This post is an email I sent today to the membership of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative
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As the 2010 Annual Meeting gets closer, let’s take a look at some of the principles that have contributed significantly to our success. It never hurts to revisit “first principles” on a somewhat regular basis, especially as our local food systems grow more resilient and complex.
1. We operate in accordance with our Core Values.
At the very first meeting of the “Committee to Organize an Oklahoma Food Cooperative,” we decided that whatever our business ended up with in terms of structure, we would operate it in accordance with three Core Values: Social Justice, Environmental Sustainability, and Economic Viability. Further, these core values would not be just a “pious statement” that we would make early on, they would be a constant lived reality in our work. All three are necessary to what we do. Otherwise, we might as well just go to the supermarket.
>From Plato to Buckminster Fuller, geometry has observed that the equilateral triangle is a “most stable form”. Our three Core Values provide a triangle foundation of support for our operations. If we change any of them, then we cease to be who we are. So as we make decisions going forward, we do well to ask ourselves how what we do, or propose to do, relates to those Core Values. When we make mistakes in this regard, we need to learn from those mistakes and not repeat them.
2. We set and serve an open table of fellowship.
This is one of the most important aspects of our success, yet it was not a matter of deliberate design — it’s just the way things happened. Early in our history, I looked around at the members of the organizing committee and thought to myself, “This is a diverse group of people.” And that hasn’t changed, lo these seven years later. We have rich and poor and all points between, left and right and center, hippies and preppies, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, Anarchists, many different religions and denominations, atheists and agnostics. All races and creeds have found a place at our local food table of fellowship.
This isn’t some kind of faux diversity, no one is saying that our personal beliefs are not important. It’s that we realize why we are here, and what is relevant here, and the fundamental fact is that all people have a right to produce and eat good, healthy, nutritious food, and participate in an economic structure designed to facilitate access to such food.
Happy accident it may have been, but our “open table of fellowship” has certainly been a critical factor in our success. If we had started out by requiring some sort of ideological litmus test on membership, well, we never would have opened for business.
3. We offer open access to our marketplace within our published standards.
The Oklahoma Food Cooperative is not a “closed” cooperative with a limited number of producers. Any coop member, who can verifiably meet our standards, can become a producer in the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. We do not limit the number of producers that can sell in a given product category. We have our published standards, and within those parameters, we have a free market with low entry barriers.
This principle derives from all three of our Core Values:
+ By remaining open to new producers, and operating a standards-based market with low cost of entry, the Coop promotes social justice, since members who can produce in accordance with the Coop’s standards can gain entry and offer their products to the coop’s membership. It’s not a matter of “who you know”, or “who you are”, or “how much capital you have”. The Coop’s leadership does not pick winners and losers in the Cooperative’s marketplace. Instead, the question is simply whether your products meet our standards.
+ By not limiting the number of producers who can access our market, we directly encourage new local production, and that contributes to environmental sustainability and the resiliency of our local food marketplace. Limiting producer access to the Coop’s marketplace would slow the growth of a resilient local food system and increase the risk of shortages of important food and non-food items..
+ Our open cooperative status protects and enhances the economic viability of the Coop. Availability of many important food items remains uncertain or limited. When it comes to food, agriculture has long lead times. From calf to steer to pot roast is at least 18 months, and there just isn’t any way to hurry that along (at least, not any way that complies with our standards.) New producers coming into the coop bring increased production, and thus more availability, for critical food items needed by Oklahoma households. The economic viability of the Coop is directly related to the amount of food and non-food items bought by our membership. Limiting the number of producers who can sell in our marketplace violates the rights of our membership to buy locally produced food and non-food items. Such reduced access will inevitably limit the sales of food and non-food items in our marketplace, and that will directly harm our Cooperative’s economic viability.
4. We use the cooperative’s transparent marketplace to achieve goals.
Early on, we decided that within our standards, we would not dictate customer or producer choices but instead, we would require full transparency of production methods and ingredients by our producers. Producers have freedom, within our standards, to choose a variety of production methods and materials — as long as they are completely transparent about what they are doing. People don’t join the cooperative because they want to buy mystery food. They want to know everything about the food that they buy. Producers therefore have an economic incentive to do a good job of transparency, because their sales will suffer if they don’t. Full producer transparency regarding production methods, ingredients, and etc., is critical to our continued growth and success.
5. We invest sweat equity.
Everyone who joins the cooperative invests capital — in the form of their membership share purchase — and every member who then uses our system to buy food and non-food items also invests some sweat equity in the “final assembly” of the refrigerated and frozen items of their order at the various pick-up sites. Many members go further — they volunteer for delivery day work, in our unheated, un-air conditioned “fixer upper” operations center, they serve on committees, as officers and board members, they run our pick-up sites, deliver orders, and answer the phones and emails. It’s an amazing example in the modern era of the pioneer can-do spirit so evident at the house and barn raisings of our ancestors days. It is a reminder that something is going on here that is more than just another food business.
6. We follow the principles of the cooperative movement
“One member, one share, one vote,” that’s the way the cooperative movement works, and that’s the way that we work too. The Oklahoma Food Cooperative is part of the worldwide cooperative movement, which offers the world many examples of sustainable, socially just, and economically viable enterprises. The principles that animate that movement — first set out in the mid 19th century by the “Rochdale Equitable Pioneers”, a group of impoverished mill workers who pooled their meager assets to set up a cooperative grocery store — remain living realities for us today, all these years later. Just as the Rochdale pioneers had no idea what would result from their efforts — they certainly weren’t afraid to start small, or they would never have started at all — we do not completely see what will grow over the coming decades from the seeds we plant today. It is said that the best time to plant a forest was 20 years ago. The next best time is today. And so it is coming to pass, right here, right now, one food decision at a time, we plant a “food forest”, that will feed generations to come with the good food of this land where we live.
So, as we come together in our 2010 Annual Meeting, let us celebrate what we have accomplished, learn from our mistakes, and do even better in the coming year, to grow a resilient local food system rooted in social justice, environmental sustainability, and economic viability.
Bob Waldrop, president
Oklahoma Food Cooperative
