715: My mom, Marie Spodek, part 3: Starting a food coop and making ends meet as a single mom in a food desert with three kids
I’ve written about how people act like food coops don’t work for people without resources like time and money or who have kids. It took me a long time to realize they didn’t see food coops being started because the people starting them didn’t have time or money and had kids. When my parents couldn’t make ends meet, then after they divorced and struggled more to make ends meet, forming cooperative groups was their way out of poverty.
Luckily nobody told them they couldn’t do it! Likewise with the people behind Drew Gardens in the Bronx, Harlem Grown, my credit union, or countless other results of community organizing.
I wrote about it in If you think food coops cost more or complain that some people don’t have access to them, you don’t know what you’re talking about and are exacerbating the problem, but my mom was there. In this episode we talk about how they helped organize a group of families to save money and time to buy higher quality food. Later that group folded into Weavers Way coop, which is one of my favorite parts of my childhood. I didn’t recognize it as such as a child, though.