For the last few months, the Board of Directors and the Collective Management Team (CMT) have been reviewing a proposal to reorganize the national system of retail grocery cooperatives. One object of the proposal is to give coops greater clout in negotiating a supply agreement with our primary supplier and to cooperate in business services to increase awareness of coops nationally. How will this affect you? It will save you money on many of your groceries, but it may increase the liability of the Coop and it might affect who we are and how we fulfill our mission.

Currently HWFC belongs to Cooperative Grocers Association North East (CGANE), a regional association of 21 coops, which is primarily an association of general managers. CGANE and eight other regional coops belong in turn to the National Cooperative Grocers Association (NCGA). NCGA runs the CAP program of monthly sales, publishes the Cooperative Grocer magazine, and maintains a listserv for local coop management.

The NCGA board is now proposing a reorganization that would dissolve the regional associations and give direct membership in the national organization to 94 local coops. The proposal was written by Cooperative Development Services. In January, Cindee Lolik, operations and administrative coordinator for the CMT, and Lynne Lekakis, Board president, attended a CGANE meeting to discuss the proposal, and Cindee flew to California in February to attend the national meeting.