Weaver Street Market

When Ruffin puzzles over the coming challenges Weaver Street faces, he comes up with three:

• Local Sourcing: The presence of entrepreneurial farmers and local food businesses in the Chapel Hill region made the first phase of local sourcing relatively there’s a clear need for processing meat locally, and these operations are capital intensive.
  
  
• Multiple Bottom Lines: Another challenge is getting all the stakeholders—workers, consumers, suppliers— to develop a consensus on choices that affect multiple bottom lines. For example, how do you discontinue newly endangered seafood varieties without driving shoppers to the competition?
  
  
• System Change: Ruffin remains enough of a historian to know that even a large, successful Weaver Street cannot change the larger food system on its own. He mentors other cooperatives, like the Chatham Marketplace, but he wants to change much more. “We’re doing well in this, better than many, but there are so many larger food system barriers.
  
  

Ruffin believes that any modest-sized community can achieve what Weaver Street has done. He concedes that his hybrid model is not as familiar as other cooperative models, but the other keys to success are not rocket science: Amass the needed capitalization from member loans, vertically integrate the food supply chain to increase control, emphasize the social benefits of a great place, and move the cooperative into other critically needed enterprises. Ruffin also sees the importance of momentum and reputation. “If you’re successful, people will come to you.”