Maple Street Co-op History

The Start-up of Maple Street-Co-op
by Jill Jordan

An address to a national cooperatives conference, 1994
Dedicated to (the late) Bill Kidston, with gratitude

In documenting this process some 15 years down the track at the request of Nora Julien, the currently retiring Secretary of Maple Street Co-operative, I am reminded how far we have come in our level of understanding of the steps involved in bringing up and running a successful community enterprise. But reading through the first book of minutes from the Board meetings of 1979 and 1980 also reminds me of how little the process has changed, and how,
even in our naivety, we sensed the elements that we needed to attend to in order to create meaningful organisations which cared about our environment and about people.

In essence, our growing understanding has enabled us to bring up cooperatives with a little more ease and speed as the years have gone by, but the flavour has remained the same.

Initial Meetings

Back in 1979, a number of us were concerned that, not being able to obtain our wholefood needs locally from the supermarket, we had to make a 70-kilometre round-trip to Nambour each time we needed to replenish our larders. We had networked enough for this chore to be shared on a rotational basis, but it was still a huge waste of time and energy.

Half a dozen of us met one night at John Gilpin's house in Frog's Hollow, Maleny, to discuss what we could do to improve our situation – John himself, Meg Kelly (now Weymark), Matthew Davies, Lorna Wilson, Gary Blisner, Julie Newey and myself. We discussed the pros and cons of a more formalised "bulk buying" set-up, and Lorna, who had recently arrived from America, talked of her experience in being a member of a food cooperative in California. The concept excited us greatly: not only could we get the healthy food we wanted for ourselves, but we could encourage others to use it too.

Thus, the idea of the first cooperative for Maleny was born. We knew vaguely of the existence of the "old-style" rural cooperatives (indeed, we had an example of it in our own town in the farmers' co-op, where the service was abysmally slow and inefficient), but had no idea of the possibilities of forming one similar to the one which Lorna spoke about. At that early stage,
we recognised the importance of being networked with people of our own values. We figured that a main-street shopfront would be an ideal focal point for people with similar values who were new to the area. It would also provide a market for any surplus organic fruit and vegetables we grew and any home-baked or home-made products we created.

In setting up such community enterprises, I emphasise the importance of establishing whether a need for the service exists in the community. This fledgling process which we were undertaking was the embryo of this aspect of community development. The decisions that we made, and that were to be vital for the character of the Maple Street Co-operative, were:
a) to "go public" with a shop front in the main street (rather than just bring up a strategy which would benefit an elite group of us);
b) to form a cooperative (rather than a company or other legal entity); and
c) to accept goods from the local community for sale on consignment.

The Legal Framework

In researching how to go about establishing a cooperative, we were extremely fortunate to meet with one of those rare human gems who "fathered" us for many years. Bill Kidston was his name [he is now deceased], and he was the Executive Secretary of the Queensland Cooperative Federation, an organisation which had been set up to give support to the existing
cooperatives – mainly rural co-ops and credit unions – within the State. Bill recognised our enthusiasm and pointed us in the right direction, giving us the confidence we needed to begin. He showed us "The Co-operative and Other Societies Act" [now "Cooperatives Act 1997"], with its potential for establishment of various types of cooperative – trading, producer, housing,
community settlement, community advancement, mutual buying group, and so on. We settled on a trading co-op, as its objects as written into the Act seemed most nearly to fit in with what we wanted to provide for our members.

Bill was absolutely invaluable in those early days: not only did he encourage us in the months that followed, but he also helped us obtain our own copy of the Act and Model Rules and showed us how to work through them in order to gain what we wanted at the time of our formal registration as a cooperative.

The role that Bill played in our formation was one which I consider to be integral in any successful process: that of "mentor", providing a role model and inspiration to those who are unfamiliar with the vagaries of the system. This role is played by someone who has trodden the path before, and knows what cul-de-sacs not to go down and what well-chosen words spoken to which carefully selected person will facilitate the process.

Initial Tasks for the Working Party

After obtaining from the Government Printer a copy of "The Cooperative and Other Societies Act 1967-76" [now "Cooperatives Act 1997"] with Regulations as well as the Model Rules and ploughing our way through that and making the necessary changes for our particular brand of cooperative, there were a multitude of aspects to be researched in bringing up Maple Street Co-op.

