Melissa Elkins March 3rd 2021 Zoom Edition!

What do I do?

I am currently the sustainability coordinator, administrative assistant, and I also provide support to the human resources department at the Community Food Co-op in Bellingham, WA. The first two are positions I’ve held for almost the last decade and I’ve been working with our human resources department for the last several months. My responsibilities include tracking hundreds of metrics for sustainability reporting which helps us keep an eye on areas I may need to audit with attention to our quadruple bottom line – people, planet, profit, and purpose. The other primary functions of my roles is project management and systems development, which we’ve had to do a lot of in the last year. I have worked for the Community Food Co-op for over 24 years because I believe so strongly in the cooperative business model and for what our co-op in particular provides to the community.

Advice/words of wisdom that affected your life you’d like to pass on?

Networking and collaboration are a big key to success in any team-based organization and are some of my favorite aspects about working in the natural foods industry. The thing that has changed the course of my career the most, however, is that sometimes you have to create your own opportunity, especially if you can prove a good ROI for your organization. When I was asked to start tracking our utilities and basic financials in what we later dubbed the “sustainability matrix”, it was just a fun project that I spent a few hours a month on. The more information I tracked, the more I saw the opportunity for the Co-op to become a leader in sustainability tracking and reporting. I proposed that we create the position of Sustainability Program Coordinator, and once it was approved, I spent a couple years developing systems and the job has expanded from there. Since the creation of my position our Co-op has been recognized multiple times for our efforts on national and local levels, but even more importantly, we’ve inspired a number of other businesses to start tracking their triple or quadruple bottom lines and have paved the way for several jobs to be created in the natural foods retail sector, modeled after my own. It is humbling to be one of the first sustainability coordinators in the grocery industry.