We sat down with Michelle Week, who works at The Counter at W+K PDX, to talk about her cross-country bike ride to celebrate and raise awareness of the co-operative movement. Read our interview and learn more about what makes the co-op movement special, including its 200-year-old inspiration, below.
W+K: Tell us about your trip.
Michelle: I’m going on a really long bike trip—3860 miles from Seattle to Boston. It’s really exciting. It’s with a group called Co-Cycle, and it’s six other girls and me. We celebrate co-ops in all the major towns we go through. It ends August 25 in Boston, but the group runs by consensus, so we all make decisions about how far we’re going each day, when to stop, so our dates are flexible.
Q: How did you find out about Co-Cycle and the bike ride?
A: I heard about them last year and decided to apply for this year. I had to give them an answer within the week, so there was a lot of calling parents, best friends, coworkers, trying to decide what I should do. This is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, so leaving is hard. But they were like, you’re young enough. You don’t have any attachments or kids. You only live once.
Q: When did you become interested in co-operative grocery stores and the movement?
A: I moved away for a term to go to Washington State University in Pullman; there’s only Safeways and a Winco out there. I was going crazy, and it was actually making me sick. My friend out there was like, go check out the Moscow Food co-op. They had a deli, a bakery, it was friendly. I realized that co-ops were all around, and you’d be guaranteed to get that area’s local food.
Q: After that, you became really involved in co-ops, and that led to a lot of local politics. What was that like for you?
A: I went to Evergreen and started shopping at Olympia Food Co-op, and started getting involved in politics and lobbying. I didn’t really understand coops until ’09, ’10. I was doing People’s Co-op, learning more and more about what that meant—democracy, transparency.
They have all these priinciples of co-ops that are very important. You can choose how much participation you put into it. So I bought my membership and became a hands-on owner, so I help stock stuff for an additional discount. We won a grant to start up a co-op in Camas, Washington, but it was a bedroom community, and after two years I didn’t have the volunteer power to make it happen, so I had to let that go. It was really hard, but after that, the board at People’s recruited me for their board of directors.
Q: What’s something everyone should know about co-ops?
A: I’m really passionate about connecting the dots for people. I talk to people all the time and they’re like, oh! I didn’t realize there were co-ops everywhere.
REI, Best Western, Tillamook, Ocean Spray, True Value—they’re all co-ops. Some are purchaser co-ops. They’re all out there and no one knows it. My ultimate dream is that they’d be a worker co-op that purchases through a worker co-op, this cooperative economy and social change that’s involved in all of that.
This is a 200 year old idea, and it feels so radical still. Co-ops are about mutual aid, self-help, self-feeding, and less reliance on government. One of the oldest examples is Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. Spain cut them off during the Civil War; they figured out their own economy using co-ops. They’re profitable, and they have one of the lowest rates of unemployment.
Best of luck, Michelle!
You can follow her progress on Twitter at @mixtieme and on Tumblr at mixtieme.tumblr.com.