The first of these was to assess if there was a need for the Co-op's services outside the small group of initiators. At that time there was no local newspaper or network of "cooperators". This task was undertaken informally, with each member of the group asking their families and friends whether they thought it was a good idea. This "needs" survey produced evidence of sufficient support to go ahead with the formation of Maple Street Co-op.

The next projects involved recruiting prospective members, researching health food suppliers, deciding on premises for the new cooperative and outfitting them. Each member of the working party took on different jobs – essentially ones that interested them. With regards to premises, one of the working party members ran an art and craft supplies shop next door to the then ambulance premises where "Red Cedar Cottage" currently operates [across the road from the Co-op's premises today]. He indicated that he was happy to share the space with the new coop, so we began trading in what now seems like cupboard space! Negotiating the lease (or in this case, the sub-lease) was made easier by the fact that the space was already under the control
of one of our number.

With regard to sourcing health food supplies, this was a very time-consuming task, since most of the suppliers operated out of Brisbane, so it meant endless trips to "the big smoke" to obtain an idea of the field in which we would be operating. Many of the suppliers were not interested in us because they saw us as being "small players" and only wanted to trade with companies
that would buy pallet loads of an item at a time. But again, some of them had a more human side, and, remembering what it was like to start an enterprise, gave us a lot of help and advice. It was quite an eye-opener to us – naive as we were about the business world and looking to run a cooperative organisation – that the suppliers were a very competitive lot. Back then, we did not have the hard-nosed business acumen to know how to play the suppliers off, one against the other!

The people who were recruited as the first members of Maple Street Co-op were called upon a great deal during the start-up phase of the business: we needed a lot of plant and equipment and expertise to change what was essentially a large, narrow room into a shop. So, as well as taking their $25 in share money, we asked them for time and commitment so we could outfit
the shop. A counter, shelves, an old bar fridge, a set of scales, a cash register and so on were all provided by our new members, who also put in a lot of time to set up the new premises.

Another important task in establishing the shop was to survey the new members to see what they wanted the Co-op to stock. We had very little money to buy our initial stock, so we had to get it right. It is interesting to note that, although we stocked mostly health food lines, we also sold cigarettes and tobacco to begin with, as that was the wish of some members! We also
approached people who were known to have such skills as croissant-making, jam-making and bread-baking and asked them to consign their goods to the shop when it opened.

The Formation Meeting

When we had drafted up the Rules that we wanted to operate under and submitted a document stating why we believed we would be successful if we were registered as a cooperative, we were given the go-ahead to hold a public meeting to form Maple Street Co-op. With cooperative societies, this meeting is referred to as the Formation Meeting, and it has to be called and conducted under a strict set of guidelines set out by the Registrar of Cooperatives. The
Registry provides a full set of documents which need be filled in at this meeting, whose procedures are clearly set out in the Act.

Again, because of the lack of local press outlets, we advertised the Formation Meeting well in advance in the "Sunshine Coast Daily" and by word of mouth through the existing local networks. On the night, 39 people turned up to help form the Maple Street Co-operative Society Limited, this being well over the number required (25 adults) by the Registrar.
.
As the shop's start-up pre-dated the time when the local Council dealt with such matters, we had to approach the Department of Health within the Queensland State Government during the initial setting-up period to ascertain the conditions with which we had to comply. This function is now handled by a direct approach to the local authority. The Health Department had
rather strict guidelines on premises that handle food, requiring a certain standard of fittings and floor coverings as well as washing up area and toilets (we had trouble complying with this requirement, as the toilet facility for the staff was a little shed in the back garden!), but we managed to comply in the end. They were also interested in ascertaining that the home kitchens in which our consignment goods had been prepared came up to scratch – again, quite
a business for those small producers!

At that time, the Health Department was adamant that we should not store our goods in bulk bins and let our members and other customers help themselves (using either bags provided by the Co-op or bags they brought in themselves). Thus, one of our regular tasks after opening the shop was the "packing night", where members, on roster, gave three hours or so on a
Wednesday night to ladle an assortment of dry goods from cartons and cases into (at first) plastic bags, tie them off and label them. We all considered it a silly practice, but we had a lot of fun in the process! It is interesting that at the time of writing [1994], even though the Health Department allows us to sell goods from bulk bins, it is still the practice (and also a member preference) to re-pack much of the stock and sell it in individual bags.

