Name: Amanda Hofer
City of residence: Fort Collins
Occupation: Realtor with Home Love Colorado, board chair for the Fort Collins Food Co-Op
How long have you lived here in Northern Colorado?
It’ll be 22 years in May. I moved here from Northern Montana. I live on the west side of town and have been pretty much here the entire time. This is only the second place I’ve ever lived. It’s a great place to land.
What are your key responsibilities as board chair for the Fort Collins Food Co-Op?
Right now, with the sale of our building on 250 E. Mountain Ave. and the purchase of this location here, 1100 W. Mountain Ave., I’m definitely acting as a project manager with a lot of things. We have a lot of tradespeople who are coming in to help us fix this place up. We just hired a GM, and we had 55 applicants. Vetting through all of those was a bit of a project, and [we wanted to make sure we were] putting good governance in place. The Food Co-Op has been around since 1972, so it’s been a staple in the community, and there have been a lot of ebbs and flows over the years. Really what we’re excited about with this new location is to get it into a more stable business model.
What excites you most about the Food Co-Op moving to a bigger location?
I’m really excited that the City of Fort Collins is going to have a small, member-owned grocery store that it’s really worthy of. I think that this town can support something like that. There are a lot of people who care a lot about trying to recirculate more of their consumer dollars into the community. Something that most people who get involved in co-op work really care about is how cooperatives as a whole can contribute to economic resilience within a town. That is the thing that I’m most excited about. Everyone needs to eat. We have to do it multiple times a day. This is a really great place to get something that you need, and also to support and strengthen your local community. It’s member-owned, which basically means that, in a perfect world, if you own a share, which is just a lifetime membership, you potentially would be able to start paying out dividends and things like that. We have to get to the point where we can do that, and we’re really looking forward to getting there someday.
Moving a grocery store is no joke. Thankfully we have such an awesome new GM who has a lot of energy and expertise and is an amazing leader. His name is Manasseh Brockus. We think our opening day is going to be Feb. 7; we’re starting to tell some of our member owners who come into the store that that’s our goal, and we’re going to work in the direction of that. There are a lot of things that we still need to do to get that done. We’re going to do our best.
How has the transition felt so far?
I’ve been hitting it really hard with my board work for 18 months straight. There were periods of crazy unknowns, and now we know and get to be excited and tell people about it. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, it feels like you’re not making progress, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “check, check, check.” The ball is rolling down the road, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, now we’re rolling. We can do this now.” That’s what it’s been like. I look forward to scaling back just a little bit, but not too much.
There was a time when I was definitely committing 40 hours a week to this, which it needed at the time. There were so many things that were crucial that needed to get done in a really timely manner that there needed to be someone at the helm taking action and keeping things moving along.
What do you do for work outside of the Food Co-Op?
Right now, I have been focusing a lot more of my time on the Co-Op. I’ve been doing real estate in Northern Colorado for 12 or 13 years, so I have a really established book of business. I’m an empty nester as of recently, so I really wanted to dive into giving back to the community somehow. That’s how I found the Food Co-Op. It’s consumed my life for the last 18 months.
How else are you and your family involved in the community?
My husband owns a recording studio in town. We’re on the west side; pretty much any local musician you know has been to Stout Studios and recorded music there. My husband and I are both in the music scene. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, so he has played for a lot of bands. I’ve had anywhere from a five- to seven-piece funk band in town for quite a while, and I have a smaller trio-type thing. The band is Colony Funk. We’ll definitely be at FoCoMX again this year, and as far as booking gigs in the summer, we play a lot in the mountain towns.
What do you love most about living in Fort Collins?
I really love the proximity to the outdoors. My husband and I are super into doing outdoorsy things. During river season, I’m on the Poudre four or five days a week. I started skiing as an adult, so I’m not the most beautiful skier in the world, but we do ski a fair amount. We live really close to the foothills, so we love the trails and mountain biking and things like that. It’s been a great place to raise my son.
It’s a great city that checks so many boxes. The Front Range is a really mild climate. The small businesses in town—and CSU having people in academia who are really passionate about sustainability and the ag school and things like that—mean there are a lot of really cool people in this town. I think it attracts a certain type of person.
If you had a friend or family member visiting Fort Collins for the weekend, what are some things you would take them to do?
I’m a homebody, but I love to be in the canyon. My perfect day is waking up and getting on the river in the summer and literally spending the entire day in the canyon on the river. I do stand-up whitewater paddleboarding. It’s definitely my favorite sport and my favorite thing to do. I can be at the takeout in 20 minutes from my house.
Do you have any plans for Valentine’s Day? Or is there a loved one you’d like to shout out?
My husband is full time in the music industry, so he works a lot of holidays, evenings and weekends. Our idea of the perfect night is doing absolutely nothing and staying home. I would have to shout out my husband, Darren, because he’s been very supportive of me diving into this role that I’ve taken on for the Food Co-Op. Genuinely, I would not have been able to immerse myself as much as I have if it weren’t for his support.
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