I want to start this month by thanking those who are running for the Board of Directors. Core to our identity as a cooperative is the principle of democratic member control, so it is important that we have engagement from our shareholders that enable us to have meaningful elections. We are happy to share that we have seven candidates for five open positions this year each of whom provides our shareholders with different skills and perspectives to choose from. More information about candidates is available and voting is just a couple of weeks away. Our Annual Meeting is November 9, and I am excited to say that we already have over 130 shareholders registered to attend. Our total attendance last year was 160, and we are on track to exceed that number by a large margin. If you have not yet registered you can do so . We look forward to seeing you!
Staff
September Update
We have a few weeks of summer left but fall is fast approaching. Kids and teachers are back to school and many trees are starting to give us their first hint of color. By the time you read this we will have celebrated Labor Day. It can be easy to forget that Labor Day is much more than an extra day off in the fall. Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions of workers everywhere and was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century. The Brattleboro Food Co-op is proud to be closed on Labor Day as we celebrate and recognize the contribution of our staff and our partnership with the UFCW Local 1459 who represent them.
August Update
I would like to start this month by extending a heartfelt thank you to Jon Megas-Russell who is moving on to new adventures after an amazing career with the Co-op. Jon built a strong and capable Marketing and Community Relations team and was instrumental in helping the Co-op build strong ties to our community. Jon – thank you for your time, energy, and service as a member of the Brattleboro Food Co-op team. You will be missed, and we wish you the best in your future endeavors!
Resilience
The update in May centered around the idea of emergence. As I write this in the shadow of the horrific events in Buffalo, Uvalde, and the ongoing atrocities in the Ukraine I would like to share some thoughts about resilience. Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty. In many ways it is easy to feel helpless in moments like these. What can we do that is meaningful for the parent in Uvalde whose child is never coming home? For a grieving mother in Buffalo who must explain to her children why they will never visit their grandmother again?
Staff member tests positive for COVID – Aug 2021
| News
We want to inform you that a Co-op cashier tested positive for COVID-19. They were last at work on Saturday, August 21, and noticed a symptom consistent with the signs: loss of sense of smell. We typically sanitize each register area at the end of every shift, so all safety protocols were enforced. The staff member is quarantining at home and all close contacts have been informed and are also being tested prior to return to work. We are greatly relieved that all were vaccinated.
Answering your Questions About COVID-19 and the Co-op
| Covid-19
What you need to know about Shopping the Co-op during Covid-19:
- August 27, 2021:
- We want to inform you that a Co-op grocery employee tested positive for COVID-19. They were last at work on Monday, August 23. The staff member is quarantining at home, all close contacts have been informed, and are also being tested prior to return to work. From what we know of the situation, there is no reason to believe this case is associated with the earlier positive case announced on August 25th.We are in touch with the Department of Health, and are making sure that all employees have all the information they need for testing, vaccination, and quarantine protocols.
Safety of our staff, our Shareholders, and our community continues to be our greatest priority. We have recently reinstituted a mask mandate in the store. Please abide by our mask requirement, wash your hands frequently, and consider avoiding large group gatherings to keep our community safe.
- We want to inform you that a Co-op grocery employee tested positive for COVID-19. They were last at work on Monday, August 23. The staff member is quarantining at home, all close contacts have been informed, and are also being tested prior to return to work. From what we know of the situation, there is no reason to believe this case is associated with the earlier positive case announced on August 25th.We are in touch with the Department of Health, and are making sure that all employees have all the information they need for testing, vaccination, and quarantine protocols.
GM Report: Relief and Refocus
I am currently recovering from a knee replacement, an unfortunate reminder that age and arthritis march along, regardless. This has occasioned me to be ever so grateful to our entire staff and to my colleagues on the management team, for allowing me to be offsite for several weeks in recuperation while things around the store continue to hum along at a pretty good clip.
New Outlooks, New Gratitudes
Much has been said and written about the turn into this new year. At the Co-op, things are no different—our cumulative exhaustion is proof enough that things need to go better in this new year, as we will no doubt need to adjust several more times to new normalities. Still, I find that gratitude has actually been easier to come by in my own assessments, and I believe this to be true of lots of our community members and Co-op customers as well.
A Day in the Life of a Brattleboro Food Co-op Employee, Pandemic Style
I work at the Shareholder Services desk at the Co-op. In mid-March I returned one week early from a trip to the Pacific Northwest and California, quarantined for two weeks, and then came back to find a completely transformed workplace. It was shocking: the business had been completely reinvented in less than a month. No customers at 10 am on Tuesday when I arrived, just a sort of warehouse feel with a bunch of very busy colleagues, as though all the grocery aisles were just for storing food for purchase, none of the browsing or chatting, just dry storage, cold storage, freezers full of future shipments.
The Impact of Fear
Fear has been on my mind lately. You’d think, after living several (some might say many) decades in this society, that I would not be surprised at the centrality of fear to our human reactions and decisions. In my continuing education about white supremacy and my privileged existence, the constant drumbeat of fear in the appallingly consistent steps that we have taken against populations of color is overwhelming. What in the world are we so afraid of?
A Big Thank You to Chris Ellis, Staff Nutritionist for Changing Lives
Chris has been a part of the Brattleboro Food Co-op family for many, many, years. She has been our Staff Nutritionist and provided support to hundreds of staff and shoppers in one-on-one consultations as well as thousands more with her years of writing in Food for Thought. She also works in Early Education Services with a deep pride in delivering these children delicious and organic food. Her impact on the children of our community might be her greatest superhero strength, and for this we are deeply in debt to her work. You may have noticed that she has authored less articles recently in Food for Thought and while she will continue to write in Food for Thought it will be less often. This shift is occurring as we decrease the print editions of Food For Thought and manage the Co-op’s financial situation.
Self-Improvement, 2020 Edition
Despite it being January, it’s hard to know where to start, when we are looking at new beginnings throughout our lives. First and foremost, I want to express the thinking I’ve been doing since the week of the Annual Meeting, including the community conversation in which many of us took part. The most overarching emotion to convey is gratitude. Gratitude to the aggrieved parties who took the forum offered to shareholders to bring up concerns to the organization and to quite openly expose their hurt and dismay at the various transgressions we have made, the microaggressions we have perpetrated on people of color. Although our Co-op is an open and forward-thinking organization, we reflect the society we occupy, with all of its faults and challenges. So many of us have incorporated unconscious bias in our lives since we were small, since our great-greats were small, that we are terribly blind to the effects of our words and actions.
