A Coop Grows in Brooklyn

Central Brooklyn organizers combat rampant gentrification and high food prices by starting a member-owned food coop.

Brooklyn is fast becoming a dining destination for iconic regional food, but some residents have to take a subway to find a good tomato or head of lettuce, according to Brooklyn resident Bianca Bockman. 

“When some think of Brooklyn food, it’s often farm-to-table restaurants, bottomless mimosa brunch, and farmer’s markets that come to mind,” says Bockman, head of the Food Justice Programs at RiseBoro Community Partnership in Brooklyn. “However, there are communities of long-term Central Brooklyn residents who have been left behind by this food boom. In a community where the ratio of grocery stores to bodegas is 1:57, residents aren’t looking for the next Instagrammable restaurant—they just want a dependable source for affordable, healthy food.”

And such food is hard to come by in central Brooklyn. “Bodegas: we need them. We love them. They’re great,” Alexis Harrison, a central Brooklyn resident and partnerships coordinator for the BedStuy Restoration Corporation, told reporters. “But the level of quality produce that they’re providing versus what grocery stores should be providing isn’t balanced. And that ultimately hinders our ability to live out healthy lives.”

That’s why a group of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights residents — mostly Black — are taking matters into their own hands and launching the Central Brooklyn Food Coop (CBFC). 

 Kickstarter campaign takes off

 On October 16, the CBFC launched its first Kickstarter campaign, a fundraising effort that will run until November 22 at 11:59pm EST. Leaders hope will raise enough money after six years of community organizing to allow them to open the doors of this member-run grocery store in the spring of 2020. The coop has already surpassed its original goal of $25,000, but leaders are aiming to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter so the business can do renovations, build a demo kitchen, and create community programs like cooking classes for children.

 ”As Black people in a predominantly Black neighborhood that has been hit for such a long time, that was struggling economically, food became a symbol – a symbol of what we did not have and what we lacked,” said Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, the organization incubating the CBFC. “So building the Central Brooklyn Food Coop is a way to right that ship. And to not think of food as something that needs to be given to us, but really, as an expression and an assertion of our own power, our own genius, our own creativity , our ability to do for ourselves —  to build institutions that are going to sustain us and literally feed us.” 

Meanwhile, the coop is relying on a time-tested but not commonly used model  to keep its doors open: The Central Brooklyn Food Coop will require all members to contribute about three hours of labor monthly. 

Since labor costs are typically the largest expense of running a grocery store, coops using this model can charge less for the food they sell. Most coops don’t require a member labor contribution, but as a result, they often have a higher wholesale-to-retail markup — prices that can make them unaffordable for a large swath of the people they seek to serve. 

Brooklyn, in fact,is one of the most rapidly gentrifying areas in New York City. Coops are designed to be democratic, representing a new, better way of operating a food store. But critics point out if they aren’t using the member labor model in neighborhoods like those in Central Brooklyn, they may end up contributing to gentrification.

CBFC founding member Rae Gomes is determined that won’t happen. “We want our children to have a place to go where they can learn and enjoy food,” she told reporters. Explaining that the store seeks to support community education as well as black farmers and other farmers of color, she concluded, “This is not just a food store. This is an effort of community self-determination.”

Ashleigh Eubanks, a staff member of RiseBoro Community Partnership, which is partnering with the coop, elaborated on the coop’s mission.

 “When we say that we’re black-led and community-led, we don’t just mean the people who own the store, we also mean the local business owners selling baked goods or jam,” Eubanks explained.  “There are a lot of community gardeners that produce a lot of good quality, high volume produce to sell. We want to buy from them. It’s really about how we can leverage support for people who don’t have access to larger markets, and also going beyond Brooklyn and supporting local, small, family farms, that also struggle to compete.”

The coop began accepting invested members in January 2019, and although the doors are not open yet, it already has 54 members. Each member will have an equity stake in the coop and help lower operational costs through an investment fee and the three hours of monthly labor — a model that the Park Slope Food Coop has used successfully since 1973. Perhaps most importantly, all members are treated equally, so that those with higher incomes are not allowed to “buy” their way out of working at the store.

This is especially important in places like New York City, where rising rents, an explosion of luxury housing, illegal evictions and gentrification are pushing Blacks and low-income people out of the city and accessible neighborhoods. A 2017 Regional Plan Association report looking at walkable neighborhoods with good access to jobs found that from 2000 to 2015, households making more than $100,000 grew by 160,000 while households making less than $100,000 a year shrunk by 61,000 over the same time period. 

Given this backdrop, Griffith sees the project “as saying that we have the wherewithal and ability to do for ourselves. I believe a grocery store or that is owned and operated by long term residents – well, I just can’t imagine a more powerful statement of our right to be here and to be here in the future.”