Co-Op Owned by Formerly Incarcerated Women Embarks on Next Step, Thanks to Surprising Money Source

ChiFresh Kitchen’s worker-owners can see their future in the building. It’s a long, six-thousand-square-foot former corner grocery, with an arched roof and big front windows facing the corner of East 71st Street and MLK Drive, in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. ChiFresh Kitchen, a worker-owned commercial food services cooperative that launched just last May, bought it for $410,000 in December.