By Tihut Tamrat, Contributing Writer
On Tuesday, May 9th, The San Diego Promise Zone partnered with the 2024 California Cooperative Conference, hosted by Café X, to connect with community partners from local working groups for a 2-hour session on worker and housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and cooperative conversions! The event enlightened and equipped working groups with the knowledge to continue the work of community empowerment in the Promise Zone, a federally designated area in San Diego that is historically burdened by the City’s highest concentrated poverty and unemployment rates.
To begin, Grant Ruroede, Urban Planner for the City of San Diego’s Planning Department, gave a compelling run down of cooperative ownership models for housing and businesses, as well as local food systems, to highlight the importance of community development and resource access for marginalized groups.
“Cooperatives tend to be much more economically equitable than traditional businesses, and they also have higher survival rates,” said Ruroede.
Ruroede defines these cooperatives into four easy-to-follow sections: worker cooperative, housing cooperative, food cooperative, and community land trusts, offering a new perspective of a collaborative economy that will work for San Diego Promise Zone residents.
To further explain the vision of a worker cooperative, Khea Pollard, Café X owner, shared with the audience the beginnings of Café X, future plans, and its role in the community.
“This particular cooperative is considered a worker-owned cooperative and has been in ideation and actualization since 2015, we formally established in 2018 and we have survived a lot. I just started to notice not only the lack of access for our communities, but also the missing tax base from our communities,” said Pollard.
“We need systems that feed back into our communities rather than extract. It’s about sustainability and ownership of our time and our talents. The cooperative is not meant to be built alone. It’s a family, it’s a real marriage of people, of ideas, of concepts. It started with coffee but this is growth. That’s why Café X is here,” Pollard continued.
Further along in the agenda, William Burties, Economic Development Director for the Logan Heights Community Development Corporation, moderated a food cooperatives panel in which Kim Rivero Frink from the SunCoast Market Co-op, a food co-op designed to create a more equitable food system, and Pollard, imparted what they have learned from starting their own cooperatives, showing that if you put your mind to it, you can do it!
Other working groups and cooperatives in attendance were: Communities for Global Sustainability (C4GS), Environmental Health Coalition (EHC), Casa Familiar, Environmental Health Coalition, and Local Enterprise Assistance Fund (LEAF).
This was an inspiring event that brought attention to all the good work these groups are doing, as well as motivating current residents to start their own cooperatives to keep the circulation of money within the Promise Zone for future generations to come.
