People’s Grocery is taking a very exciting step toward creating our grocery store. In order to expedite our store development and provide the leadership that a project of this scale requires, we’re going to hire a new Executive Director in the Fall so that I can turn my focus and leadership to developing the retail business and becoming the CEO of the new retail. This was a decision that was based on an assessment that 1) People’s Grocery is now a strong enough organization to successfully sustain a leadership change and 2) my involvement in the new startup business will be essential for its development and success. I’m personally very excited about the opportunity to tackle this project on a near full-time basis.

Once a new Executive Director is hired I’ll become a temporary project manager (between 6-12 months) on the nonprofit staff. In this role I’ll apply 75% of my time to store planning and 25% to training and mentorship of the new Executive Director. The nonprofit will continue to support the retail development until the new company is formed and receives its seed funding. At that stage I’ll move over to become the CEO of the new company and continue working on the development and launch of the store (the nonprofit will be reimbursed for all expenses it has incurred in the business planning).

Of course the nonprofit and the new retail business will have a very close relationship in many ways. The nonprofit will be an equity holder in the store so that it can sustain a long term relationship and ensure that the business stays on mission. The store will also contract the nonprofit to provide nutrition education services and to grow vegetables at our farm for the store. This means that I will continue to have a presence in both organizations and will continue to support the new Executive Director.

Today is the first day that we are announcing this leadership change and releasing the job announcement for a new Executive Director. If you see the job announcement don’t be worried that something bad is happening at People’s Grocery. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – People’s Grocery is running really strong and we’re making confident steps towards realizing this great and much needed venture. There are other details to this leadership transition and what we’re looking for in a new leader. I’ll be writing more posts about these details in the future, so please visit my blog regularly to learn more.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under People's Grocery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.