Dear friends, supporters, and member-owners of the Amherst Food Co-op:
Hi. I’m Ross, the Amherst Food Co-op’s Blog Editor.
I’m entering this role as someone who actively attempts to practice community. I’m a facilitator, a queer and feminist educator, a program director, a food co-op worker, a farmhand for both vegetable and animal farms, a student-leader, a writer, a resident advisor, and more. As a student at Hampshire College, I’m starting my Div II project exploring community theory and development alongside education and social entrepreneurship. In short, I’m asking how small changes in our closer circles can breathe incremental change to the larger circle that is our world. Big ambition, right?
However, you all share some aspect of that ambition. You chose to support the Amherst Food Co-op because you want something to change. As editor of this blog, I’m here to give constructive feedback. I’m also here as a facilitator for conversations surrounding questions of change, change which applies to everyone and everything.
Autumn is a time of harvest and readying for the winter. While we celebrate what has come before, we owe it to our future to keep talking. I believe this blog has valuable potential to help strengthen conversations surrounding our agricultural and economic systems, co-operatives, critical social justice issues, and more. This blog is a place to share values and ideas to connect with one another and our diverse communities through stories of discovery. The Amherst Food Co-op’s discovery began around food, but I invite you to revisit the co-op’s new mission statement: “Owned by workers and consumers, the Co-op is a grocery store that draws together the diverse communities of the Amherst area in an inclusive space supporting food justice and local resilience.”
Local resilience is made up of so many things. The people around us, certainly, but also our shared experiences and the differences that make us unique. I ask you this question if you’re looking for writing inspiration: What does local resilience mean to you?
Please join me in bringing new ideas and energy to our blog– to each other. I sincerely hope and believe the collaborative effort represented by this blog will help us connect and grow stronger together. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to write and share about something that’s meaningful to you, I’m here to say that this is one of those opportunities.
I will soon be posting about community guidelines and the process of submitting content to the blog- stay tuned.
Best,
C. Ross
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