Despite Setbacks, Northside Food Co-op Efforts Carry On

Cierra Washington loves a gushy movie moment – the kind where well-intentioned people come together for the common good, perfectly executed needle drop included. While she may have moved to Wilmington originally to major in film and make those moments happen behind the scenes, she now plays a pivotal role in making them happen in real life as the project manager at Northside Food Co-op.

“Those lovey, gushy movie moments about communities coming together…part of me wants to hold onto that in times when things are really, really hard,” Washington said.

Those “really, really hard” times Washington references are far from fiction. After years of building toward opening a much-needed grocery store in the northside of Wilmington (a USDA-defined food desert), the team at Northside Co-op had all the funding they needed in 2024. But by 2025, they – according to Washington – had lost about $10 million that had been earmarked for the effort.

At the start of the Northside Co-op in 2017, the original mission was for a group of community members, nonprofit leaders and the hospital to come together and do a community health assessment for the northside.

“Part of that assessment was to try and understand how we help this super vulnerable community,” Washington said. “When they did the health assessment, one of the things the community said they wanted and needed was a grocery store.”

A committee was formed out of that initial group to work on bringing in a grocery store – not build their own, but bring one in. “But when they realized that a corporate grocer could not be enticed to come here, they said, ‘Well. We’ll try doing our own.’”

And that’s what they set out to do, with quite a bit of positive momentum and funding raised in the intervening years. But the Northside Co-op effort lost $10 million in funding when two things happened: New Hanover County reallocated funds, and the New Hanover Community Endowment pulled back a $6.7 million grant.

New Hanover County had budgeted $2.45 million for the design and construction of the store, along with up to $1.55 million to subsidize potential cash flow deficits in the store’s first five years of operation.

The endowment grant pullback took place after the co-op had announced plans to pause work on construction of the proposed store in 2025 as leaders evaluated the grocery store’s business model and location.

“It was hard for us, hard for the community,” Washington said. “But through that, we pivoted, and we were like, ‘OK, this will give us time to change up our business model and make it stronger.’”
One major element of that new business model was the launch of a nonprofit, Growing Resilience.

“We have the co-op, which is a for-profit entity that’s owned by members of the community,” Washington said. “And then we started a nonprofit for our community programs.”

To do that, the team consulted with the Duke Community Enterprise Clinic at Duke University to understand the legalities around funding in this space.

“They gave us some really great legal guidance, and we were able to build out Growing Resilience,” Washington said. “So we have these two entities – they are legally two separate entities – and when the co-op opens, Growing Resilience will still be doing things for the community. They’ll still continue our community programs that will continue to advocate for the health and wellness of the Northside community.”

Because the co-op project had its fair share of ups and downs and stalls and starts prior to losing the funding last year, the team was already well-versed in coming up with fresh ideas to serve the community.

In June 2022, they started their completely free community dinners.

“We were basically trying to figure out: How do we feed people now while we also work toward this long-term goal of feeding people more permanently?” Washington said. “We knew that while building something with our community, we first had to learn how to just be in community.”

In addition to the community dinners, the team has also started hosting grocery store tours. Essentially, neighbors from the northside area get together and go to three different grocery stores throughout the city. They are given a persona of a shopper and a shopping list, and then sent to experience that grocer. Afterward, the group gathers to discuss the experience: What did you like, not like and most importantly, how can we use this information to influence how Northside Co-op will be built?

This idea of for the community by the community is instilled in everything the Co-op aims to stand for.

“I think for a neighborhood – specifically the northside that was historically Black and where so much gentrification and change has happened – we wanted something that the neighbors could have as their own, to have influence over and have pride in,” Washington said. “So co-op is really a business structure, and it’s the idea that a bunch of people come together, create a solution to what their problem is, and then they all collectively own it.”

As for the future of the co-op, Washington doesn’t ever use the word “if” in reference to it, but “when.”

“Right now, we are just trying to get people to come back to the table and work with us,” she said. “We’re still seeking funding; we have an updated business plan, pro forma…we’re confident in this model that we’re building. In the meantime, we really are just trying to have people gather and develop community in an intentional way.”

To learn more about Northside Food Co-op, visit northsidefoodcoop.com.