The City of Phoenix is once again accepting applications for entrepreneurs who want to take part in the
Sustainable Cooperative Food Business Training Program The 10-week course, taught by Thrive Consultancy, Inc. in partnership with the ASU School of Sustainability, is funded by Phoenix's Office of Environmental Programs (OEP). It helps current and aspiring entrepreneurs create a cooperative -- an employee-owned business -- through classes on business planning, group decision-making, budgeting, marketing, and more.
Stella McPhee, a farmer of 15 years, came into the Spring 2022 cohort looking for a way to help her 'incubator' (beginning) farmers market their products.
"It was just a luck opportunity to meet some wonderful people, like-minded people who share the same values," she said, referring to her now-partners in their eventual co-op, Kendra Branham and Elizabeth Ferguson. Now McPhee is excited about not having to bear the weight of farming on her own shoulders alone.
"When you're doing a cooperative, everybody's sharing the responsibility on their shoulders and so we can problem solve. We can help each other," she said. "It's a really nice way to have some more income coming in where it's not just all you by yourself."
Ferguson recently graduated with a master's in landscape architecture, and has farming in her family background.
"I didn't know them at all; we were total strangers," she said of Branham and McPhee. "But we just happened to get along really well, thankfully."
Ferguson came away with the business know-how to start getting things off the ground.
"The biggest thing for me... is not really knowing how to get started with a business plan, how to have a business plan to present to get funding, how to create a budget," she said. "And those are all things that [the training program] taught us to do ourselves."
Branham is a self-described plant nerd who is taking her passion to the next level and looks up to her co-op partners as mentors in the farming process.
"We're out here, we're in the sun, I'm with somebody who has a lot of knowledge and is actually just excited to share. It really kind of helps enrichen the experience," she said.
The group is still looking for 2 more people to help them reach cooperative status in Arizona.
The city of Phoenix is funding the upcoming spring cohort, which runs from June 14 to August 18, 2022, for up to 25 applicants. Training sessions will be held in downtown Phoenix each Tuesday and Thursday from 5-7 pm. While there is no charge for accepted participants, they are required to commit to full participation and completion of the program. The application​ deadline is June 5, 2022.
