History
The first Oberlin co-op, Pyle Inn, opened in 1930 but due to poor funding, only existed sporadically. By 1949, however, students dissatisfied with the college's dining system chose to revive the concept of a cooperative food system. The Inter-Cooperative Council (ICC) was founded in conjunction between Pyle and the newly opened Grey Gables, with a mission to serve as an educational and social committee. By 1962, with the inception of Keep, the ICC became the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association. With three nodes in their network, OSCA became the largest student-run cooperative in American history.
OSCA flourished for another twenty years, until it underwent a critical financial crisis in 1982. OSCA was audited by the IRS and nearly lost its tax-exempt status. This setback caused a rift in the community and instigated the start of several major changes to the cooperative structure.
By 1989, the organization committed to practices of sustainability and environmentalism, purchasing local foods and cooking with more environmentally-friendly practices. In the spring of 2002, OSCA created the institution of COPAO, the Committee on Privilege and Oppression, which explores racial and socio-economic inequality within the cooperative system.
Read more about this topic: Oberlin Student Cooperative Association
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“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)