Farewell to Board Members Ben and Luis

by Rachel Baron

As we collectively shake off our winter blues and get ready to usher in spring, the Co-op’s board is also going through some changes.

For those unfamiliar with the organizational structure of the Co-op, our board is made up of a group of democratically-elected member-owners, each of whom serves a three-year term with unlimited opportunities for re-election. These members play a central role in the Co-op’s business and operations, and have the final say in decisions like whether or not to hold open shopping hours, for example, or to switch over to a new point of sale system. They’re also in charge of strategic planning, and making structural choices that impact the Co-op’s long-term and short-term health.

The number of members on the board has tripled in just two years, from a skeleton crew of just two members in late 2024 to six and counting as of this past February. This month, we were excited to welcome Peter Schwartz, a member-owner of six years, to the board, and also said goodbye to Ben Werner as he concluded his first term. Werner worked closely with Luis Calleja, who stepped down in December. We spoke with Werner and Calleja about their early days on the board, the myriad challenges they faced, and how much the Co-op has changed in the intervening years.

“The Co-op was really in a crisis when we joined the board,” Werner explained. Membership was low overall, said Calleja, and compounding this was the ongoing issue of frequent shift call-outs, leading to store closures. This resulted in ”a long-overdue invoice to UNFI,” (one of the Co-op’s main suppliers), said Werner.

“If UNFI had cut off serving us, that would have [affected] like 60 percent of our goods in the store. So it was pretty critical.”

To lead the Co-op toward safe harbor, Calleja and Werner—who, for a large part of 2023, were two of only three or four board members—put their respective analytical and project management skills to work. To Calleja, it was clear that the Co-op needed more members in order to keep afloat. He embarked on a “trial conversion campaign,” in which Calleja—with the help of other member-owners—called up people who had completed a trial membership, but had not yet signed up for a full membership. He and Werner also “worked as hard as possible to keep the lights on,” he said. This involved everything from doing their best to limit call-outs and no-shows—something they achieved by instituting text reminders for upcoming shifts—to beefing up staff presence by hiring Jordan Rosenberg as Assistant Manager.

Now, in 2026, the Co-op is decidedly out of the danger zone: the board has exploded in size to eight members, and overall membership has nearly doubled—from a low of around 275 members in spring of 2023 to 446, just three members away from an all-time record of 449! Getting to this point wasn’t a straightforward process, however.

“I had never been at the helm of an organization through an intense crisis, so it was a real trial-by-fire situation,” said Werner. Learning to work through these challenges was “a very humbling experience, and a very empowering experience at the same time.”

One thing that helped a great deal, of course, was how well Werner and Calleja worked as a team, each learning from one another in the process. While Calleja focused on data and analytics, ensuring that the Co-op ran effectively as a business in addition to a community space, Werner worked as a project manager as well as a point person for important decisions.

“[Werner’s] communication style was very, very effective. People always fell in line and had confidence in a lot of things that he said. So learning from his communication style was really cool,” said Calleja.

While he and Calleja did a lot of the hard work required to keep the Co-op running, Werner said, he also emphasized that a large part of the credit belongs to the Co-op staff and member-owners. “It was an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation.”

In addition to the growth in membership, Werner and Calleja have also seen a huge uptick in the number of member-owners applying for a position on the board.

“Now we’re at the point where holding a seat on the board is alluring,” said Calleja.

Both are excited to see what the next batch of board members will do: “I think a trait of a good or confident leader is if you’re willing to recognize when your time is done, and release control of the future and let it go where it happens to go,” said Calleja. Werner feels similarly: “It’s time for a new generation of leadership in the co-op and take over and run with it, I think.”