Getting Corporations Off Our Backs

Here is a great report about a group of people who decided to take their future into their own hands. More of us need to do the same:

Guilford County, North Carolina, has 24 food deserts - high-poverty neighborhoods where at least one-third of the residents live a mile or more from a grocery store. Seventeen of those food deserts are in the city of Greensboro. According to a 2014 report from North Carolina's Committee on Food Desert Zones, people living in these neighborhoods are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and more. "The consequences of food deserts could be enormous for public health, the economy, national security and more," the report said.

The neighborhood of Northeast Greensboro is one of those food deserts. There, residents have been without a local grocery store for nearly 20 years.

Back in 1998, the neighborhood's grocery store, Winn-Dixie, closed. The store had been profitable, but because of the way the city was divided between Winn-Dixie and other grocery chains, the company closed its location on Phillips Avenue.

In the years after, residents of Northeast Greensboro asked the city to help bring a new full-service grocery store to their neighborhood, without success. No company was interested in investing in a store that would service a relatively small area and turn a small profit.

Then in 2012, neighborhood residents got together with members of the Fund for Democratic Communities (F4DC), a grassroots organization in Greensboro. Through these meetings, residents learned that they didn't have to wait for a company to build a grocery store in their neighborhood. They could do it themselves.

You can read the rest @
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33680-after-decades-in-a-food-desert-these-neighbors-are-building-a-2-million-co-op-and-they-own-it

Leaving our food security and job security in the hands of corporations is a death wish. Real democracy comes only when We The People control our own future.