Now That's Rural - Gove – community owned grocery
Note to Editors: This column is adapted from the Kansas Profile radio series. Every Wednesday, a different Kansan, Kansas community or Kansas-based company is profiled as a regular feature of the K-State Research and Extension News lineup. A photo of Ron Wilson is available at http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/news/sty/RonWilson.htm.
By Ron Wilson, director, Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University.
What happened at your local grocery store when the ice storm hit? Many stores struggled to provide needed supplies when an ice storm hit Kansas in December 2007. Today we’ll learn about a rural Kansas store that found a way to serve its community members despite the storm – in part because the store is owned by the community itself.
Von Tuttle, Cheri Remington, Marvin Beesley, Kassie Remington, Don Zerr, and Megan Tuttle are members of the Board of Directors of the Gove Community Improvement Association.
Gove is a rural place. It has the distinction of being the smallest county seat in the state with a population of 103 people. Now, that’s rural.
It’s a challenge to sustain services in a town that size. The local grocery store in Gove closed in the early 1980s. In 1986, a group of concerned citizens came together to reopen and operate a store. They formed the Gove Community Improvement Association or GCIA and founded the GCIA Grocery.
By the early 1990s, the local café had closed as well. In 1995, the GCIA built a new building with volunteer labor, local donations, and a 10-year, no interest loan from the local rural electric cooperative which has been repaid. This building houses the GCIA Grocery as well as a community-owned eating place called the County Seat Café.
For $25, a person can join GCIA which entitles them to charge their groceries at the store. I don’t mean with a credit card, I mean that the store will keep a charge account for them which they pay at the end of the month.
The building is clean and well-maintained. But what is really unusual is that it is community-owned and directed by volunteers. There is a hired manager, but a board of volunteers gives direction and also provides legwork to operate it.
In 2006, GCIA purchased a local grocery distribution business. The wholesaler delivers groceries to GCIA which are then redistributed to other local stores. This helps all the stores meet the minimum purchase requirement from the supplier, as well as sharing needed produce or meat products. Board members and other volunteers step in to help sort the shipments each week.
The GCIA Board has seen first-hand the importance of having a store nearby for the elderly or young families. Cheri Remington saw this benefit while caring for her husband’s grandmother. Or when there’s a sick baby in town, someone is willing to open the store to get the medicine they need.
A dramatic example happened in the ice storm of December 2007. The power in Gove was out for five days, but the GCIA Grocery opened to serve the community. The store had no power and no lights, but they found a way to make it work.
Marvin Beesley says, “We had flashlights and people went through the aisles. We didn’t have a cash register but we wrote down who owed what, and when it was all over, they came in and paid their bills. It’s another convenience of having a local store.”
They used a portable generator to keep the refrigerator and freezer going at the café, but there was too much in the store to save it all. So they took a bunch of food to the gas grill in the café, cooked it up and fed a bunch of people, including the linemen who were working on the down electrical lines. The café itself was unlocked, because the generator cord went through the café door so it had to remain open. People took food to shut-ins and neighbors helped neighbors.
Marvin Beesley says, “It wasn’t a good time, but it was a lot of community togetherness.”
So what happened at your local grocery store when the ice storm hit? In the case of Gove, the people of the community and the community store came together and helped each other through tough times. We commend all those who are part of the Gove Community Improvement Association for making a difference by sustaining that local service. That spirit of cooperation helps rural communities to cope with whatever might be in store.
------------------------------------------------
The mission of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development is to enhance rural development by helping rural people help themselves. The Kansas Profile radio series and columns are produced with assistance from the K-State Research and Extension Department of Communications News Unit. Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at http://www.kansasprofile.com. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/huckboyd/.
-30-
K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.
Story by: Ron Wilson
rwilson@oznet.ksu.eduK-State Research & Extension News The Huck Boyd Institute is at 785-532-7690 or rwilson@ksu.edu.