How Small Community Investors Helped Get a Boston Food Co-op Off the Ground

Every now and then, Jenny Silverman gets a check in the mail made out to the Dorchester Food Co-op, where she volunteers as board treasurer. The community- and worker-owned grocery store, a grassroots effort to increase access to nutritious and culturally relevant food, has been a decade in the making. Last week, the co-op held a pandemic-delayed groundbreaking ceremony. It’s on track to finally open its doors early next year, on the ground floor of a brand new mixed-use building with 41 low-income apartments, at the corner of Bowdoin and Topliff Streets in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.

Silverman’s received 80 of these checks just over the past year or so. They come from individuals making an investment in the co-op. Since 2015 – long before city, state and federal tax credits came into the project – around 140 individuals have invested a total of more than $400,000 in the co-op so far. That’s an average investment of around $3,000.

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