Support our Friends at CoFED

Our friends and colleagues at CoFED need your help.  CoFED, or the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, is in the final push of a major fundraising campaign.  They have 5 days left to raise the remaining $4,744 of their $20,000 goal; and if they reach their goal, the 11th Hour Project will match their fundraising efforts with another $20,000!

Like TESA, CoFED believes that a just economy is a cooperative economy.  CoFED, born out of the student food co-op movement, launched nationally in 2010, is an organization that focuses on empowering students to start and run food co-op ventures on their campus.  Through their work developing student co-ops, CoFED is giving students and college campuses democratic control over their food and campus businesses – a truly radical idea.

CoFED is a national movement.  As their work has gained traction, they have expanded their reach nationally, developing an educational fellowship network and Community College program.  These two initiatives are the focus of their funding – supporting CoFED means that you will be strengthening their Fellowship program and enriching their expanding program in Community Colleges.

The Fellowship program is designed for people who are interested in food and cooperatives.  Fellowship recipients will work with college students starting or running food co-ops in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Pacific Northwest and California.  This network of CoFED fellows will extend CoFED’s reach and help to add depth and structure to CoFED’s national goals. In turn, CoFED’s work in Community Colleges is equally important. CoFED has been working with a group of students at Northern New Mexico College who started Española, New Mexico’s  first healthy food business. This work has led CoFED to begin exploring possibilities for expanding their community college work, and they are currently in conversation with people in Detroit at a local community college.

A just, sustainable food system and an equitable, democratic economy come hand-in-hand, which is why CoFED’s work is so important.  CoFED is at the nexus of the environmental and cooperative movement, and they need our support.  Please check out their work, and if you can, please donate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FU9WRFzu_EU