Your Mom Was Right About Sharing

Taking a quick break to advocate for something that's really helped our family. Here in the Heartland, we're blessed to have PrairieLand Food, a food buying cooperative available to stretch our grocery budgets.

PrairieLand is a 501(c)3 non-profit made up of folks who give our time to help the community in a zillion different ways. In return, we're able to order food shares at a reduced price. Here's the cool thing...it's open to anyone who volunteers, no membership is required and there are no income guidelines.

This particular food co-op is available to folks in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, but I urge you to look for a cooperative food buying club in your area, too.

Here's how our food buying cooperative works:

• Members pre-order shares that are announced each month by the co-op managers. PrairieLand Food shares are made up of five meat items and five or six veggie or fruit items for $24. Is that incredible or what? Examples of recent meat items are pre-cooked frozen turkey breast strips perfect for making fajitas, two big packages of frozen chicken fried rice or shrink-wrapped deli sliced turkey and ham. The more shares sold, the more food we're each given.


• We're also able to order Monthly Specials at amazing prices - everything from four steaks and two lbs of jumbo shrimp for $20 to a Christmas baking box that contains everything you need to get started with your Christmas cookies.


• On a specified pick-up date, food shares are delivered by truck, divided into individual share boxes by volunteers and picked up by members who pre-ordered. Here in our town, there are about a dozen distribution sites, usually churches or union headquarters.


• When picking up their shares, members turn in their volunteer hours for the month. All it takes is a couple of hours a month doing anything that helps someone else--mowing your neighbor's lawn, tutoring, or any other kind of kind act performed for free.

What could be easier? I priced the items in my share from last month and found it was actually $44 if purchased at local grocers. I don't know about you, but my family definitely needs that kind of savings right now. It's also an amazing way to gift families in need...we've ordered extra shares for people on hard times; all it takes is $23 more and another couple of hours of volunteering.

So, if you're in the Plains States, why not check out PrairieLand Food? If you live elsewhere, investigate local food buying clubs or co-ops or start your own. Buying power is buying power, right? If you had enough people buying the same food at the same time, I'm willing to bet you could negotiate discounts with food manufacturers and distributors in your area. Here's a cool article I found about setting up a food co-op from scratch.

I hope I hear from some of you about how cooperative food buying has helped your families. Building strong, sustainable families is, after all, what this blog is all about.