Repost

In the heart of Victoria, British Columbia, a remarkable transformation story has been threaded by The Make House. What started as a 10-year-old sole proprietorship blossomed into a worker co-operative in December 2022.

Industrias del Orinoco, C.A. (Indorca) is a factory without bosses in the industrial city of Puerto Ordaz in Bolívar state, the home of Venezuela’s basic industries. Indorca’s workers carried out a heroic three-year struggle to gain control of the factory after the former owner brought it to a halt. Since 2015, when Venezuela’s Ministry of Labor extended a mandate giving the workers control over Indorca, the enterprise has been democratically managed by the women and men who produce here day in and day out.

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money?

Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard summarizes her work on solidarity economics and worker cooperatives.

As baby boomer business owners retire, their employees are taking ownership of their own futures.

A series of 6 videos from CWCF on how to develop a worker co-op.

Healthcare-based interventions addressing social needs such as food and housing generally fail to impact the upstream wealth and power inequities underlying those needs. However, a small number of US healthcare organizations have begun addressing these upstream inequities by partnering with community wealth building initiatives. These initiatives include community land trusts, resident-owned communities, and worker cooperatives, which provide local residents ownership and control over their housing and workplaces. While these partnerships represent a novel, upstream approach to the social determinants of health, no research has yet evaluated them.

Marketing /visibility - including Marketing the Worker Co-op Advantage Marketing /visibility - including Marketing the Worker Co-op Advantage

Digital solidarity and the sharing economy may seem like natural companions. To be sure, the sharing economy with its melding of community and commerce has the potential to be a key contributor to digital solidarity in developing economies.

This is a story of how the makers who create a living off their hard-earned skills, banded together to challenge this dominant business ethic, and about the cooperative they built that’s just now getting off the ground. It is a venture that aims to grow at the speed of trust to serve the makers, the customers, and the staff who run it.