People joined Common Share Food Co-op thinking they were signing on to get a grocery store. From start to finish, the idea was indeed to build a supermarket. But as the project trundled along, it became clear that the co-op had another role to fill. Felicia Sevene brought a new way of looking at the challenges facing any group intending to bring a food co-op to Amherst. From her own life experience, Felicia understood better than many others that Amherst is not a single, homogenous community. It is, in fact, several communities which are divided by economic power or the lack thereof. One of Amherst’s former economic development officers made a similar point: He said that, economically speaking, Amherst has a dumbbell-like shape, with many affluent households at one end and an equally large, if not larger, set of economically disadvantaged households at the other. And there is not a whole lot in between.
With this understanding, the co-op leadership realized that Common Share Food Co-op had to be developed as a justice co-op. The store would have to have a full range of affordable food options. Member-owner shares should be subsidized for economically disadvantaged people. The co-op would have to include a redistributive approach to ensuring that the abundant food choices available to affluent Amherst residents would be shared with the less affluent.
Moreover, the co-op should serve as a community focal point, a gathering-place for people with space for parties, picnics, concerts, political organizing, and so on. Some of co-op’s organizers, I included, felt that the co-op should have a political significance and offer a counter-narrative to the neoliberal scarcity model that characterizes late-stage capitalism, a system that seems tailor-made to create haves and have nots.
A friend of mine quipped: “Alex: you guys aren’t building a supermarket; you’re building a political action committee that happens to sell carrots.”
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