Board member profile: Roseanne Rivers

—by Anne Holzman

It was a step down from trying to save the world, perhaps, but Roseanne Rivers decided that through a food coop, maybe she could help save a little part of it. “I feel strongly about community,” she said, explaining her attraction first to volunteering and then to board service.

Rivers’s first attempt to gain a seat on the board failed, but then she was asked to fill out the term of a departing board member. She was reelected, and serves her current term through 2010.

“I was interested in being more involved, finding out about how things worked,” she said of her interest in the board. And? “I did!” she exclaimed.

It’s been a busy year for board members, but Rivers said her commitment remains solid. “I feel so strongly about the co-op, and the fact that we still have volunteers,” she said.

Rivers spent her early childhood living on the grounds of Father Hennepin State Park, then moved to Little Falls, which she considers her hometown. She recalls going to a co-op grocery store in tiny Isle, Minnesota, with her mother—her first co-op memory. She said it carried mostly bulk items, and she especially liked the sesame sticks. As an adult, she found herself living near Hampden Park Co-op. “A friend told me how great it was.… I went and checked it out, and fell in love.”

She still likes snacks, especially those mixes of nuts and fruits coated with candy. “Sweets are my downfall,” she said. But her grownup tastes also include the co-op’s cheese, organic apples and bananas, and mushrooms. Lots of mushrooms. “I put them in everything,” she said, listing veggie burgers, pasta, stir-fry, and her morning plate of eggs. “My husband put them in fettucine alfredo, chopped up fine,” she added. “It was really, really good!” Since joining the board, she has married and changed her name from Jones to Rivers. She and her husband, Nic, recently bought a house in Columbia Heights, where they live with their cat.

Rivers teaches full-time at Grace Neighborhood Nursery School in the Uptown neighborhood in Minneapolis. She said she settled on teaching preschool after trying out other careers: “I’ve done all sorts of different things.”

Rivers was modest about her role in the co-op’s quest for building ownership over the past year. She said she’s helped with walk-throughs for structural engineers, drafted letters, and made a lot of fundraising calls— “That’s what I was doing when you called” for the newsletter interview, she said rather apologetically.

She also serves on the membership committee, helping decide what benefits members should receive and thinking of ways to recruit new members to the co-op. “The membership committee does things like going to the St. Anthony Park art fair and handing out apples,” she said. The committee also organizes book clubs and finds other ways to strengthen the HPC community.

Rivers said she wants members considering board service to know that while a certain amount of expertise is needed in areas like law and finance, people from many backgrounds can contribute. “You might not know everything about everything in the world,” she pointed out, “but nobody does.”

She said that as the dust settles, she pictures the co-op stepping up to the challenge of a larger space. As building owners, she said, “I feel like we have a bit more freedom.” The space will be “more fresh and modern,” she said.

“I would like to see us grow and become an even stronger part of our community,” Rivers said.

[Anne Holzman is a freelance writer and HPC member.]