The Co-op Revolution

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.

“We were undercapitalized, inexperienced, practiced democratic decision-making and some of us smoked dope occasionally. All elements that would make us grow as human beings and as business people. We ran a helluva show.”

In the spring of 1975, a free-spirited Jan DeGrass backpacked across Canada in search of adventure and greater meaning in life. When she arrived in Vancouver, she met a group of people committed to social change; together they re-imagined the food industry in BC.

In The Co-op Revolution: Vancouver’s Search for Food Alternatives, author and journalistDeGrass writes about her journey as a founding member of the Collective Resource and Services Workers’ Co-op. Bounding to life during the heady, activist, grant-funded years of 1974–1980, the CRS Co-op became one of the most successful co-ops in BC and was committed to co-operation and worker ownership. While the decade of the seventies is remembered for its new wave of co-ops—usually organized by a “free-flowing” collection of women and men in their twenties—CRS was unique in its success. Among its many accolades, it created the Tunnel Canary cannery, the Queenright Co-operative Beekeepers, Vancouver’s popular Uprising Breads Bakery and a food wholesaler, which later became Horizon Distributors. The economic, political and social skyline of Vancouver was changing. For some, the co-op movement was about crushing capitalism; for others it was simply about buying cheap, wholesome food from people they trusted and living in communal camaraderie. No matter the pursuit, co-operation was the answer.

About Jan DeGrass

Jan DeGrass writes in Sechelt, BC, where she is the Arts & Entertainment columnist for Coast Reporter and editor of Coast Life magazine. For the past twenty-five years she has written in every genre, from sparkling arts news to exotic travel narrative to a cookbook of potluck recipes. She received a national award for a business article that furthered Canadian co-operative literature, and she was a winner for Best Coverage of the Arts by the Canadian Community Newspapers Association. She is the author of a credit union history book and her first novel, Jazz with Ella (2012), based on her student experiences in Russia. Her short stories have appeared in Canadian LivingChatelaine and Room.

detail

Binding EAN ISBN-10 Pub Date PAGES Language Size Price
Paperback 9781987915952 198791595X 2019-06-21 240 0.00 x 6.00 x 9.00 in $24.95

Publicity

Connect

Multimedia

Contributor Platforms

Recent Press

Promo Quotes

Events

Book Signings and Tour Cities

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide

by Sherwood, Jay

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide is the second book of a two-part seriesdescribing the initial Alberta/BC boundary survey undertaken between 1913–1924. Surveying the 120th Meridian focuses on the years 1918–1924, when the Alberta crew continued the survey of the 120th meridian while the BC crew split off to continue mapping the Great (Continental) Divide...

read more
Mountain Man

Mountain Man

by Tegart, Hiram Cody

Life was one big adventure for Hiram Cody Tegart. At times unbelievable and others just downright impressive, Mountain Man is the celebration of a legend of a man and a legendary way of life that is quickly disappearing.Cody was born in 1950 on a ranch in BC’s Columbia Valley. The bush that surrounded his family’s farm was the best playground any kid could ask for...

read more
Invisible Generations

Invisible Generations

by Barman, Jean

Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her inheritance. Her local community in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley all too often treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent that Irene embodied was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to not belong...

read more
DrawBridge

DrawBridge

by Boxall, Joan

In an attempt to rekindle her relationship with her estranged brother Steve, who suffered with schizophrenia, Joan met him at the Art Studios in Vancouver. Schizophrenia had already done its worst, confounding Steve with voices, hallucinations, and delusions. At fifty-five, Steve was in a burn-out phase of schizophrenia with a hunger for creativity...

read more
New Ground

New Ground

by Kujundzic, Ann

New Ground: A Memoir of Art and Activism in BC’s Interior is the extraordinary memoir of a feminist, artist, and activist who fought for change no matter her circumstance...

read more
Free to a Good Home

Free to a Good Home

by Torti, Jules

The German word zugunruhe translates as the “stirring before moving.” It’s used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well...

read more
The Co-op Revolution

The Co-op Revolution

by DeGrass, Jan

“We were undercapitalized, inexperienced, practiced democratic decision-making and some of us smoked dope occasionally. All elements that would make us grow as human beings and as business people. We ran a helluva show.”In the spring of 1975, a free-spirited Jan DeGrass backpacked across Canada in search of adventure and greater meaning in life...

