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June, 1973: Address to the MSU Student Housing Corporation BoardOfDirectors

The end of two years of existence is a good time to reflect for a moment on where we've been and where we are going. Two years ago we began the Student Housing Corporation in a blaze of idealism, six houses ranging in ideology from Eleutheria to Elsworth, 175 people charging off to do battle with windmills. Our By-Laws were a hodge-podge of compromise and guesswork, and our budget was microscopic. Our office in Student Services was about the size of a closet, and if we needed an adding machine, we usually went over to Hedrick. Our first President quit after just a few weeks, and our Board meetings were as silent as Grant's Tomb. We've come a long way.

We put in long hours that first spring, often spending our nights in meetings and our weekends in the office. And we made plenty of mistakes -- more than I sometimes care to admit. Sometimes those mistakes stand out in my mind as the patches of quicksand that marked our path during the last two years. There was the HUD failure; the unused shower stall sometimes referred to as "Bozzo's Blunder;" the horrible mistake of hiring Bill Davis as Business Manager and the icy finger down my spine when I found out that he'd forgotten to pay the taxes. I never thought I'd be happy to fire someone.

But the tragedy that I remember most was not of our making, It came in the early hours of the morning less than a year ago, when I heard Phil's voice on the telephone saying, "Eleutheria is burning."

Few may remember, but we lost a second house just this last September, when we lost the lease on Evergreen Co-op at 558 Evergreen. The last two years have certainly had their share of sadness and frustration.

None the less, we have eight organizations today rather than 6, and we number 225 rather than 175. A small increase, perhaps, but it's a start. More significant is our increased ownership. Just a year ago, we held title to only Hedrick and Elsworth. Today we own Bower, Ulrey and Knight as well. The market value of our property is over $400,000 dollars, and our equity is nearly half of that value. If we do receive our proposed HUD funding, the market value of our holdings will nearly double.

At the same time, we've done a fair amount to stabilize the present cooperatives and improve our own internal functioning. Our Board meetings are no longer morgues, and we finally have functioning committees. The Pinecone is actually becoming a medium of communication rather than a curiosity, and a large number of our members have taken advantage of conferences and exchanges as a means of learning about co-ops in other places. ICC is back among the living organizations at MSU, and the spring term course on Consumer Cooperatives was filled after only 2 days of pre-enrollment. All but one of the houses are now using a standardized bookkeeping system and are beginning to make regular statements and monthly reports. Our $20 deposits have given us an adequate financial cushion for the first time, and our increased revenues actually make it possible to save a little money.

I think we've gone a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Perhaps we need some long range goals, and I'd like to suggest a few. For the next year, that we revise our financial procedures, set up depreciation reserves, reorganize our maintenance committee to make it more functional, hire an intern as an eventual replacement for me as Executive Secretary, strengthen our organization and continuity through the use of advisors, and at the very least replace one rental house with an owned house.

For the years after, I suggest that we must replace all of our rental houses with owned properties and make cooperative living an option in as many new houses as possible. We must increase our membership awareness and understanding of the cooperative movement of which they are a part, and begin to provide more services, either directly or indirectly for our membership. We must also increase our involvement with the community of which we are a part, and take an active part in molding the future of our East Lansing environment. And eventually, I believe, we must come to grips with the idea that we are different, we are an alternative economic system, and that co-ops may be the only real hope of the consumer to gain control of his or her own destiny. We have an edge on history, if only we can see it. Through cooperation, we can be more than the sum of our individual parts. Through cooperation, ultimately, we can have a hand in shaping our world. The SHC is a cooperative; we've made a start.

Jim Jones