Alleviate the Financial Burden on New Moon's Workers

To our dear community members,

The collective of workers who make up the New Moon Cooperative Cafe is saddened to announce that we will be closing our doors on December 16th, 2024. New Moon has been a community staple for over 20 years, when it transitioned into a cooperative in 2013, workers and community members put their brains and hardworking hands together to open a beautiful staple of art, music, food, and worker self-determination.

In the first 6 years of its existence, New Moon Co-op was able to pay off its purchase loan of $100,000 in just 5 years, conversations around expansion were happening, several members of the cooperative helped start up the Le Voyeur Co-op. The cooperative movement in Olympia seemed explosive, and it felt unstoppable. This all felt true leading into 2020, and then the COVID pandemic hit the entire planet.

New Moon has struggled to recover since then, barely making ends meet. It was just able to pay its vendors, labor, and rent, but food cost inflation, plus added forms of taxation towards small businesses in the state of Washington, brought our break-even to unsustainable levels.

We were financially assisted through Winter 2023-2024 through GoFundMe and government-assistance loans, and we able to run on our own throughout Spring and Summer of 2024, but business dropped dramatically starting Fall. We tried our best to change our business practices towards more cost-effectiveness and consistency, but costs such as maintenance costs, taxation, labor, and food costs, kept going up.

It is with the heavy hearts of more than 12 collective members that we need to announce our inability to keep holding on to this space.

New Moon Cooperative Cafe is run by a collective made up of queer, low-income workers, who have been served a heavy operational plate. While we believe there’s a collective out there that could keep this place running, it has become evident after a year barely holding on to ourselves, that it’s not us. So, we need to step back from this burden and ask out community with help for that.

Currently, our financial burdens are the most concerning, and we’ll need assistance dealing with them for the long run, even past our closing. Our taxes, rent, and unpaid work has racked up a burden of over $20,000 dollars. We hope to raise money through a variety of avenues, so we’re asking those who see our GoFundMe to help with a large chunk of it, but not all.

Where is the money going?

• Paying contingent members and worker owners for their work these past few weeks.

• Paying off rent and any fees incurred for late payment in order to leave in good standing.

• Paying off our state tax burden.

• Closing vendor accounts.

We understand that, as a business, we should have seen this coming and that asking for money outside the service we provide to be something looked as as shameful. Please understand, we are human beings who need help from a wider community. Running a business properly, all while cooking, dishing, and serving food to our customers, has been almost impossible in a city facing gentrification and hostile to the workers who have helped its community for so long.

We need your help, and it’s hard to ask for, but we need it desperately at this time.