The purpose of the Founding Membership Drive is to build a voting membership and to raise our venture equity, but there are many benefits to NOFC Founding Members:

You benefit by becoming a Founding Member

• This is a socially-conscious business investment.
• You become a part-owner of the New Orleans Food Community.
• You become part of the democratic process involved in starting a cooperative grocery store.
• You get to decide how your store should look and operate.
• You will have one vote in board elections and other special elections and be eligible to run for a board position.
• You will be able to participate in determining where your cooperative grocery will be located.

The NOFC benefits from your founding membership:

• Funds collected from membership are the primary way that co-ops raise the money to open a grocery store. By becoming a founding member you are helping to make the dream of opening a cooperative grocery store a reality.
• Opening a grocery store requires a lot of money. We will need money to purchase equipment, hire a staff, stock the shelves, pay our lease, utilities, insurance, etc.
• If we estimate that we need $200,000 of equity to open, this money could be acquired by collecting memberships from 2000 people.
• The more people who become members of the NOFC the more of a representative and diverse community we have operating our co-op.

You should not wait to become a Founding Member

• Founding equity will allow us to negotiate favorable lending terms and accounts with suppliers, and we could open our store sooner!
• If you wait until the store opens to become a member, you will have to go where the Founding Members have decided the store is best situated.

The official By-Laws of the New Orleans Food Community are now available in PDF form. These were adopted by Unanimous Written Consent by the acting Directors of the New Orleans Food Community as part of our incorporation as a non-profit in the state of Louisiana.

These are our governing rules going forward, to be amended as necessary by the Directors of the non-profit and the Founding Membership. These by-laws are designed for our current situation as a non-profit with a cooperative membership that is seeking to open a co-op store. At such time as the store opens, there will certainly have to be more amendments to deal with the operation of a storefront and a different membership structure.

You will find the download here.

Due to summer vacation schedules and a desire to revamp the online storefront, the buying club will not be making an order in late July. After the upcoming June 27th order, the next order will be August 22nd for an expected delivery of August 31st.

The online web store will close after this June 27th order, to be relaunched in mid-August in time for the August 22nd order. We have several great features in the works, as well as a Buying Club manual detailing all the aspects of ordering and receiving local and Ozark items.