communities, and to democratic culture everywhere:

30 years

Boise Co-op
Cape Ann Food Co-op
Co-opportunity
Community Mercantile
Durango Natural Foods Co-op
East Wind Nut Butters
Moscow Food Co-op
New Leaf Market
Oneota Community Co-op
People’s Food Co-op (La Crosse)
Sevananda Food Co-op
Skagit Valley Food Co-op
Tucson Cooperative Warehouse
Weavers Way Cooperative
Wedge Community Co-op
Wheatsfield Grocery

25 years

Community Food Co-op (Bozeman)
Crow Wing Food Co-op
Mississippi Market
St. Peter Food Co-op