Jon Steinman spent time with the staff, Board, and member-owners of TPSS January 22-24, 2026.
Around 70 TPSS member-owners and supporters gathered on Saturday, January 24th to begin casting a vision for a second store. While TPPS’s Board of Representatives and General Manager Mike Houston have been working together since 2022 on strategies to ensure the long-term financial health of TPSS, this was the kickoff of the next steps of the project.
During the first portion of the event, Jon Steinman, food co-op expert and author visiting from Nelson, British Columbia, delivered a photo-filled presentation on the evolution of food co-ops and their challenges and opportunities over time. By illustrating how co-ops across the United States and Canada have understood and met their communities’ needs, he inspired creative thinking around what TPSS’s second store could look and feel like.
Steinman’s presentation included photos of and stories about the 100+ co-ops he has visited in the United States and Canada.
Steinman then introduced a facilitation method called Cooperative Dialogue as the guiding approach for the second portion of the event. With a decade of experience as board president of his food co-op and as co-owner of a co-housing community, Steinman is familiar with the challenges that can come along with collaborative decision-making, and sought training in Cooperative Dialogue in order to better facilitate productive conversations leading to understanding instead of frustration or division.
Steinman challenged participants to focus on dialogue instead of discussion, noting that discussion often emphasizes exchanging or defending viewpoints while dialogue focuses on thinking together and attending to the values, assumptions, and context from which perspectives arise. Participants were encouraged to listen for what others care about most, reflect those values back, and remain open to multiple interpretations without pressure to agree or disagree. Steinman also invited members to consider who was not present in the room—such as staff, vendors, producers, and broader community members—and to hold those absent stakeholders in mind. He framed dialogue as an ongoing practice that deepens over time and observed that even within a limited timeframe, collective insights naturally surface when space is created for careful listening.
Members then engaged in structured dialogue exercises that surfaced their concerns about a second store by prompting conversation partners to identify the values underlying those concerns. Then, through a fishbowl-style Cooperative Dialogue format, participants explored what would signal that a second location truly “feels like our co-op.”
Event participants engaged in a fish bowl-style dialogue about what would signal that a second store feels like our co-op.
Common themes included:
- the importance of bulk foods,
- minimal plastic use,
- human-scale and imperfect design,
- strong and consistent staff culture,
- local and healthy food offerings, and
- spaces that foster conversation, education, and participation.
Many emphasized that the co-op should not feel like a conventional supermarket, but rather a values-driven, community-rooted space.
Education emerged as a recurring theme—not as one-way instruction, but as an interactive, relationship-based process that helps people understand cooperative economics, food systems, and shared ownership. Members discussed the importance of engaging new communities collaboratively rather than extractively, building trust, and ensuring accessibility and cultural relevance. Volunteer opportunities, staff continuity between stores, visual cues of governance and ownership, and thoughtful store layout were also identified as important contributors to a sense of belonging.
Participants reflected positively on the dialogue format itself, noting that it surfaced deeper insights, reduced pressure to speak, and fostered a stronger sense of community than traditional meeting structures. Longtime members and board members alike shared that the experience felt unusually authentic and connective. The session concluded with reflections on how dialogue, shared ownership, and intentional space design are central to making a future store feel like home—not only for existing members, but for the new community it would serve.
In the coming months, there will be additional opportunities for member-owners and neighbors to participate in and build on the dialogue about and vision for our second store:
- In-store: Beginning the week of February 2nd, shoppers are welcome to contribute their ideas for our second store on our in-store Shaping Our Second Store bulletin board
- Participate in Another Second Store Dialogue: We plan to hold another fishbowl-style dialogue in the near future and will share the date and time when they are available. If you are not yet on our newsletter, please sign up here.
- Board Meetings: Member-owners, shoppers, and neighbors have an open invitation to share their ideas and perspectives during our monthly Board meetings, which take place at 6:30pm on the third Thursday of the month at Historic Takoma. Here’s a link to join the February 2026 meeting.
- Join our TPSS Expansion Champions Group: Member-owners who would like to engage more deeply in supporting our second store or maintaining what they love about our current store are invited to share their interest here.