Story by Stephanie Pendleton

When arriving at The Little Grill Collective in Harrisonburg, crowds of fashionable hipsters and health-conscious patrons make lines in and out side of the door.

The place is always crowded. Especially on Mondays. Mondays are free. It’s like a soup kitchen, only the dining is family-style.

Ron Copeland greets his customers with an announcement. He tells everyone that there will be chicken, fries from their own garden, salad, and about five other foods, including a desert of apple pie.

He then concludes that they should have a good time and to “imagine a world where everyone forgives each other when they’re mad at one another.” His laughter echoes around the room.

Copeland explained how a collective cooperative works.

“The Little Grill has been a restaurant since the 1940s. I bought the restaurant in 1992, then sold it and in effect turned it into a worker-owned cooperative in 2003,” Copeland said.

“I remained on as a worker/owner, but there was an actual sale. We started a new corporation, and I sold the restaurant to the new corporation, of which I was a board member. The new corporation was a cooperative,” Copeland said.

A great idea. But how does a cooperative work, exactly?

“We actually raise money from customers which we’re paying back, and I financed half of the sale,” Copeland said.

“A worker-owned cooperative is different from other types of cooperatives that people might be used to. A worker-owned cooperative means that all owners work, so there would be no owner that didn’t work. By definition, a worker-owned cooperative means that there’s one owner, one vote, which means that no one can use capital or money to get more votes. The profit is distributed based on how much labor you do. So if I do 10 percent of the labor, over the course of the year, I receive 10 percent of the profit.”

Young volunteers serve patrons as the very arty decor looks on. There are paintings by locals and famous artists alike. Lots of kitsch decorates the scenery such as license plates and plastic dolls. Some are mutilated to look like hybrid Godzilla Barbies.

Copeland continues: “When I owned the restaurant myself in ‘92, I started the Monday-night soup kitchen in ‘92, and my idea was that we could have a cooperative meal, a community meal, that would be a spontaneously-occurring free meal, and that’s what it’s really become. No one pays, and no one gets paid.”

So where does the food come from?

“I started by putting a jar on the counter at The Little Grill,” Copeland said. “Customers were very generous right away. Some people give us some money, like today, this corn came from a farmer who brought in tons of food, the fried chicken somebody had left over from a party, the french fries are potatoes from out own garden here at the community center, these rolls are donated from Costco, they give us a lot, whatever else we need, we buy. We have a checking account. The soup kitchen started having a life of its own.”

Across the street from The Little Grill, there is a mural-painted building with the words “The Community Center” brightly painted on it.

“We were getting so many donations we started having too much money for just one little meal, that’s when we started looking at his building which was across the street from The Grill, and empty, and for sale, you know,” Copeland said.

“I started with some other people a nonprofit organization called Our Community Place. The soup kitchen basically folded into Our Community Place, or became a function of Our Community Place,” Copeland said.

“This will be a center for many other things such as meetings. For instance, Skyline Literacy Coalition is a place out of Dayton, and they want to use this as a substation in Harrisonburg,” Copeland said. “We hooked up one of their tutors with a man I know who doesn’t know how to read. They started meeting here and that relationship will continue. My wife does childbirth education, Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m starting a little Mennonite Church.

“The goal of the board is to create a community center. All of that came out of the soup kitchen,” Copeland said.

For Further Reading

The Little Grill Collective - www.littlegrillcollective.com

Filed under: 5-October 2007 Issue