In my final semester at Oberlin, I joined Harkness Co-op (Hark) for dining. This came after years of toying with the idea of being in a co-op, and always determining I didn’t have time, or the cooking and cleaning skill, to make it work.
Not familiar with the co-ops at Oberlin? Here is a great explanation of the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA), from my fellow blogger and a continuing OSCAn (what we call OSCA members) and Hark member, Ozzie. Ozzie’s piece shares a charming collection of uniquely Hark experiences and here I wanted to add my part to the love of this beautiful community and share what some of the pros and cons of being in a co-op at Oberlin might mean for you.
An Awescan Experience, or Not?
Consider First: The Time
There’s no way around it: Being in a co-op means working to do your part and taking time out of your week for each communal meal. As a busy college student, working the five hours per week of cooking and cleaning shifts can be tough to fit in. There are variations in how this could look. Some co-opers are accommodated for working fewer hours through “time aid” because they have outside jobs or are overloaded on credits. The type of work you do can also varies, with examples including working as the weekly granola maker or an accessibility coordinator for the co-op to fulfill your hours.
On the upside, however, all the time you spend working and eating in the co-op is helping you build bonds with your co-op community.
Second: The Timing
Speaking of busy schedules, some students, unfortunately, have consistent enough conflicts with co-op meal times that dining in one doesn’t make sense. Each co-op serves lunch at 12:20 and dinner at 6:20 daily, with Hark serving breakfast for all of OSCA at 8:20 on weekday mornings. The one exception to these times is Brown Bag Co-op, through which co-opers pick up ingredients and independently cook their meals.
If you have—for example—a sports practice at 6 pm every weekday evening, eating in a co-op could be rough. There is a system through which you can request “saveplates” up until twenty minutes before each meal so you’ll still get to eat. While this works great for one-off conflicts or a couple conflicts weekly, missing out on communal meals with too much consistency, in my opinion, substantially takes away from the co-op experience.
Even considering this, however, I know some co-opers who eat with the community at very few meals but still show up for their shifts and participate in the co-op in other ways, such as coming to parties and group hangouts in the lounges. For some, being part of a co-op community in this way could still be very beneficial.
Third: The Food
Dining in a co-op means you get your food from there and NOT from campus dining services.
“Is co-op food better?” people often ask. I’d say it depends—especially on the head cook for the meal—but personally I did like the taste of the co-op food better than AVI Fresh dining services on average. I was also glad to know that what I was eating was cooked with care by a fellow student and sourced from local, sustainable suppliers.
If you’re a picky eater, it might be tough only having one option for what to have for a meal as in a co-op, but if you truly can’t stand something, just like if you have an allergy, you can put that information on the co-op DR (dining restriction) chart and have alternatives made for you. If your restriction is being vegetarian, you’re in luck, as two of the six dining co-ops are wholly vegetarian, and the others trend that direction as well because it’s economical and environmentally friendly.
For me, I found the co-op food delicious. Eating it together with others was the very best point of bonding with my fellow Hark members.
Fourth: The Community
The community I’ve known from every co-op I’ve interacted with (which is all of them at least a little bit) has been tight-knit while also being welcoming, kind, and quirky in the best ways. I tried out my share of ways to engage with community at Oberlin, and loved many of them. I never found another community that could compare with the bonds of my co-op though. Through meal times, work times, and co-op parties and events, which are held on a fairly regular basis, you run into your fellow co-opers constantly, and have many charming exchanges.
The only real downside to this consideration is that your time is fairly monopolized by the co-op life. This can limit your ability to engage with other groups on campus and yet, for me, this, too, was worth it. There was no group of people other than OSCA which I would rather have committed myself to being with.
My Heart is in Hark(ness Co-op)
I believe I would have loved being in any co-op on campus. Harkness called out to me as a home when I first walked inside though. From the entryway, you could glimpse the lounge upstairs and the dining room down. The carpeted lounge is filled with couches and a piano, via which students often fill the space with music. The dining room downstairs is a wide-open space tiled in green and white. Both the lounge and dining room often have their furniture re-arranged to accommodate the wide variety of events Hark hosts. Every wall in the co-op is hung with the trappings of a community that is vibrant and full of, if you will, whimsy. There are posters advertising an eclectic bunch of student performances alongside those announcing co-op inside jokes. The very first thing you notice upon entering and even through the window outside is the massive, colorful, papier-mâché shark (“The Hark Shark”) that serves as our mascot.
Of the OSCA co-ops, Harkness is the largest—in Spring of 2026 we had 113 members—and is very central on campus. The spaces are multipurpose and home to more all-OSCA events than any other co-op. It’s no quiet hideaway for the introverted. I already knew when I walked in that it was a bold community too, with a history of such policies as blanket “anarchy” in the co-op. It is also currently the only co-op to allow full nudity in the halls and lounge of the housing space. And yet, for me, all these things made it seem perfect, and it turned out to be very much so.
Throughout my semester in Hark, I walked in our jelly fish parade on full-moon nights. I met up with friends in the dining room in the evenings for impromptu chats, sweet treats, and granola. I had my first experience wrestling in a kiddie pool of jello. I developed a deep respect the thoughtful and methodical process of discussion and consensus conducted to decide on each co-op policy. I became more comfortable with the co-operative way of respecting the needs of the community and yourself, stepping up or back to get shifts covered as needed.
Best of all, I chatted with my fellow co-opers at each meal about topics from how good the cream sauce on our lentils was, to our dreams for the wide-open future. Each day I was so glad to met by a multitude of Hark hellos and smiles. I truly felt I belonged there in a unique way, and would join again a hundred times over.
I send my love, thanks, and heart, out to my fellow members of Hark. I was so lucky to be a part of the community and I wish everyone still there the best for the future. I can only speak for my own co-op experience, but I hope it can stand as an exemplar to future Obies of how they might join and come to love the OSCA community too.
