Federation of Southern Cooperatives
Ralph Paige, Director
100 Edgewood Ave. N.E.
Atlanta, Ga.
(404) 524-6882

Working out of a modern office building in downtown Atlanta that literally overlooks the "Sweet Auburn" neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and preached, the Federation is a legitimate icon of the civil-rights struggle, and its leader, Ralph Paige, has been there since the beginning.

The organization, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1994, got started in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King's victories, Paige recalled. With the March to Selma in the history books and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in place, he said, "People started asking each other, 'Where do we go from here?'"

The answer, at least for the advocates of the minority, dirt-poor farmers and sharecroppers of the Southeast, was to ensure "our God-given right to stay on the land and to have a decent way of life, through economic-development, land-retention projects, advocacy and outreach."

Here and there across the South, minority farmers independently started forming cooperatives to gain economic power. Often organized by workers from SNCC, the SCLC, CORE or the NAACP, they frequently started as alternative economic structures outside the white-dominated local economy, which many of them opposed through boycotts. "Finding themselves in the wilderness," as Paige said, a number of these groups federated themselves into a formal coalition, and got federal Office of Economic Opportunity money to hire organizers (including Paige himself) to go out and encourage the formation of more cooperatives, which functioned in many fields from low-cost housing and economic development to marketing agricultural produce.

Added Jerry Pennick, "Our co-ops operate on the one-man, one-vote principle, more in the way of sharing resources than profits. In credit co-ops, for instance, people pool their resources and lend them to their neighbors."

At one point, as many as 130 coops were active in the Federation, although that number has slipped today, with black farmers in the South, like their white counterparts on the Plains, leaving the farm in large numbers, with only 23,000 black farmers thought to remain on 3 million acres of farmland ... a fraction of the numbers two decades ago.

Organizing continues, with organizers training local leaders who then organize independent, self-governing local cooperatives.

The federation is also active in national coalitions and advocacy, working closely, for example, with the National Family Farm Coalition.

Other major activities include its Rural Training and Research Center at Epes, Ala., which offers year-round training in both co-op development and organizing and farm management. (Federation staff also produces many training materials, including the "Land Loss Prevention Manual"; "Descent & Distribution," a primer on writing wills in such a way as to keep farmland in the family; and reports on sustainable agriculture techniques.

Finally, a new program that fits in with one of the most exciting evolving access-to-food models is the Federation's Rural Urban Marketing Project, which organizes food-buying co-ops in urban public-housing projects as ready and reliable markets for the produce of the Federation's farmers, as well as identifying other possible markets such as WIC and church feeding programs. They're setting up some models in Chicago, Philadelphia and Jackson, Miss.

There's a lot of excitement here, and a firm conviction that organizing can make a difference.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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