Help Keep Our Worker Owned Cafe Open This Winter

New Moon Cooperative Cafe, a worker owned diner and community event space running in Olympia, WA for 10 years now, is struggling to keep the doors open. We need your help to raise $35,000 to cover up to $21,000 in essential repairs and keep our workers employed through the winter months.

WHO ARE WE?

Established in 2013, New Moon Cooperative Cafe (NMCC) is a worker owned and operated breakfast diner in Olympia, Washington. We’ve been serving up delicious, accessible food, and community for over 10 years. Having been around for 15 years previously, our cooperative purchased The New Moon Cafe in 2013, after food workers in town and former collective members of The Evergreen State College’s student-run Flaming Eggplant Cafe got together, with the mission of creating a sustainable and fair workplace for food workers around town.

We’ve focused on providing options for customers of all dietary needs. While we do serve plenty of non-vegan breakfast, we make strong efforts in offering vegan and gluten-free options of everybody’s favorites like pancakes, biscuits, and eggs benedict. We’ve worked hard over the years to sustainably source ethically farmed and organic ingredients through our relationships with our local food cooperative and farmers, and pour fair-trade coffee obtained through Equal Exchange, a fellow worker owned cooperative. We also provide free meals to those in need through our customer supported pay-it-forward program, which has been successfully run for over 4 years now.

Aside from our delicious food, we provide a safe community event and art space for the many subcultures that exist in Olympia. When you enter our cafe, you’ll usually be welcomed by the sight of local art up on the walls, showcasing the beautiful minds in this town. We’ve held poetry nights, activist forums, all sort of music shows, clothing and plant swaps, and fundraising events at no cost or commission to anybody who needs it.

NMCC’s mission has always been to provide stable, fulfilling, and secure work for us, its workers. Our cafe is run by and for the people who work here, and we are committed to empowering a collective made up of working class or otherwise disadvantaged food workers everywhere, with a workplace that supports their needs, and those of their loved ones and communities.

WHAT DO WE NEED?

Unfortunately, NMCC is currently facing a number of challenges on top of sharply rising food cost. Since before the pandemic, businesses and workers like ours have been pushed out of town with rising cost-of-living and gentrification, taking away some of our biggest avenues of support. Precious Olympia staples such as fellow cooperative Burial Grounds Coffee Collective and King Solomon’s Reef have gone down in the madness. Many other pillars of Olympia’s downtown face closure today, threatening not only the identity of Olympia, but the workers who keep each one of these places running.

We have over $20,000 in essential repairs that need to be made, and the upcoming winter months are typically our slowest time of year. This means that we are at risk of having to close our doors unless we can get some help from everybody around us.

We are asking for your help to raise $35,000 to cover the following expenses:

• $21,000 (or 60%) will go towards a $15,000 - $20,000 leaking roof repair, and whatever is left over being spent on a new reach-in refrigerator as well as any other necessary kitchen equipment needs.

• $13,000 (or 37%) would go to supplementing our payroll expenses, which have dipped substantially due to cut-backs arising from our precarious financial situation. We would still need to keep costs under control over the winter months, but your donations would help ease our minds as we work on restructuring our collective and implementing new sustainable cooperative business practices.

• $1,000 (or 3%) will go to building an effective marketing strategy to keep us running for the long haul.

We will be sending out periodic updates on our spending and how our collective is learning and growing through your donations.

By donating to NMCC, you are helping to keep a worker owned cooperative restaurant open that can help provide a safe and fair workplace for displaced workers around town, and a D.I.Y. community space where people from all walks of life can come together to enjoy each other's company.

Any donation, no matter how small, would make a big difference.

Thank you for your support!