read more
Body & Soul

Body & Soul

by

Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers is a spiritual journey through experiences that can be liberating but also awkward and sometimes even dangerous, because women are so often excluded from conversations about spirituality...

read more
On the Curve

On the Curve

by Nicol, Janet

Sybil Andrews was one of Canada’s most prominent artists working throughout the late twentieth century. From a cottage by the sea in Campbell River, Andrews created striking linocut prints steeped in feeling and full of movement. Inspired by the working-class community that she lived in, her art is known for its honest depiction of ordinary people at work and play on Canada’s West Coast...

read more
Resolve

Resolve

by Parks Mintz, Carolyn

Andy and Phyllis Chelsea met during their years spent at the St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. Like the thousands forced into the church-run residential school system, Andy and Phyllis areno strangers to the ongoing difficulties experienced by most Indigenous peoples in Canada...

read more
Before We Lost the Lake

Before We Lost the Lake

by Reimer, Chad

For thousands of years, the broad expanse between Sumas and Vedder Mountains east of Vancouver lay under water, forming the bed of Sumas Lake. As recently as a century ago, the lake's shores stood four miles across and six miles long. During yearly high water, the lake spilled onto the surrounding prairies; during high flood years, it reached from Chilliwack into Washington State...

read more
Dancing in Gumboots

Dancing in Gumboots

by

After the extraordinary success of Gumboot Girls comes the sequel anthology, Dancing in Gumboots. Having relocated to Comox, Jane encountered a new group of women who travelled to the Comox Valley in the 1970s...

read more
The Suitcase and the Jar

The Suitcase and the Jar

by Livingston, Becky

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAAR-SAWhen a brain tumour takes the life of Becky Livingston’s twenty-three-year-old daughter Rachel, her life makes an unconventional turn. Rachel, an avid traveller, had one wish: to keep exploring the world...

read more
Food Was Her Country

Food Was Her Country

by Bociurkiw, Marusya

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAAR-SAHow can a god-fearing Catholic, immigrant mother and her godless, bohemian daughter possibly find common ground? Food Was Her Country is the story of a mother, her queer daughter and their tempestuous culinary relationship...

read more
Imprint

Imprint

by Sicherman, Claire

Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation. When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped...

read more
Surveying the Great Divide

Surveying the Great Divide

by Sherwood, Jay

In 1917 Canada commemorated its 50th anniversary against the backdrop of World War I. Although the war effort was the main focus of the federal and provincial governments, some important projects continued. The Alberta-BC boundary survey, which had started in 1913 during an economic boom in western Canada, continued to receive funding throughout the war...

read more
On Mockingbird Hill

On Mockingbird Hill

by Kelly, Mary Theresa

In the same vein of tree planters and lighthouse keepers, Mary Kelly flips the over-romanticized lifestyle of fire observers made popular by Jack Kerouac and shows us how lonely freedom really is...

read more
Blossoms in the Gold Mountains

Blossoms in the Gold Mountains

by Chow, Lily

Third book by de facto expert on Chinese Immigration to BC reveals never-before-told stories relevant to food, politics and national heritage. In this long awaited third book, author Lily Chow further explores Chinese settlement in BC. In the nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in British Columbia to work as labourers...

read more
Fernie at War

Fernie at War

by Norton, Wayne

Fernie, a small community located in BC’s Kootenay region, entered the First World War in 1914 with optimism and a sense of national pride—it emerged five years later having experienced staggering losses and multiple controversies that threatened to tear their community apart...

read more
Whale in the Door

Whale in the Door

by Le Bel, Pauline

An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration, Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman’s transformative experience of her adopted home.   For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided abundant food, shelter, and stories, for the Squamish Nation...

read more
Butch

Butch

by Holman, SD

Butch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities. Its first incarnation exhibited as a public art project in transit shelters around Vancouver in March-April 2013, with a simultaneous gallery show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (the Cultch)...

read more
North of Familiar

North of Familiar

by Milos, Terry

In 1974, Terry Milos moved to rural northern Canada, to pursue her dream of homesteading. Following the seventies trend of the back-to-landers she and her partner left the city life for what they imagined would be a simpler existence...

