This story on the FCCM was published recently in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. “Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market looks to take over Foodland building,” by Rena Delbridge, was published Monday, July 13:

It’s dark and cool inside the old Foodland building at the end of Lacy Street.

And it’s a bit of a mess, scattered with the behind-the-scenes mechanisms that served grocery shoppers.

But on Sunday, organizers of a work day to bring a community market to life there saw potential.

“We need to think about how we’re going to reduce the whole transportation factor in food,” interim board chair Rob Leach said. “We need to be locally self-sufficient. If you’re going to wait for government to solve these problems, it’s going to be a long, long wait. We need to do it locally, and we need to do it for ourselves.”

By April, organizer Mary Christensen hopes for a bright, bustling business, with a stream of shoppers seeking locally produced meats and produce with a bend toward organics.

This article resulted in a huge increase in the number of visits to the website and the blog, as well as numerous comments and a letter to the editor which also garnered quite a few comments.