Lavender Magazine Community Pride Award – Small Business: Seward Community Co-Op

You immediately think of Seward Community Co-Op as a grocery store. We should remind ourselves that they are much more than that.

As Natalia Mendez, the Marketing and Communications Manager at the Seward Community Co-op explains: “Seward Co-op is a community-owned grocery store. Anybody can shop there. So, it’s not like a club, like a Sam’s Club or a Costco. So anyone can shop there but we do encourage people to buy ownership into it because so much of the work we do ends up giving back to local business, local communities and working locally and also inclusively and small-scale and sustainable is very important to us.”

Important to an entire community just east of downtown Minneapolis. More important to us. “We are a space that has always been welcome for queer families, queer staff, employees, queer trans folks to shop, to work, to feel comfortable and to go into a space that feels like it does belong to us because it does,” explained Mendez.

In receiving this accolade, Mendez stated that the Seward Community Co-Op is “elated…just because it’s nice to see that we are being recognized a community member.”

“We’re very excited to feel like a place that has been seen and chosen as a place to represent our community,” Mendez continued. “Again, because so many of us that work here are within the queer community, LGBTQ+ community, that it’s nice to have that be recognized because it is such a haven to go to a place where you feel like you could just go to work and be yourself. We’re very excited that Lavender is recognizing us and that hopefully in the future when we’re hiring, more folks will come from our community to be a part of that as well.”

For being a beacon of sustainability and providing opportunities for their LGBTQ+ employees and partners, Lavender Magazine congratulates the team at the Seward Community Co-Op for their Community Pride Award in the Small Business category.