Saturday, April 4 from 9 to Noon, Hanover

Dear Friends:

I would like to take this opportunity to issue the proverbial special invitation for you to attend a festive event next Saturday morning (April 4) from 9:00 AM to noon at the Richmond Middle School in Hanover.

The Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society is holding a "Cooperative Expo" that is intended to show off what the cooperative movement does for our local economy. The excuse for this free gathering -- which will feature exhibits, food demonstrations, and other sources of informal and festive celebration -- is the Co-op's annual meeting.

I must admit that if you have been a member of the Co-op for more than a few years, thanks to Pavlovian conditioning you automatically lapse into a fugue state whenever you hear the words "annual" and "meeting" in juxtaposition. But those church basement suppers with soporific reports from various co-op functionaries are gone. We're not even doing what we did last year (which was to invite an interesting guest speaker -- a great idea but still one that called on attendees to stop fidgeting and pay attention to the front of the room). This year, party is the paradigm and fun is the function.

Yes, there will be a really, really brief edition of the formal annual meeting at 10:30. But it will be in an adjoining room (so you can skip it altogether if you like), and it will NOT involve any boring reports! (If you would like to read the highly engaging report of the president of the Co-op, along with that of our general manager, as well as a lurid accounting of the financial results for 2008, you can check out the recently published, written annual report of the cooperative.) The major agenda items, in reverse order, are (1) an opportunity for members to ask questions about the co-op (potentially entertaining and informative, because it's always fun to watch decisionmakers struggling to be polite in the face of citizen griping), and (2) the annual Allen & Nan King Award for Community Service.

This year the Co-op is giving the Allen & Nan King award to Dr. Bill Boyle, the pediatrician who founded, leads (and lends his name to) DHMC's Boyle Pediatrics Program. Bill Boyle is an especially beloved figure in our household and, I gather, in that of gazillions of local families to whom he has been of professional service over the years. The Boyle Program has been a major force in transforming pediatric care, both here and everywhere, from authoritarian to family-friendly. It is really, really cool that Bill is getting this award and if you have a connection to him, as I know many recipients of this communication do, please do think about being at the Richmond School at 10:30 next Saturday to honor this kind and good man.

As for everyone else, consider this: Cooperatives are the secret success story of an American economy that is otherwise in crisis thanks to the delusional effects of unfettered greed in the investor-owned sector. More Americans belong to at least one cooperative organization than own shares in publicly traded corporations, either directly or indirectly. Here in the Upper Valley, people don't just buy groceries and gasoline at a cooperative . . . they bank at co-ops (i.e., credit unions), they get hardware from them (Tru-Value), they eat cheese from them (Cabot), they get electricity from them (the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative), they live in them (co-housing communities), and they get their news from them. (Okay . . . I am making that one up -- but a reader-owned, cooperatively organized, web-based newspaper is a fantasy of mine, given the looming extinction of traditional daily newspapers). Most if not all of the area's co-ops will be at Saturday's Expo, along with local food producers and other sources of fun and free stuff.

Six years on the board of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society have left me more convinced than ever that co-ops are playing a pivotol role in saving civilization from climate change, economic collapse and everything else that threatens us. But even if you have not drunk as deeply as I have of the cooperative kool-aid, please come to the Expo next Saturday if you're free. It will be a pleasant, community-building event at a time when lots of folks are yearning for such opportunities.

Cheers,

Don