In 2009, Randy Wilson ran for the board of the Jackson Energy Cooperative in Kentucky. No one had challenged a board member since the co-op formed 71 years before.

Most electric co-ops formed during the Great Depression as a way to bring electricity to rural areas. Because investor-driven electric companies didn’t see much profit in it.

Electric co-ops are consumer cooperatives, in which each customer holds equity and voting rights. Today, 72 percent of these co-ops have less than 10% voter turnout. The larger the co-op, the lower the turnout.

Unfortunately, voter suppression, price gouging, and manipulation of bylaws are common practices. Again, the larger the co-op, the more its power is consolidated in an incumbent board, and it turns against its members.

Size is an important factor in the formation of a community-owned business.

YouTube: FOX* WGHP Renaissance Co-op vacancy could be filled soon  

As I stated in Part II, nonprofit and community-led grocery stores had a success rate of 92 percent in food deserts (sacrifice zones). The vast majority succeed, so let's examine one that failed because failure is the best teacher.

Renaissance Food Co-op

In 2016, Renaissance Food Co-op opened its doors with $120 each from a thousand members in a food desert (sacrifice zone) in Greensboro, NC.

Four years later, the co-op had been outcompeted. Dollar stores and Walmart were entrenched in the community's shopping habits. In fact, a dollar store opened just down the street (with the city’s support) at the same time as the co-op.

Renaissance was committed to hiring local people who were often unemployed, underemployed, or in reentry.

So it was hard to find a general manager (GM) to close the skills gap who also had "the hard and soft skills to manage a store in a black, working-class neighborhood."

Selecting the right products and offering them at the right prices was also important. It’s easy to see why, with a thousand members, the co-op thought it didn’t need to advertise. But price, location, and convenience weren’t enough.

It started as a movement of a thousand people inspired by ideas of mutual aid, equity, and deep democracy. It was something big box and dollar stores couldn’t emulate.

After opening, sales staggered, and the co-op became just another business, losing its spirit of democracy and self-determination.

Intervale Community Farm is a member-owned farm in Burlington, VT with an emphasis on service over profits.

"We operate the farm in order to benefit the members," says the farm's manager, Andy Jones.  

Even after Hurricane Irene destroyed their crops, the farm survived because it had fostered the community’s identity as cooperative owners.

Freedom Farm Cooperative

In 1969, Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, purchasing 40 acres of land in Mississippi.

Even with membership at $1 per month, only 30 families could afford to join. 1500 other families were members by name.

In 1970, the co-op purchased 640 more acres of land and launched a "pig bank," breeding thousands of pigs and providing them to member families. Freedom Farm was a hybrid cooperative, blending aspects of a farming co-op with those of a land trust.

Land trusts are the collective ownership of land. There are different kinds, but most relevant to this discussion are those owned by communities. Similar to the Freedom Farm Co-op, Cooperate Jackson in Jackson, MS has a similar approach today.

In this writer’s opinion, Cooperation Jackson is one of the most exciting projects in the United States right now.

From their website: "We employ community land trusts (and other forms of collective stewardship of land) to decommodify the land and deconstruct the systems of private ownership."

Community land trusts can keep housing affordable and allow lower-income families to remain in neighborhoods despite rising costs.

They also protect communities from private speculation and give its members power over decisions made about how the land and its properties are used.

In Part IV, I’ll discuss housing co-ops and the interplay between these different kinds of community-owned institutions.

I’ll also explore how they can work together to create a more encompassing ecosystem of community ownership and FareMarket’s role and our mission in establishing systems like this.