Croissants and roses: The May Day Cafe reopens as a worker cooperative
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A handful of people mill around the May Day Cafe’s kitchen, a longtime community hub in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis.
The cafe side was temporarily closed. Sunny Draves-Kellerman is new to the staff as a worker-owner.
“But I’ve been a lifelong patron since I was five or six when it first opened. I just grew up a couple blocks away,” Draves-Kellerman says. “Just really excited to give back to the community that made me who I am.”
Draves-Kellerman is one of five worker-owners of the new May Day Cafe Workers Cooperative, which opened Friday, Baker Cassandra Hendricks is another.
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“It’s been totally bananas, but really empowering and exciting to think about being the newest stewards of this place,” Hendricks says. “It’s really not just like any cafe.”
The cafe served coffee and housemade pastries — including fan favorite croissants and M&M cookies — for three decades before briefly closing this winter.
“It’s going to be the same cafe that people have known and loved for three decades, but now it’s going to be owned and managed by people who work here,” says worker-owner and barista Mira Klein.
Klein says they are tapping into the building’s roots: Before it was May Day, it was a cooperative grocery store.
In the ‘90s, Klein adds, Mala Vujnovich purchased the building and opened May Day, which in turn was purchased in 2003 by employee and baker Andy Lunning. In 2023, Lunning decided to sell. Since then, Klein says the workers and people in the neighborhood have been organizing.
“It felt like a real opportunity to experiment with this model that has worked so well, both in other places in the United States and around the world,” Klein says. “We’ve gotten a lot of support to explore what that would look like.”
Klein says they sought advice from other cooperatives in the Twin Cities, including Happy Earth Cleaning, Seward Cafe, Hard Times Cafe and Matchbox Coffeeshop, as well as the Curbside Compost Cooperative in Northfield, Minn. And, there’s another cooperative, City Blocks Quilt Shop, just down the block from May Day.
“There’s a really rich cooperative history in Minneapolis and Minnesota, so that’s also been really interesting and important to tap into,” Klein says.
During a yearlong fundraising campaign, the worker cooperative raised more than $100,000, “mostly from small donors,” says Klein. In January, the Minneapolis City Council awarded May Day a $130,000 Great Streets Loan.
“Let’s keep this in the hands of community while building power for workers,” Council member Jason Chavez posted Jan. 16 on social media about the grant to May Day.
Klein says the worker cooperative closed on the sale of the business and building at the end of January. The only change to the cafe, for now, is that the cafe will open at 7 a.m. instead of 7:30. The cafe will continue to be a community hub, Klein says.
“When we think about climate, when we think about capitalism and how people are going to survive in this world, as so many of these systems continue to deteriorate, to be part of a project that’s building something that I think is actually going to help hold ourselves up in this unfolding reality feels both essential and life-giving,” Klein says.