read more
Making Room

Making Room

by

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine celebrates the history and evolution of Canadian literature and feminism with some of the most exciting and thought-provoking fiction, poetry, and essays the magazine has published since it was founded in 1975 as Room of One’s Own...

read more
How Deep is the Lake

How Deep is the Lake

by O'Callaghan, Shelley

A prudent and intentional examination of privilege and belonging in Chilliwack Lake by retired environmental lawyer and grandmother.Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake where her family has spent the summer for over one hundred years, author Shelley O'Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area...

read more
The Land on Which We Live

The Land on Which We Live

by MacPherson, Barbara

Legendary tales of pioneers and adventurers cultivating BC's Cariboo Plateau in between the 19th and 20th century.The romantic backwoods landscape known as the North Bonaparte, stretches east from 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake and is full of small remote ranches, hidden abandoned homesteads, and rutted roads leading to graves in forgotten meadows...

read more
What the Mouth Wants

What the Mouth Wants

by Meneghetti, Monica

The redefinition of family values as seen from the eyes of a polyamorous, queer Italian Canadian obsessed with food.This mouthwatering, intimate, and sensual memoir traces Monica Meneghetti's unique life journey through her relationship with food, family and love...

read more
Wherever I Find Myself

Wherever I Find Myself

by Matejova, Miriam

An anthology of Canadian immigrant women and their experiences of being caught between the world of their past and the world of their future.Edited by Miriam Matejova, WHEREVER I FIND MYSELF is a diverse collection of stories about the joys and struggles of immigrant women living in Canada...

read more
Chilcotin Chronicles

Chilcotin Chronicles

by Birchwater, Sage

A collection of historical stories about the early indigenous people, settlers, trappers, and adventurers of BC's Cariboo Chilcotin.A compilation of stories that meld both culture and bloodlines, CHILCOTIN CHRONICLES by Sage Birchwater is set in the wild and untamed country of central British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau...

read more
Ootsa Lake Odyssey

Ootsa Lake Odyssey

by Sherwood, Jay

From the 1920s to 1952, George and Else Seel lived about sixty kilometres south of Burns Lake near the small farming settlement of Wistaria on the western shore of Ootsa Lake. Like many early twentieth century settlers who migrated to BC’s Central Interior, the Seels came in search of opportunity and prosperity, but the harsh environment posed challenges they could not have imagined...

read more
Not My Fate

Not My Fate

by Romain, Janet

Josephine Caplin (Jo) was born into a world marred by maternal abandonment, alcoholism and traumatic epileptic seizures. In grade three, she was apprehended by child services and separated from her protective brother and her early caregivers, her father and uncle, who were kind men with drinking problems...

read more
The Amazing Mazie Baker

The Amazing Mazie Baker

by Johnston, Kay

In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squamish Nation, a community caught between its traditional values of respect—for the land, the family and the band—and the secular, capitalistic legislation imposed by European settlers. When she was six, the police carried her off to St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, as mandated by the 1920 Indian Act...

read more
No Way to Run

No Way to Run

by Crichton, Holly

On September 3, 2010, the RCMP in Grande Prairie, Alberta, received a 911 call from Mat Crichton about a shooting on a local farm. Seconds later, miles from home, Holly Crichton got a shocking call from her son. “I just shot Dad,” Mat told her...

read more

Similar Titles

  • Mountain Man
  • Invisible Generations
  • DrawBridge
  • New Ground
  • Free to a Good Home
  • The Co-op Revolution
  • Body & Soul
  • On the Curve
  • Resolve
  • Before We Lost the Lake
  • Dancing in Gumboots
  • The Suitcase and the Jar
  • Food Was Her Country
  • Imprint
  • Surveying the Great Divide
  • On Mockingbird Hill
  • Blossoms in the Gold Mountains
  • Fernie at War
  • Whale in the Door
  • Butch
  • North of Familiar
  • Making Room
  • How Deep is the Lake
  • The Land on Which We Live
  • What the Mouth Wants
  • Wherever I Find Myself
  • Chilcotin Chronicles
  • Ootsa Lake Odyssey
  • Not My Fate
  • The Amazing Mazie Baker
  • No Way to Run
  • Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide