Everyone Welcome? Examining Race and Food Co-ops

The following is part of our Dismantling Racism in the Food System Series and was originally published at CDS Conusulting Co-op: Solutions for Cooperatives.

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Why so white?

Cooperatives are an international movement, yet as we looked around the U.S. food co-op sector, most of the people we saw were white. We asked ourselves a simple and powerful question: Why?

We decided that this was something we wanted to investigate. Why are food co-ops — which are guided by cooperative values such as equity and equality — so white? It’s a question that has been a long time coming. Many of our new wave food cooperatives have reached 40-year anniversaries. In business for more than a generation, why don’t these co-ops reflect greater diversity on their boards or within their membership?

Click here to download this Issue Brief or view in full below.
The cover photo was taken by Andy Piper (CC BY 2.0).