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In September 2010, at the Fair Trade Futures Conference in Boston, Santiago Paz, co-director of CEPICAFE, a small coffee farmer cooperative in northern Peru, shook the audience with his...

In March 2006, about 30 people came to a meeting at the Little Grill Collective restaurant in Harrisonburg, Va., to talk about starting a cooperative. The Little Grill had opened a 600-square-foot...

"Cooperative enterprises build a better world." This has been adopted as the official slogan of "2012: International Year of Cooperatives"—a United Nations declaration and a global...

Budget and skill

Good designers can cost anywhere between $25 an hour to hundreds, but don’t make the mistake of only looking at designers in your price range. Luckily, creative folks like...

Every so often a question will be put forth among co-ops that, in its simplified version, asks something like this: “Does your co-op support farmers markets and community-supported agriculture (...

A record 100 attendees representing 66 food co-ops from across the nation convened in Minneapolis, Minn., May 4–5 for the National Cooperative Grocer Association’s (NCGA) annual Marketing Matters...

High spirits and stimulating conversations marked the 55th annual Consumer Cooperative Management Association (CCMA) conference in San Diego June 16–18. Attendees included over 400 food co-op...

Serving on a board has been some of the most rewarding work I’ve done in my life, but it rarely has provided instant gratification. And that’s appropriate—the board takes a long-term view.

On a Monday in May, I addressed a room crowded with attentive listeners who had come to hear how to add an income-generating activity to their food co-op organizing efforts. They were 127 people...

A growing category in grocery retail embraces farmer-ownership. What do Divine Chocolate, Ocean Spray, Tillamook, Organic Valley, and Florida’s Natural have in common? They are all “farmer-owned”...

At the annual winter conference of the Vermont Northeast Organic Farming Association earlier this year, author and activist Bill McKibben congratulated those gathered on a cold, windy day in...

Even as co-ops and other local food providers promote meat and dairy from pastured livestock, these advocates are confronted with drawbacks to a diet centered on those resource-intensive foods. “...