You’d like to join the Park Slope Food Co-op to get access to their goods and deals, along with very long meetings on divestment from Israel. But you don’t live that close to Park Slope, and you’d like to have political battles about something else (Gibraltar belong to Spain, dammit!). The easy solution is to start your own damn co-op, so lucky for you, the Park Slope Co-op is giving low-interest loans to people with plans to do jus that.
The co-op will be giving out low-interest loans of $20,000 to a few people with business plans that seem sound enough to work, according to DNA Info. But you can’t just go to them, empty hat with “CO-OP FUNDS” written on it in hand. The co-op’s loan board wants to see that you have a site picked out, a business plan, your projected income and proof that you’ll be able to convince people to work for you, despite how unlikeable you are.
But if you can prove all that, twenty grand will be yours to set up your own quasi-socialist republic in whatever corner of Brooklyn you see fit to establish it. The loan program is going to focus on Brooklyn at the beginning, so get your business plan and someone else’s good credit score now, before everyone is trying to get themselves a loan. And then one day your store can be the focus of a lightly mocking Daily Show feature.
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Not mentioned in this article is that to qualify for a loan, your coop must strictly follow Park Slope's model.
I am a founding member of the Bushwick Food Coop, and we decided not to apply for a loan because one of the requirements is that the coop must be members-only. At the Bushwick Food Coop (and others like the 4th St. Food Coop in Manhattan), we felt that it was important to make our store open to non-members, who are allowed to shop (unlike Park Slope), though they must pay a higher "non-member" price for all purchases.
Check out the Bushwick Food Coop at http://www.bushwickfoodcoop.org for more information!