The Co-op Food Stores of New Hampshire and Vermont

added 02/23/09

Board Report
by Donald Kreis
Board President

Two years ago, in my capacity as a member of the Class of 2007 of the “Leadership New Hampshire” program, I found myself in the company of George Bald, commissioner of the state’s Department of Resources and Economic Development. And I could not resist.

After exchanging a few words about our respective day jobs, I mentioned to the commissioner that in my spare time I was the president of one of my region’s major employers, a retail establishment with what was then about $65 million a year in sales. I asked the commissioner if he could guess what business I was referring to. He could not.

I mention this not to complain about George Bald in any way; in fact, he is a fine fellow who is resolutely dedicated to building New Hampshire’s future as a viable community. To me the story illustrates how much work we have to do when it comes to telling our friends and neighbors, in both New Hampshire and Vermont, about what a powerful tool cooperation truly is.

How powerful, you ask? To get a sense of what a fully developed cooperative economy would look like, the Board recently invited Erbin Crowell of the Cooperative Development Institute and the Cooperative Fund of New England to brief us on his fact-finding trip last autumn to the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Erbin travelled there as part of his coursework in pursuit of a master’s in cooperative management from St. Mary’s University in Halifax.

We learned some remarkable stuff. Emilia Romagna, which is in the northeastern part of Italy, has 4.2 million people living in it – and is home to 7,500 co-ops. Most but not all are worker cooperatives, and they inhabit virtually every niche in the economy in a region that has one of Europe’s lowest employment rates. Coincidence?

You could get kind of smug about how popular the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society’s three grocery stores are until you learn that in Italy, a network of consumer co-ops comprises the biggest retailer in the whole country. We’ve got our terrific commissary kitchen to create all of those excellent prepared foods at our stores; Emilia Romagna has CAMST, a worker co-op of nearly 6,000 members that does food service and catering at the scale of $374 million a year. As our chief financial officer likes to say, that’s a lot of rice cakes.

What seemed to be Erbin’s favorite thing about his trip to Emilia Romagna – I have heard him mention it at least three times now, in various presentations to U.S. cooperators – is the legal mechanism by which Italy’s cooperatives assure the health and growth of their economic model. Every co-op in Italy must contribute three percent of its annual surplus to a fund for cooperative development.

But that is not an end in itself—it’s a means to an end. Each of us could surely rattle off sectors of our economy that would benefit from cooperatization, just by thinking of what products and services we need but cannot currently get from a reliable, accountable, ethical, and financially viable provider that is not exploiting its employees nor despoiling the Earth. Since that conversation with Commissioner Bald back in ’07, I have harbored thoughts of a fantasy annual meeting consisting of a ‘cooperative summit’ in which Governor Lynch of New Hampshire and Governor Douglas of Vermont, with their respective economic development teams, hold a public dialogue about the importance of cooperatives to the economy of the region.

One of the pictures Erbin showed us from his trip was of a street sign which read: “Via Della Cooperazione.” Even if translated into somewhat more prosaic English, that’s a lot snappier than “Lyme Road,” “Park Street,” or “Centerra Parkway,” wouldn’t you agree? So let us strive to become worthy of having the streets in front of our stores named after us.

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