Community Shops

On July 10th this year the Green Valley Grocer opened its doors for business (See http://www.slaithwaite.coop/) . It's a community coop, owned by the members who set it up, financed it and now use it. Some of us who set it up also belong to MASTT - the local Transition Town - and for us there's a significant overlap between our Transition initiative and one of the core missions of the Green Valley Grocer, which is to sell as much locally sourced food as possible and to work on developing the production of food in our valley.

On one hand this is an example of how the cooperative and transition worlds can work together. We've had help from Cooperatives UK, and from the Cooperative Group who have given us some shelves which they replaced during one of their shop re-fits.

On the other it raises some interesting questions :

Suppose that hundreds (thousands ?) of shops like the Green Valley Grocer are set up to put the heart of the shop back in the community. Suppose also that we start to federate - negotiate for better prices and terms for electricity, insurance, bags, and non-local goods like fair-trade bananas (unlikely to be grown in Yorkshire for some time . . .) It's also possible that in the future we could work together to set up community farms, regional warehouses, distribution networks and so on.

Question 1: Would the two groups be in competition ?

Question 2: Could the Community shops buy directly from local Cooperative farms ?

Question 3. Is the Cooperative Group looking at these sorts of issues (local food/low carbon distribution) as the dangers of Climate Chaos loom, and Peak OIl makes it look inevitable that oil-based industries are going to have to re-think the basis on which they work.

Hopefully the conference will start to address some of these issues and to find ways of continuing to work together.