Greetings All,

Thanks for your previous interest in the Altadena Area Food Co-op Steering Committee.  Here's just a quick note to keep everyone updated on what's been happening with the effort to bring a consumer cooperative food store to Altadena and to invite you to join us for an upcoming presentation…

We've been holding monthly meetings since March and weekly meetings all this month.  Three of us have been doing most of the work so far.  Fifteen others have joined our Yahoo group – they've been attending/helping as they can.  We've had a field trip to Co-opportunity in Santa Monica (the only consumer co-op in LA county) where the manager was very helpful in answering questions about their operations.  We've also had a fun potluck dinner with tasty local/organic food to try and lots of great people to get to know.

I've been making the most of my normally quiet summer schedule by learning as much as I can about co-ops and meeting as many "co-op people" as possible. Highlights include…
    – attending the Consumer Cooperative Manager's Association convention in Portland, OR, last June,
    – attending the Co-opportunity board of director's meeting in July,
    – visiting the Natural Foods Co-op in San Luis Obispo and the Isla Vista Food Co-op outside of Santa Barbara,
    – finding many useful books and websites that relate to co-op formation.

We've found a lot of interest in our area and a lot of resources available for our effort.

Our next task is to start writing bylaws as a precursor to incorporating.  In the bylaws will be details on how our co-op will operate – how memberships will be handled, how many board members will be needed, etc.  We can handle this with our existing group but it would be nice to hear from more Altadena voices during this process.  To help bring in these newcomers, and to better inform our existing group about co-ops, we're going to hold a presentation in the near future.  The details from our hand bill…

A happy coincidence is that the leading cooperative consulting group, Cooperative Development Services, is starting a free webinar series the following week. This series covers topics important to getting one of these wonderful stores started.  It looks like our presentation will act as a nice orientation "springboard" into their more detailed weekly series of webinars.  More information can be found at: http://cdsfood.centraldesktop.com/fc500registration/

So please attend if you can.  Feel free to cross-post this announcement to other blogs or message boards in our area.  We'll probably continue to meet weekly to dig into the details of co-op formation.  If you're interested in joining our effort, please check out our Yahoo group:
       http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aafcsc/

Thanks for your interest!
Patrick Reagan