While city leaders continue to discuss the massive subsidies involved in the Judge Doyle Square project, there is a much smaller project with a much smaller public giveaway that I find more exciting.
City of Madison staff are recommending that the city award a $300,000 grant to a group that wants to start a grocery co-op in the Allied Drive neighborhood.
This is a chance for Madison to be Madison at its best, breaking the cycle of inaction around our disparities. White Madison’s increased awareness of our city’s disgusting disparities has rightfully taken us down a peg. But I feel some only care to take potshots at our flawed progressivism and ignore the city’s strengths.
Madison is home to some of the most vibrant, innovative nonprofits in the nation. They have a proven track record of building private and public partnerships. The local Boys and Girls Club partnered with Summit Credit Union and created the first youth-chartered credit union in the world. The Dane County TimeBank works with local schools and police departments so that when a student breaks a rule they repair the damage using restorative justice as opposed to getting a ticket.
Efforts like these aren’t silver bullets, but they do have a positive and cumulative impact. The proposed co-op can be another project that helps make Madison the place white residents ignorantly thought it was all along.
Plus, this project will have help from people with good knowledge of the grocery business. Staffers from the Willy Street Co-op will be coming on board to provide logistical support. The folks who run Willy Street have grown their business by running a good grocery store — plenty of other co-ops selling similar goods have struggled or shuttered.
I’m sure there will be a learning curve to transition from high-end boutique groceries to a community grocery store. But I’m confident Willy Street’s expertise will transfer over. They know more about how to make a small grocery store work than the folks from the big-box chains like Cub Foods that previously failed in that area.
Will this co-op manage to beat grocery giant Woodman’s for prices? Probably not. But they don’t need to. This store’s main competitor won’t likely be Woodman’s. The real competitors for this store are the nearby gas stations where people buy food because they can’t make it to bigger grocery stores.
I do the majority of my food shopping at Woodman’s. But I can only handle a trip to its cavernous aisles once every couple of weeks. Seriously, if Phil Woodman would just go ahead and add a Minotaur, Woodman’s would be a straight-up labyrinth. I use smaller grocery stores to buy fresh stuff between visits to Phil’s house. What this store provides for the Allied Drive neighborhood is that Woodman’s alternative.
My biggest hope for the store is that they find a space that allows for a small cooking classroom. Providing more access to healthy foods is good; providing the knowledge and skills to affordably prepare those foods is even better. Imagine baking and knife skills classes taught entirely with ingredients you can buy at the neighborhood co-op. If they can’t find a space that allows for a classroom, a good second choice would be to hold classes in a partner's space somewhere in the neighborhood. As long as there is plenty of promotion in the store, that seems like a solid workaround.
The cooking classes I took at the Willy Street Co-op were probably the best thing I’ve gotten out of my co-op membership. There are many ways the classes can be made affordable for all residents: volunteer instructors, a pay-what-you-want pricing scale and grants. Staffers from the Dane County Time Bank are involved with this, all of whom are much smarter than me, so I’m sure they can make it work.
Even the worst-case scenario in this situation looks pretty darn good. Let’s say the grocery store eventually folds. As taxpayers we will still have gotten a lot out of our $300,000 investment. Our tax dollars will have helped provide jobs for at least a few years in a section of town that could use living-wage jobs.
Residents, including children, will have a few years of better nutrition. Children who don’t get enough fruits, vegetables and dairy products tend to get lower grades.
If nothing else, this grant makes more sense to me than paying tens of millions of dollars to subsidize a downtown office building and hotel.