Staffing and Wages

With an extreme shortage of capital with which to start the new enterprise, at the beginning it was not possible to pay wages to any of the people who worked at Maple Street Co-op. Even though one of the objectives of the fledgling cooperative was to help create local employment, it was less risky to have volunteer labour than, for example, to go into debt to pay initial wages
– especially given the fact that no financial institution would have been likely to lend us money for the little venture. The success of the enterprise was completely hit and miss, since we had a very small membership in those early days and really had no way of knowing whether people would patronise it to the extent of keeping it afloat.

It was quite difficult to maintain continuity in the shop during this period, since we had to work in other jobs to earn an income and could only work at the Co-op a few days a week. This difficulty taught us the importance of sound methods of communication (via the written word, changeover periods, etc.) – and this is still a challenge in our cooperatives today, even with payment of our workers.

The first wages were paid about a year from the opening date of 14 January 1980, and the amount was set at $20 per day. When you think that our first year's insurance premium was $66, this will give you an understanding of the relativity of the wages situation.

This wage persisted for the first couple of years, and then began to rise steadily. After that time, it was decided that the payment of wages would take the form of award wages for as many hours as the cooperative could pay, with all other hours being worked voluntarily until, finally, full award wages would be paid for all hours worked. This system has persisted to date, and at the time of writing [1994] this objective has just been achieved.

Education

The role of education – one of the six principles of the international cooperatives movement – has been important from the very beginning of Maple Street Co-op's existence. Although we were regarded with suspicion (but not outright hostility) by the "old" settlers, some of the practices that we established at the outset (for example, recycling of jars and plastic bags) proved to be the means whereby some of those more conservative residents were drawn in to see what was happening. This applied especially to some of the older women, who remembered from the 1940s the value of bits of string and jam jars. They came to give us their valued resources, stayed to chat, found out that they could sell to the shop on consignment any produce that they grew, and slowly over time became, first, shoppers and then members.

The principle of education also applied to our produce sold on consignment. At first we accepted any produce that was brought in for sale, not refusing goods if they had been sprayed with chemicals. But we did have a system of labelling the consignment goods with stickers: one colour for organically grown produce, another for goods that had been grown with inorganic fertilisers or herbicides/pesticides. This meant that our members/customers could buy
according to informed choice.

Of course, as time went on and more and more "ordinary" folk demanded cleaner food, the inorganically grown fruit and vegetables tended not to sell as quickly as the organic produce, with the result that some of the consignors who had previously grown with chemicals changed over to organic growing. Now, of course, Maple Street Co-op has a policy that allows only organic produce to be sold in the shop.

Member Involvement

In those early days, although we were very new to the process of running our own businesses cooperatively, we were able to stress to our members how important it was to contribute time and energy towards running the shop because of the general lack of financial wherewithal. And they did not always do so completely willingly, but nonetheless they put an inordinate
amount of time and effort into helping the skeleton staff. As the shop and membership have grown, it's been harder to convince members of this important aspect of cooperation.

As the systems of running the business have been honed, members see merely a well-running business. Those who do think to go in and offer their time can sometimes feel they are in the way as the well-oiled staff rush around satisfying an ever-increasing demand for the products stocked in the Co-op.

I would like to conclude this article on the following note: our long-term success as a cooperative will hinge on how well we can gain member involvement – quite a difficult task in the current climate of complexity and demand for efficiency, where everyone's time is at a premium.
But I believe that, as we learned the very essence of cooperation as volunteers in those first days of Maple Street Co-op, this habit is the one that enriches our lives more than any other we may cultivate.

[Jill Jordan is a founding member of Maple Street Co-op. She has also nurtured the creation of a number of cooperatives in Maleny, including the Manduka Cooperative at Frog's Hollow, the Maleny and District Credit Union, LEED Cooperative and The UpFront Club. Jill was a Councillor in Caloundra City Council in the early 1990s and has involved herself in a range of
community and cooperative oriented programs and projects over the years, often working as a facilitator and teaching these skills to others.]