As People’s Grocery prepares for Nikki Henderson to take over as the organization’s new Executive Director on January 11, 2010 I want to make sure that everyone understands why I’m stepping down as Executive Director and what I’ll be focusing on in 2010.
First of all, I want to assure everyone that I’m not stepping down as People’s Grocery’s Executive Director for any negative reasons. On the contrary, I’m stepping down because we have arrived at a moment of opportunity to more fully pursue People’s Grocery’s mission and vision of building a community food system in West Oakland. As some of you know, it has always been a goal of People’s Grocery’s to open a social enterprise retail food store in West Oakland. In fact, more than just creating a food retail store, our goal has been to create a new social enterprise model that can solve the problem of providing access to healthy foods in inner city areas in a way that is sustainable, scalable, and able to make an impact on public health and in creating economic opportunity for West Oakland.
This design process has included some critical questions such as:
• How do we create a model that can overcome the numerous challenges of developing retail stores in inner city areas like West Oakland?
• How can we reposition grocery stores as public health centers and as components of our healthcare system?
• How can we create a store that is the equivalent in the food retail industry to what micro-financing has been for the financial industry?
• How do we leverage what is good about both nonprofits and for-profits to improve public health and create economic opportunity?
Over the last two years we have been engaged in a planning and design process that has grappled with these and other critical questions for inner city food systems. We are now at a place where we think we are getting to something that can really work. However, through this process, we have come to understand that People’s Grocery, as a small nonprofit, can not provide the focus and dedicated resources required to fully implement a project of this magnitude. With all of People’s Grocery’s programs continuously growing it has been hard to muster the resources and capacity needed to make this model store a reality. So, in mid 2008, I and the People’s Grocery Board of Directors decided that, in order for the store to become a reality at the scale and level of innovation we envision, the project would have to be housed under a separate organization that could solely focus on the store itself.
It is in support of this decision to create a separate sister company that I am leaving the role of People’s Grocery’s Executive Director. In 2010 I will be dedicated fully to creating and leading this new company. The decision to hire a new Executive Director so that I can focus on the retail store (rather than hiring someone to lead the store so that I could remain the Executive Director) was based on a shared belief that I have a unique vision and understanding of the business model for this new enterprise and that, as a co-founder of People’s Grocery, I am well positioned to share this vision, to rally our networks in support of it and, most importantly, to ensure that this new venture works closely with the existing People’s Grocery organization to implement the collaboration necessary to achieve what will now be the shared mission and vision of the two organizations.
While we are setting out to create two distinct organizations — the nonprofit People’s Grocery and a for-profit company — the reality is that what we are really doing is creating a single “hybrid social enterprise” model in which the two organizations will work together to create change in West Oakland and beyond. So, while I’m leaving the nonprofit that I co-founded and have led for the last seven years, I am not going very far away at all as I will be running a new company, side by side with Nikki as she runs People’s Grocery, that shares the same mission and will work collectively with People’s Grocery to realize the vast possibilities that can only come from this kind of shared leadership and collaboration.
Happy New year to you and all of the great possibilities that lie ahead in 2010.
