Seward Community Co-op (Minneapolis, Minn.), creator.

Seward Community Co-op was founded in 1972 by Jerry and Deane Dodge, [Butch?] Hughes, Phyllis Scott, and Don Barton. The co-op was opened in a storefront located at 22nd Street and Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The co-op's founders secured a $3,000 grant from JUMP, a coalition of area Protestant churches supporting urban renewal projects, to purchase the former Superette building. Money was raised from community members and through the Model Cities program to purchase the co-op's initial inventory. Like North Country Co-op and other new co-ops in Minneapolis, the store was run on volunteer labor. In addition to the founders, Leo B. Cashman and Kris Olsen put many hours of work into the new store and remained member-workers for many years.

Management of Seward Community Co-op was very loosely controlled by the workers, with some input from residents of the Seward neighborhood. The core workers became known as the "collective." The collective solicited community input by holding community meetings, which usually involved a potluck dinner and a business meeting wherein they tried to address volunteer schedules, pricing decisions, what products to carry, and similar issues. By 1973 the collective's membership changed from that of the co-op's founders to a new core of workers which included Mark Johnson, Lori Zuidema, Barb Jensen, and Michael Beard. There was no general manager for the store and no board of directors overseeing the collective. After 1974, the members of the collective, now sometimes known as "coordinators" or "store coordinators" began to receive a small wage for their labor.

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