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Small-investor crowdfunding for collective real estate ownership is a growing trend across the U.S., but until recently, this type of fundraising, especially for large purchases like real estate, was far more difficult.

As market economies become more expensive and predatory, Stephanie Rearick is showing that it’s entirely possible to meet people’s needs effectively through care and cooperation, through a kind of alternative social economy.

Fishing is Palmarito’s backnone, connecting nearly every household to the lake. Yet agriculture, hunting, and tourism also sustain the community, contributing to its resilience in hard times.

The Puerto Rico Social Solidarity Network is a platform that connects people and organizations to promote and foster the social solidarity economy. The network emerged after a series of economical disasters and from the coop and community development movements to influence economic transformation for a sustainable, integral, human development for the common good.

Unfortunately not everybody's experience of cooperatives is positive. For Elle, their time in co-operatives was both transformative, but also painful, marred by classism that often goes unnamed.

On the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, Palmarito is an Afro-Venezuelan community shaped by centuries of history, culture, and resilience. Its people carry forward traditions rooted in their African heritage and in the fishing trade. Central to Palmarito’s way of life is the socialist commune, a form of popular self-government that transforms everyday life and work into a shared project.

This webinar, moderated by Shelterforce's Miriam Axel-Lute, caps off our most recent Under the Lens series “Innovations in Community Ownership.” Learn about the power of Los Angeles’s Measure ULA, New York City’s take on a shared services model, cooperation between conservationists and affordable housing development in New York’s Hudson Valley, and more. Speakers: —Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of the New Economic Project and convener of NYC Community Land Initiative. —Roberto Garcia Ceballos, co-director of Fideicomiso Comuniatario Tierra Libre, and director of the LA Housing Training Hub. —Chris Brown, board vice president of Trillium Community Land Trust, and a member of Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation.

I reached out to David to talk about homes, ownership, and why rebuilding communities might be the last honest form of democracy left. 

Four videos celebrating the life and works of this year's Cooperative Hall of Fame inductees.

This article explores worker cooperatives’ possibilities and challenges of knowledge-making through constructive resistance within the capitalist market economy, based on qualitative material from five Swedish worker co-ops.