Update on CoFED’s Summer Retreats
The days are getting longer and warmer—summer is finally here—and our summer retreats are only a few short weeks away!

On the West Coast: The West Coast Summer Training is offering an early bird registration that ends on May 27th—act fast and save $30 on admission to the retreat! After that date the price is $180.

On the East Coast: Only TWO DAYS LEFT to register for the Northeast Summer Training & Incubation – only $150 for an inspiregizing week! Applications received after May 18th will be put on a waiting list. Don’t forget—if you register in a group of 3 or more, your group will get a discount price of $115 per person!

Urgent notice:  If you registered for the Northeast Training but have NOT received confirmation, please email christine@cofed.org to confirm your registration. A glitch in our application process may not have accepted all applications—please connect with Christine ASAP!

Our Summer Retreats are CoFED’s long standing tradition of building the student food co-op movement. They are a magical combination of summer camp vibes, beautiful scenery, and the power of building a student movement. We provide professional and personal development with the opportunity to network with other students doing similar projects across our regions, with phenomenal speakers and intensive workshops. As we say, “inspiregize” to develop a more cooperative, sustainable culture through college campuses.
-CoFED Northwest Regional Organizers

Check out Facebook and the Northwest or Northeast Regional pages for more on our retreat schedules, workshops, fabulous retreat sites, great food and field trips! REGISTER TODAY!

Spend Your Summer With CoFED!
Looking to build your resumé this summer? CoFED has two enticing internship opportunities that will help you build the skills you need to make that resumé sing. This summer we will be offering a Business Research Internship and a Communications Internship.

The Business Research Intern will work with CoFED staff in researching and developing a guidebook for business model planning around sustainable, cooperative food business. The guide will focus on business operations around three types of student-run food businesses: food carts, cafés, and markets. This guide is intended to advance CoFED programming by providing students with the detailed resources needed to successfully operate food businesses on college campuses.

The dates for this internship are flexible but require approximately 15-20 hours per week for two months. Interns may have the opportunity to work remotely so all interested applicants are encouraged to apply. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

The Communications Intern will be given the opportunity to develop a strategic media proposal to advance CoFED’s presence through press and media. He or she will also be responsible for writing and distributing newsletters and blog posts while coordinating CoFED social media. This position offers the flexibility and opportunity to put your creative marketing skills to the test—this will certainly be a hands-on internship where you will work closely with staff in developing the next stages of our marketing strategy.

The dates for this internship require approximately 10-15 hours per week, from June 15 – Sept 15, 2012. These dates can be flexible for the right candidate. Interns may have the opportunity to work remotely so all interested applicants are encouraged to apply. Applications are due by June 1st.

For more information on both of these positions, including detailed job descriptions and qualifications, please visit the CoFED Jobs Board. Interested applicants are encouraged to fill out the CoFED Internship Application Form and send in a resumé and cover letter to jobs@cofed.org.

CoFED Introduces The Archives
We are proud to announce the arrival of the CoFED archives. We are now archiving plans, curriculum and resources for students in an online resource wiki. The page is a work in progress and will continue growing as we create more resources and gather more information. As we continue to build on these resources, we plan to develop this page into an interactive interface—to make your search for information even easier.

You can help us build our research database! Please send us plans and resources that have helped you and your co-op, or you believe may benefit students at various stages of planning, implementing and maintaining their campus co-ops.

Check it out and feel free to provide feedback directly to Matt at matt.steele@cofed.org. Visit archive.cofed.org and keep checking back as we continue to build out our resources page!

Co-Cycle Gears Up For Cross-Country Tour
This summer, in honor of the 2012 International Year of Cooperatives, Co-cycle—a youth-led, bike-powered tour of cooperatives—will cross the country to build momentum for the cooperative movement. Through public events, Co-Cycle will encourage the communities they travel through to take notice and seek out connections with local co-ops—building a web of connected co-ops across the country!

Check them out and offer your support as they ride through a town near you! The tour begins on June 1st in San Francisco—events will be held in Portland, Seattle, Helena, Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Cleveland and Amherst!

Take part in an event, join us for a leg, help out in our fundraising drive or have your co-op be a stop on our tour and help us connect with the national cooperative movement!
-Megan Meo, CoFED Board Member & Co-Founder of Co-Cycle

Check out co-cycle.coop or the Co-Cycle facebook page for more information!

In Cooperation,

The CoFED Team

The journey will be organized as a set route comprised of regional legs. Events will be hosted by different communities and may include educational workshops or public showcases of cooperatives in a single region. Each event will strengthen networks, educate the general public, and galvanize awareness of and support for the cooperative movement and its capacity to catalyze social change. Our journey will be documented by a New York University student film crew, in order to spread the message of Co-Cycle and the power of cooperatives to a larger audience.

Our project is sponsored by the International Year of Cooperatives and we are being supported in our organizing efforts by representatives from the US Federation of Worker Co-ops and the NCBA. The tour will begin on June 1st in San Francisco, CA and end in Amherst, MA in early September. We will be visiting a range of different co-ops including housing co-ops, credit unions, agricultural co-ops, student-run co-ops, etc. We aim to link these cooperatives together as well as connect youth more closely with the cooperative movement.

The tour is comprised of nine different legs which are divided by events in key locations along our route.  Cyclists will have the opportunity to do the entire tour, series of legs, or single legs. We will be hosting events in the following cities:

· San Francisco

· Portland

· Seattle

· Helena

· Minneapolis

· Madison

· Chicago

· Ann Arbor

· Cleveland

· Amherst

To join the team or get more information about the tour, visit the Co-Cycle website: www.co-cycle.coop or their Facebook page!

Kitchen Team:

CoFED is looking for a Kitchen Manager and Retreat Cook to serve approximately 50 people 3 meals a day. We are seeking students or professionals who are interested in sustainable food movements and/or cooperative theory and are looking to gain experience working with healthy food, managing a kitchen staff, and preparing high volume, casual meals in an easygoing environment. This team must be able to plan, budget, prep, and prepare all meals – incorporating leftovers and maintaining minimal waste, prepare for a variety of dietary restrictions (gluten free, vegan, vegetarian, allergy-sensitive, etc), manage student volunteers effectively and cooperatively, all while maintaining a clean and safe kitchen environment.

Qualifications:
Preference given to applicants that have worked in industrial kitchens, catered, or have cooked for large groups. You must be flexible and have great communication skills.

Expected Hours:
An average of 8 hours/day — in 2-3 hour shifts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Compensation:
$250 stipend each. Meals and accommodations are provided, with access to retreat grounds and yoga classes with limited access to training workshops and speakers. For the right candidate, CoFED will aid in travel costs.

Logistics Team:

CoFED is seeking two energetic and well-organized individuals to make up our Logistics Team for the 2012 Summer Training. This position is ideal for students who wish to enhance their retreat experience through hands-on retreat planning and implementation. The position requires that applicants be available for the entire event, from June 16 – 23, 2012. The Logistics Team will be responsible for coordinating with Regional Organizers for pre-retreat planning, set-up and manage registration tables, document workshops and events, and assist students and staff throughout the retreat.

Compensation:
$150 Retreat admission fee is waived — meals, accommodations, workshops, and beautiful scenery included.

To Apply:
Send a short statement of interest and your resume to Anna@cofed.org by May 15th, 2012. Qualified applicants will be asked to participate in a short interview.

This Summer’s retreat will be held in Georgetown, CA – in the Sierra Nevada foothills, at the beautiful Ariadne Yoga + Labyrinth Retreat Center. At 3,000-foot elevation, the retreat site is home to a range of beautiful plant life – not to mention, some rather large trees! There are beautiful gardens, yoga studios, a labyrinth and all of the beautiful scenery of the California Foothills.

The retreat price is only $150 for almost a week of workshops, field trips, speakers, materials, and more! Food and accommodations are included!

If you have any questions, please contact your Regional Organizer:
Southern California Regional Organizer — Janaki@cofed.org
Northern California Regional Organizer — Ava@cofed.org
Northwest Regional Organizers — Anna@cofed.org & Amy@cofed.org

Space is limited and will fill fast – register now!

Scholarships are available.

Three years ago, I was organizing protests at UC Berkeley. Now I’m at my laptop, speaking with Camilla Bustamante, a Northern New Mexico College Dean.  She’s enthusiastically telling me about a student-run, local foods cafe that has just opened at her campus.

In January 2010, CoFED (The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive) trained Jeff Ethan Genauer, a student at Northern New Mexico College, at our Training the Trainers retreat. For 10 days, he and a group of 5 other organizers huddled together around a wood stove and wifi router in a farmhouse in Sebastopol to learn the basics of how to open a cooperative food business on college campuses. Since then, he’s been hard at work doing financial planning and market research and now, with the help of his campus, he [has] successfully opened a student-run cafe. And he even taped the only-slightly awkward ribbon-cutting.

La Tiendita (“The little store”) sells healthy, local breakfast and lunch and provides meaningful employment to 5 students. It is currently run “collaboratively”, according to Bustamante, but there is interest in transitioning to a formal student cooperative, though it’s unclear whether students,  workers, or both, would be the cooperative’s members. The produce for Tiendita is either grown onsite at the Sostenga farm or purchased from local farmers. This is an unusual project for a college that is rural, known mainly for its athletics and is not filled with affluent foodie types.

It’s not just happening in New Mexico of course. At UC Santa Barbara, they’ve gotten administrative buy-in for a solar-powered food truck, at the University of Washington-Seattle they’ve gotten rent-free cafe space and are negotiating for a prime space in their student union, at NYU they’ve gotten funding for a food cart. This summer, some 80 new student co-op organizers will gather for seven days on the West and East coasts to re-”inspiregize” and learn basic organizing, fundraising, campaigning and planning skills.

