Our Clients
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Over the life our KDC we have worked with 156 community owned businesses or start-up ventures. Those businesses serve 42,695 members, employ 543 people which created 175 jobs and saved 88 jobs. We estimate the annual gross sales of our clients to be around $87,724,526 from the best of our knowledge. |
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The technical assistance metrics KDC has provided including 43 feasibility studies, 32 focus groups and member/consumer surveys and 17 business plans. KDC helped incorporate 36 businesses and assisted in policy and legal documents including the writing of 21 bylaws for our clients. These businesses represent many cooperative sectors: Agricultural Marketing, Food Cooperatives, Purchasing, Shared Services, Broadband, Energy/Utilities, and more.
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Start-up cooperative groups are our primary clients. Farmers, rural residents, rural organizations, food-processing firms, and consumers are positively impacted through the cooperative development efforts of KDC. The following graph shows the diversity by sector, showing that agriculture still is a large component of our clientele. Over the past several years we have seen an increase in food cooperative start-ups and a trend to exploration of the cooperative model in urban areas, which often strive towards the worker owner model.
In a typical year, KDC provides technical assistance to about 30 business, giving priority to qualified groups in economically distressed areas. This year, we have projects in five small communities whose poverty rates are twice the state average, while median income is half. Seventeen of 20 rural Pennsylvania counties where we have active projects have unemployment rates that exceed the state averages, in some cases by almost 50%. Sixteen of 20 also have poverty rates above the state norm, and all but one have median household income figures that lag behind those for the rest of the state.
