Today, Weavers Way Co-op counts more than 10,000 member households, with storefronts in Ambler, Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy, and a new store due to open this year in Germantown. But long-time member Sylvia Carter can remember 50 years back to its humble beginnings as a buying club in a church basement.
Carter moved to Mount Airy as the neighborhood integrated in the mid-1900s. “I was one of several of the early Black homeowners, and there was beautiful outreach among the 80% that welcomed us into their communities,” Carter says. “But there were still some who didn’t understand how we were able to purchase the homes in their [white] domain. The only African American they knew in some of the cases were household maids.”
Carter became heavily involved in welcoming Black households to the Charles W. Henry Elementary School, which is directly across from what became Weavers Way’s first physical store at Carpenter Lane and Greene Street in 1973. Carter didn’t know much about food cooperatives, but when her sister Madeline Morris became the founding membership coordinator of the group that would create Weavers Way, Carter realized that this was yet another way to build an integrated community.
“For some reason, the parents and faculty at C.W. Henry had this thinking that we were an exclusive club and we had to get that whole idea out of their heads,” Carter recalls. She and fellow members got permission from the principal to attend the school’s parent-teacher nights, she says. “We would go there with apples to let the parents of the students know that they were welcome at Weavers Way.”
This outreach wasn’t just targeted to after school time; in the next few years, C.W. Henry allowed Weavers Way members to become part of the school day with what Carter called “Little Co-op.” In this program, Weavers Way staff and members taught kids how to select, purchase and sell a product, and even how to pay the bills and determine a profit. Carter remembers that one year the kids made a profit and used the money to buy a cow for a family in South America. This led to more farm-based education that paved the way for the establishment of the Weavers Way farm at the Awbury Arboretum, which still exists today as a production and education farm.
And it wasn’t just the kids who were getting an education. Over the past 50 years, Carter has seen firsthand how a community can learn to run a profitable and professional grocery store.
“We learned how to run a co-op and a board,” Carter says. “We learned how to respect and give authority to our talented staff. And we learned how to be more diverse and to be sure that we were getting the talent we needed to run a store with the community involved.”
Co-op member Kristin Haskins-Simms says she was practically raised in Weavers Way; she grew up in a house only a few doors down from the Summit Presbyterian Church, where the grocery store got its start as a buying club. Her mother, Yvonne Haskins, was an early adopter and used to bring Haskins-Simms along with her when she shopped.
As Weavers Way started opening stores, Yvonne Haskins made sure that her household had a membership, which has benefited Haskins-Simms as she has left and returned to Philadelphia throughout her adult life.
During college when I would come home for break, we were working members so I was in the basement bagging chips and pecans.”
— Kristin Haskins-Simms, Weavers Way member
“I’ve lived in New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut, but always was able to maintain a membership through my mom,” Haskins-Simms explains. “During college when I would come home for break, we were working members so I was in the basement bagging chips and pecans.”
Haskins-Simms says she most values the familiar quality that a trip to Weavers Way invokes, where a shopper gets to know people, their lives and their stories. For Haskins-Simms, that’s not an everyday experience at other stores. As she describes it, her family have been members for so long that it’s just “part of the fabric of our lives.”
Haskins-Simms thinks Weavers Way’s future looks bright, with the plans to open in Germantown. She readily admits the Mount Airy store is much too small and there are not a lot of decent shopping options in Germantown, aside from a larger chain grocer and dollar stores. She’s excited for the potential increased membership that the Germantown store will usher in.
“It’s going to be a great footprint in the community.”
General Manager Jon Roesser says that getting the Germantown store up and running by 2024 is priority number one for the immediate future of Weavers Way, but surviving another 50 years will take more than a new storefront. “We’re gonna have to continue to really lean into the things that differentiate us from all the other grocery stores that are out there,” he says. “Being the ultimate local source for locally grown and produced food, and our cooperative business model as an alternative to the traditional, for-profit, capitalist model.”
