Board Member Interview: Melvyn Jones

—by Anne Holzman

Melvyn Jones has been shopping at Hampden Park Co-op (or its earlier incarnations) for almost three decades and is now serving his first term on the board of directors.

He said that soon after moving to the neighborhood in 1984, he and his wife, Esme, discovered the
co-op, then called St. Anthony Park Foods and located at what is now Lori’s Coffee Shop, at Cleveland and Buford avenues.

When their two children were old enough to help, the family started working volunteer shifts.

Now retired, Jones can often be found running one of the cash registers. Elected to the board in November 2010, he serves on the Membership and Long-range Planning committees. He brings
a wealth of organizational experience to the role.

Jones grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where his father worked as an electrician and his mother as a clerk-stenographer. He had relatives, though, on nearby farms.

“I spent every summer on the farm,” Jones said. “I learned a little bit about how to work.”

But while the work was hard, the gratification was relatively quick, he added. “It only takes a year to see results. Other kinds of work, it takes generations.”

He started college in the 1960s, tried out officer training and determined he could not in good conscience join a war effort—this in the years of the draft for Vietnam. He changed schools twice,
finished his degree at Washington University in St. Louis, and began the process of appealing to his Mobile draft board for Conscientious Objector (CO) status.

He obtained permission to perform alternative service with the New York City welfare department. He worked on many projects there, but one that stands out as good preparation for his later co-op participation was helping folks in Brooklyn start food- buying projects in neighborhoods where good food was scarce.

“The grocery stores in that neighborhood really had kind of sorry produce—they got the leftovers” from stores in wealthier areas, Jones said.

He said “little family-run places” would take orders and make runs, but they didn’t know how to make it work. “We helped them by finding out how other cooperatives worked,” he said.

Other groups with no grocery experience needed help finding locations, or basic grocery-buying know-how, “for example, how to distinguish frozen foods that hadn’t been thawed and refrozen.”

His alternative service finished, he was paid by the city to stay on in the role. Some 11 years later, he’d met his wife, and they’d determined New York was too expensive for raising children comfortably. She was from Minnesota, so they decided to move here.

He tried freelance writing, then landed the first of a series of jobs in state government, which led
to a position as an enforcement officer with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

After his years working with the city of New York, Jones said, “I had a good deal of experience at reading and interpreting statutes.”

Part of his job was investigating discrimination complaints and determining whether the case had enough evidence to pursue. A company would approach the state to find out whether it was in compliance, and Jones would audit personnel files “to see if they were doing all they could to avoid discrimination,” and advise them how to do better.

“The preventive side, I liked better,” he said.

He retired from that position in 2007.

Jones served on two other boards of directors before joining the Hampden Park Co-op board. One of his children attended junior high at Cedar-Riverside charter school in Minneapolis, and he joined the parent board there. “That was a very good learning experience,” he said.

He continues to serve as treasurer with the other group, the Welsh Studies Institute in North America.

When he’s not working for an organization, he’s using his retirement freedom to learn to play the mandolin. And, he added, “coping with the needs of an old house.”

Maybe Jones’s best preparation for his board role is that he’s been shopping for decades and knows the ins and outs of co-op participation.

Jones said one of his proudest accomplishments at HPC is getting the co-op to carry Uncle Paul’s and other varieties of bread from the 3^rd Street Bakery in Duluth. “One of the things I like” about co-ops, he said, “is that they listen to what you want—interests aren’t strictly on the bottom line.”

He and his family also eat lots of grains from the bulk section, and a few canned goods. “Organic canned tomatoes get us through the winter,” he said.

Jones hopes that after several years of transition, the co-op can enjoy “a solid growing period, that various construction projects won’t get in the way too much.”

He said he helped hire general manager Kari Neathery and has “great hopes” for her leadership.

He said both his committees, planning and membership, keep him looking forward. “I hope we can grow in a sustainable way and still be the kind of co-op that we are,” Jones said.

[Anne Holzman is a freelance writer and recent discoverer of the 3^rd Street Bakery’s delicious bread.]