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As anyone who has ever washed pots, cleaned bathrooms or managed the work of others knows, it is a significant accomplishment just to keep the Berkeley Student Cooperative running. Each member’s experience is unique, and the twelve hundred students to whom the BSC supplies a quality, affordable housing community each semester may each tell you of a success or a learning opportunity that has not reached my ears. These individual stories create a rich fabric of experience that define our community in the present moment. But it is even more impressive when this large, unwieldy group of disparate individuals acts collectively to ensure the BSC’s success long into the future. We have taken a number of such steps in the course of the past year.
The most evident change is that the co-ops have completed the process of amending our Articles of Incorporation to officially embrace the title of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. The emblem of USCA is near and dear to us as and will not readily be lost. However, for business and recruitment purposes, the Board of Directors found that prospective members can more easily find us with the new title, and that it provides a more welcoming tone for students from a variety of institutions of higher education, including our local community colleges. In a superb display of our democratic spirit, over seven hundred BSC members weighed in during our first member referendum in twenty years. That process has opened the door to greater direct member participation in decision-making in the future.
The stability of our new name also helped us to reach out to other organizations, growing our sense of partnership in the cooperative community. The ties between the Berkeley Student Cooperative and our Alumni Association have never been stronger, as the two Boards of Directors partake in a joint meeting each semester and host more events to connect members from both organizations. The BSC has also donated to the North American Jim Jones Fund, as well as initiated the creation of our own $10,000 fund to support budding co-ops in our local community. These ties will allow the organization to support its broader mission in years to come.
 With one eye on the broader cooperative movement, we have also focused diligently on our buildings. The historic Cloyne Court Hotel has undergone incredible renovations to improve its structure to withstand seismic activity, as well as to increase disabled access and fire safety. With added aesthetic perks, Cloyne opened its doors to 151 co-opers to enjoy its new comforts as well as its trademark cooperative legacy. Similar construction to protect the safety of our members occurred at Lothlorien and Euclid this summer, with a barrage of other capital improvements for virtually all of our buildings. With the retrofit of the Stebbins kitchen, we are proud to report that all of the BSC kitchens meet high standards of health and safety, while offering an amazing learning environment for budding Iron Chefs.
Our buildings are only bested in importance by the organization’s greatest asset: its members. Through the dedicated work of our Member Resources Department and input from many others, the Board adopted a policy to streamline the maintenance of emergency caches, train all managers in emergency preparedness, and to continue to form and rehearse emergency protocol for a co-op-wide response. This will ensure the safety of our members through whatever natural disasters they may face in the coming years.
In addition to maintaining the safety of our members, we have worked to improve the services that we can provide to them on a daily basis. The first area for improvement has been the Central Level Information Technology overhaul. The organization committed great resources to make the leap to use technology to provide faster and more consistent member services from their applications to the release of their deposits. This investment would not have been possible without the generous donations alumni have made over the years to our “Where It’s Needed Most” Fund. Additionally, we have taken on the task of updating job descriptions for and reorganizing the Central Office staff to allow for an organizational structure that makes more intuitive sense to members and recognizes the work that many members of the staff have taken on over the years.
Most importantly, during the last year, the organization spent  much of its time and effort guiding our future work by updating our strategic plan through a process that involved input from all willing members and staff. All parties were able to take an unprecedented look beyond the near future, convincing us once again of our shared values and commitment to the organization. It will also help to guide and focus the work of future generations of co-opers to continue to strengthen our community over the next five years. The strategic plan is captured in five overarching priorities. The first is to assess and improve our systems for retaining institutional memory. This will be accomplished through more regular auditing of organizational systems and processes, developing a standardized protocol for electronic documents and communications, and forging stronger ties between BSC members and alumni, as well as with other cooperatives.
Improving institutional memory also depends on the second goal of strengthening ties between internal groups. This consists of creating of an easy system for members to provide feedback to CO, encouraging responsible house-level decision-making whenever possible, and empowering groups of house-level managers to participate in Central Level decision-making.
Third, the strategic plan directs the organization to increase accessibility of our co-ops to prospective members, building upon the longstanding value that the co-op can be home to any student who is willing to do the work required to live communally. This will result from our disabled access plan, increasing standards of habitability to provide comfortable homes for a wider range of students, re-assessing our marketing and recruitment strategies, outreaching to existing student groups, and gaining a greater understanding of the groups we serve well and those that we can serve better.
While we continue to reach out to a broader array of students, we are also aiming to provide them needed services by maintaining long-term organizational sustainability. We can make that happen through continued capital improvements with supporting policies and procedures, building up cash reserves without sacrificing affordability, fulfilling our commitment to overhaul the Central Level IT system, and continuing to focus on projects that increase our environmental sustainability.
Finally, we will expand the role of member education in the BSC. This will consist of providing cooperative education to members before they sign their contract to ensure they understand the responsibilities and benefits of being co-opers. That education will continue with in-depth orientations for new members, inviting member involvement and workshop creation, and teaching contemporary members about the benefits of our Alumni Association.
Considering the day-to-day challenges of managing a student housing cooperative as large and complex as ours, these goals will be no small feat. We know that the tasks we’ve laid out are not only worthwhile, but essential to the continuous process of growth that makes our cooperative flourish. We have reached into the extraordinary before, and there is no doubt that the organization, with support, will continue to thrive. After all, as all of us can attest, the goal of providing such a strong, high-quality, and affordable housing community to students is surely a good motivator.
I am excited to pass the reins to our new BSC President, Palmer Buchholz, a proud Clone and former  Cabinet member. In Fall of 2009, she plans to focus attention on our member education opportunities, and relations between the BSC and the greater cooperative community. You will no doubt hear about the new Community Action Workshop series to be held at Cloyne Court throughout the semester, where students will educate peers and community members on cooperative values and challenging skills. Additionally, Palmer hopes to increase communication and collaboration between the Alumni and student Boards, so that by working together, we can continue to ensure an exciting and extraordinary future for the Berkeley Student Cooperative. |
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was brought to a vote. On May 5, 2009, after voting to negotiate a contract with Panda for two years, the SOB voted down negotiations with Panda Express 6–3. In its place, the students offered an alternative—a student-run sustainable food cooperative that would serve as a space for students to study, activists to gather, musicians to perform, artists to show work, and for the entire community to buy delicious, affordable and sustainable sandwiches and salads. The Berkeley Student Food Collective was born!
Since stopping Panda Express, a group of dedicated students and community members has been busy finding a location, securing funds, creating a cooperative operating model, finding local farms to source from, and gathering momentum for the opening of a viable storefront. The new organization has hit many milestones these past several months. They have assembled a dedicated and brilliant advisory board of top professionals, hired a Program Director, and created a business plan. The BSFC has reached out to hundreds of students and gained their support, reaching one-third of its fundraising goal of $300,000, including a $10,000 grant from the Berkeley Student Cooperative. With a plan to open its doors in the Spring of 2010, the BSFC is making its future impact meaningful in the present by distributing CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) food boxes to students and community members for one dollar a pound. 
In 1942, Hal was promoted to General Manager and Corporate Secretary of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. The following year he met and married Audrey Neaman, then the house manager of Lexington Hall. Under his tenure, the Co-op acquired six additional co-ops and built Ridge Project (now known as Casa Zimbabwe). Hal set up a college loan program for Co-op members, and began communication with the University. Hal even took the University to court when they proposed razing Cloyne Court and Oxford Hall to make room for tennis courts! Hal’s national legacy includes teaming up with North American Students of Cooperation and the UCLA co-ops to convince the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to amend their regulations to include student cooperative housing as eligible for low-interest HUD loans. Cooperative housing developments across the country might not exist had they not the opportunity to be financed through these loans.
who needed one. While in those days women in the co-op had a house mother to go to for advice and counsel, the men had to go it alone. Many of us came to Hal when we needed an actual adult to talk to. Hal was generous with his time and energy, always happy to talk, and to listen. Cheerful, optimistic, encouraging, but sensible and practical too, Hal was an enormous organizational asset. He could go on for a long time talking about the co-op, how important it is as a model of humane social organization, and how significant it has been in the personal development of the thousands of students who have lived under its roofs. He loved the Berkeley Student Coop, it thrived under his leadership, and we loved him in return. Good-bye Hal, and thank you. 
