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This week we are joined by David Cobb, Lydia Lopez, Jyoung Carolyn Park, Kali Akuno, and Petula Hanley to hear about how to use/influence public policy advance individual policies as part of a coherent strategy to democratize the entire economy.

Equal Care Coop and Clapton Commons are mapping a local landscape of care and support in Clapton Common, Upper Clapton. Using KUMU, a powerful system mapping platform, we are creating an interactive map that makes the often invisible grassroots networks of care and support more visible and accessible to people giving and receiving care.

Groupmuse was founded in 2013 as a platform that organizes house concerts in the United States, and converted to a worker-owned cooperative in 2020.

At the June 2023 meeting of the USFWC's Union Co-ops Council, Jonny Sopotiuk presented on the Union Cooperative Initiative (UCI), an exciting project out of Vancouver, BC founded in 2021. Jonny shares about the history of the UCI, its co-ops and prospects, their strategies, and how the union co-op model is proving successful.

Using text-as-data techniques, we apply the dictionary to a 15-year sample of credit union (a type of co-operative) and bank (IOFs) annual report texts. The resulting model ranks credit unions and banks on a co-op versus IOF firm scale and identifies credit unions that may be at risk of losing their identity because of their use of IOF language.

Meet the Black women organizers defying anti-Blackness to build a Canadian federation of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations.

The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite.

An online panel facilitated by co-op researcher-practitioner Emi Do that brings together presenters from several such projects: CoTech, Exit to Community Collective, Platform Cooperativism Consortium, SPACE4, Start.coop, UnFound Accelerator, and Union Cooperative Initiative. These projects advance democratic business formation and co-op theory-building, and they offer valuable lessons on the promises and challenges of accelerating worker ownership today.

Having successfully fought for regulatory reform for all taxi workers in the past and facing the realities of a shrinking taxi industry in San Diego, UTWSD, in its mission of pursuing taxi worker well being, has turned to a vision of promoting economic democracy through cooperative means.

This country needs more affordable homeownership options. And more communities are looking to the long-established Limited Equity Cooperative (LEC) and Community Land Trust (CLT) models to provide a permanently affordable way to provide homes for low and moderate-income individuals and families. But how do these models work to provide housing ownership and stability? Who controls the decision-making, and how do you get them financed and developed?