DK Holland, Green Hill Food Co-op Co-Founder
[Published originally in The Local / NY Times blog, on Jan. 28, 2011]
DK Holland is one of the driving forces behind the Greene Hill Food Co-op.
Deborah K. Holland vividly recalls how lucky she was that summer day in June 2007 when a man stole her tricycle from the front of her Adelphi Street house. The thief didn’t know how to ride the trike and minutes later smashed it into a parked car on Willoughby Avenue. Before the police arrival, the tricycle thief managed to escape leaving behind Holland’s yellow tricycle and a story that days later made it into the local newspaper.
Had Holland bought a bicycle instead of a tricycle before, maybe The Brooklyn Paper would not have been interested in the wheels-stealing saga, and Holland’s opportunity to test the waters about creating a food co-op in Fort Greene to bring fresh and affordable food to the community- would have taken even longer.
“During the tricycle interview, I mentioned the idea about the food co-op to the reporter,” said Holland, 63, sitting at a white couch in her living room surrounded by Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo, her two adopted cats. “Another article followed and people in the community started to ask for a meeting.”
A Fort Greene resident since 1983, Holland, who goes by DK, created her first nonprofit project in 1984, The Hill, a community journal that she still publishes twice a year. But it was not until more than twenty years later when her desire to build a strong sense of community led this former graphic designer to come up with the idea for the Greene Hill Food Co-op, a food cooperative funded and operated by local residents. Her persistence, supported by a volunteer steering committee, has gathered more than 200 paid members at this point. That is still a low number seven months before the co-op opens its doors in Putnam Avenue, hopefully, in September.
Holland’s drastic change to become ‘all about community,’ as she describes her volunteer efforts, happened in the midst of the Twin Towers’ collapse. Few months after ending her 13-year marriage and quitting the iconic Push Pin Studio -the design firm where she was a partner- her mother died. The family loss, along with the death of Harriet Tubman, on Valentine’s Day, prompted Holland to renovate herself.
Without any offspring to take care of, some savings in the bank, a monthly rent paid by Olea Restaurant on Lafayette Avenue, property lot which she owns, and a desire to spend more time in Brooklyn, Holland’s renaissance started by remodeling the house where she has lived since 1990.
“When I moved back to New York from San Francisco in the 80s, I only wanted to live in a house with a garden,” said Holland while looking at her flower-filled garden. “And for ten years I lived in this house when it was gutted, with wires hanging from the ceiling and bricks pulling out of the walls. It was really precarious.”
During the decade she spent living at her own house as if she were a squatter, Holland almost lost her mind, she said, but at the same time she kept simmering ideas that could have a deeper effect on her community. The new Millennium came and Holland joined the Park Slope Food Co-op to get the kind of food she couldn’t get in Fort Greene. And the puzzle started to piece together.
“Getting to Park Slope was hard,” Holland recalled. “And I said to myself, ‘we can have this in our neighborhood. Wouldn’t it be great to bring everybody together?’”
Thanks to the tricycle incident, Holland and her friend Kathryn Zarcynski put out the word about opening a replica of the 37-year-old Park Slope Food Co-op in Fort Greene. Three years have passed in which committee meetings led by Holland and other members/owners have gotten some results: A space on Putnam Avenue to open a full-time store- as long as the needed funds are available- and the implementation, this week, of a buying club where members who pay a $50 insurance deposit, on top of their $175 one-time fee membership, can buy fresh food produce and pick it up at the location.
Joe Holtz, Park Slope Food Co-op’s manager, has met with Holland in various occasions since 2008 at her request to discuss ways to collaborate and support the new co-op. “Our relationship is purely on the whole idea of starting a co-op, and I’m happy to say that she’s making sure that everybody is welcome,” Schultz said.
Building a food co-op in Fort Greene that embraces the diversity of its community is what Holland said she and others in the steering committee are committed to. “Our co-op is totally inclusive. It welcomes everybody. That is a big part of our guiding principles, ” she said.
Karen Bowser, a Clinton Hill resident who used to be a Park Slope Food Co-op member, believes in that inclusion. This career management adviser approached Holland last April to inquire about the food co-op. Today, Bowser is the outreach committee’s co-chair, the only black member -black from down South, as she said- in a co-op committee.
“Over the next couple of elections you will probably see more diversity,” said Bowser referring to the election by co-op members of the chairs to the various committees – outreach, finance, branding, membership, fund raising, IT- that report to the steering committee. “This is an open project and DK makes sure that all the information is shared with everybody.”
Holland passionately believes that this year all the planning and efforts will pay off and Fort Greene residents will have, finally, their own option to get fresh and organic food at an affordable price. These days, ‘all about community’ for her means keep building strategies to increase the co-op’s membership.
“I’m very happy after I go to a co-op meeting, really genuinely happy,” she said. “It’s all about hope – that everything can change in the future for all of us around here.”
