Jared Knepper

View Jared's resume here: 

Why would you like to serve on the City Market Board? What excites you about becoming a Board Member?

After graduating from Champlain College just this past spring and choosing to make a more permanent home for myself here in Burlington, I am eager to engage with my local community in new and unique ways that leverage the relationships and the investment in this space and in its people that have developed through my collegiate years. 

I have drawn a great deal of joy from my prior experiences in executive boards and steering committees, and I think that these venues are excellent vehicles to collaboratively exercise voice, mind, and agency for the sake of public benefit. I trust too that my nearness to the student population here in Burlington will provide a useful perspective for the board’s work.

City Market has been a focal setting for much of my life here in Burlington and has nourished me with many a chicken pesto sandwich, with the smell of freshly cut pines each winter, and with serendipitous reunions with good pals. I am thankful for the ways it supports local makers and supplies our community with good food—food that sits well with the conscience and tastes truly fantastic—and I want to more directly support its sustenance and its evolution.

Please describe any professional skills you have that will help you to be an effective Board Member. How would you help the Board to balance the business needs of a $50 million business with the need to meet our Global Ends as a community-owned cooperative?

Through four years of business studies at Champlain College, from which I emerged as the valedictorian of the Stiller School of Business, I accumulated a great collection of business savvy that has enabled me to interpret data, ask insightful questions, discern themes and areas of especial opportunity, and iteratively develop assets and solutions in roles of employment and in my life at large. My mind by default gravitates towards strategy—long-term visions and the individual components required to actualize these visions—and I genuinely enjoy the process of building small sparks into raging bonfires of success and vitality. I listen carefully and thoughtfully, and I am willing to engage challenges with optimism and determination. Additionally, prior to my application to serve on the co-op’s board, I have visited three of its meetings, consecutively, for the purpose of familiarizing myself with its process and function more deeply and wholly. For all the spaces in which I lack knowledge and exposure, I am willing and keen to learn.

Describe your prior involvement with community organizations and/or cooperatives. What did you learn from these experiences?

My experience with cooperatives is minimal; I have merely been a member-owner at City Market, though for three of the four years for which I have been a resident of Burlington. With community organizations, however, my involvement has been significantly more robust—in my workplace now at Generator, where I directly and frequently liaise with our board and with our sponsors, donors, and partners to sustain community programs; during my studies at Champlain through the College Council where, as a student representative, I worked alongside staff, faculty, and administration to address the school’s greatest upcoming opportunities and challenges; with key players in a change movement both local and global through my role as a steering committee member for the World Positive Education Accelerator and for Champlain College’s resulting local effort, New Vision; and with both the Pride Center of Vermont and the Intervale Center through instances of volunteering.

I am amply aware that the efficacy of these organizations relies upon the engagement of their members, upon the actualization of democracy. I am also aware that these groups achieve greatest successes when their members are diverse, representing various interests, perspectives, and experiences and mutually valuing those shared by their peers.

What opportunities and challenges do you see in the future of City Market?

City Market has established itself as an integral presence and force in our local community, and I believe its greatest opportunity is to engage more deeply and learn in the process—to learn the needs of distinct community sectors and extend efforts to adequately meet those needs, to learn how equity can exist more centrally in its work, and to learn how its impacts can be amplified for the benefit of many. The lingering challenge after the great undertaking of expansion into Burlington’s South End is, of course, pursuit of profitability. As we continue to pursue profitability, we must choose to sacrifice certain opportunities in pursuit of other, minding both our opportunity costs and our concrete financial data to remain fiscally responsible to our employees and our member-owners.