Our generation of food movement leaders gets how complex the food system is–and we are committed to addressing the whole, messy picture. These projects are educating and taking action on issues many foodies would rather ignore, including issues of race and class, of corporate control and workers’ rights. And it’s definitely not just CoFED that sees things in this way. READ MORE

University of Maryland’s Maryland Food Collective has made huge progress this semester reducing some of the debt that they had incurred over the years.

They just have a little more money to raise to pay off their rent for this semester. They’re holding several fundraiser concerts in their campus storefront, and they’re running a campaign on IndiGoGo! Donate here, if you can; if you can’t, please help them spread the word!

They’ve been working with CoFED to rework their pricing and addressing collective responsibility to ensure the co-op’s financial sustainability. Your generosity will help them focus on keeping themselves in the black in the future!

(5 days left to vote; they’re currently at #4)

Hi CoFEDerates,

I hope you’re all well! I just wanted to let you know that my food collective has the really exciting chance to be a contester in the “Green Solutions Competition” at UCLA. If our idea and business plan wins, it gets published in GOOD magazine and we have the opportunity to work with university facilities to implement the idea.

The public gets to vote for the first stage of the process, so please vote for us! And tell anyone you know!

This is the link to vote or read more about the competition. I am so excited. This is a rare chance to make working with the university to make our food coop a reality that much easier.

a lot of love!

Shaydanay Urbani

I was intimidated to begin writing what is now a 45-page-long opus of a business plan, that couldn’t have gotten to its current stage of completion if not for amazing teamwork and collaboration with another Beet Director. Ben and I set out to write this document as a final project for a clustered set of courses that focused on Perspectives of Sustainability, and we had no idea where that would take us. We were writing and refining the plan as others in the co-op were gearing up and launching our third pilot project: developing a relationship with a co-op of local farms, and having them deliver shares to campus, while at the same time, mobilizing the campus community to support these farms and invest in local, sustainable food for next semester. There was goal setting, community organizing and affirming happening all over the place. We found the boundaries of this community and started pushing them. We also pushed against our own — where we thought our limits and abilities tapered off — and created work that is amazing and revolutionary.

We began the business plan project with the blank template that CoFED had offered us, and a long way to go. We had already conducted our market research and had 305 responses to work with. We had a mission statement, a statement of purpose, a website and a year’s worth of organizing. With that, a few weeks, no forecast and sturdy rainboots, the two of us jumped into a Google doc and started filling in what we knew, and making up what we didn’t. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that simple. What we knew were the shopping habits of our community, the location of the local stores, the structure that we wanted for the co-op and a few shreds of strategic planning. What we didn’t know was market research about the local stores, the way we were structuring membership, ownership and leadership, the calculations of working hours and energy consumption of the co-op, our start-up costs and long-term strategic planning, and the text that was going to serve as a blueprint for how this generation of leaders (directors) and the next few will conduct themselves. We knew the levity of writing this document, and wanted to be as prepared as possible, as if prepping for a thunderstorm — blankets, food, tea, rain slickers, good company — all the usual things. We didn’t know when (or if) the storm would hit little apartment 31 on Hannum Drive, but we were ready to face the worst.

But surprisingly, the sun shined most of the way through the process! And when it did start to rain, instead of retreating into safe cover and pitching umbrellas, we had no choice but to face it squarely. We wrote more essays, provided more context and dug deeper into our analyses in response to the insistence of our professors. We got a little muddy at times, but we had the support of CoFED staff and folks from GW, UCLA, Chatham and UCSB cheering us on. We found allies in unexpected places on and off campus and we wrote more than we had thought possible in just 2 weeks. And unlike most writing assignments, where I begin feeling like I don’t how how to start or what to argue, we had relevant details and extensive training from the start to be able to approach this project with expertise and joviality. Writing the business plan was a privilege and a chance to really grapple with some central co-op logistics and values. It was an amazing way to contribute to a project that we really believe in, with the support of the rest of the leaders and directors. It was also a way to express how far we’ve come in the past year, from a cluster of post-its on the wall of our apartment, to a living document full of rich information, graphics, statistics, history, narrative and criticism. Writing the business plan, at least for us, wasn’t scary. It was an opportunity and an exciting one! As we prepare to formally present it to our community, I can’t help but think that this whole affair is like tapdancing in a rainstorm — making fun out of stress and expressing ourselves because are passionate, prepared and empowered, despite unpredictable obstacles and weather patterns. Join in the fun! For more information about the work we’ve been up to, check out our website @ thebeetgoeson.weebly.com

Check out this Washington Square News article on the NYU Student Food Co-op’s first catering event at NYU’s Earth Week Mobile/Mobile Fair!

How cool is that bike blender!?

This article has links to websites and tools that will make it easier for you to eat local in your area!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/weight-loss-tips-eating-in-season_n_1389167.html?ref=green&ir=Green