Worker Co-ops in Argentina: 10-year Update

In July 2022, Kaiser Permanente awarded Denver’s Center for Community Wealth Building (CCWB) $360,000 for a three-year initiative to launch six to nine new cooperatives in Denver and the neighboring city of Aurora. CCWB is using cooperative development as an economic development strategy for low-income and underserved communities at risk of displacement resulting from gentrification. Worker cooperatives stabilize jobs and income for those who might otherwise be displaced while also helping to keep small businesses, the heart of these communities, alive.

Kaiser Permanente has been partnering with CCWB for several years to improve health in the metro Denver area by investing in the economic well-being of underserved neighborhoods.

“This investment directly contributes to Kaiser Permanente’s goal to help underrepresented communities improve financial security, reduce debt, and build wealth,” Ellen Weaver, director of Community Health and Engagement said. “Inclusive economic opportunity and growth are critical to both individual and community health.”

Read the rest at Fifty by Fifty

This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change.

Read the full issue at International Journal for the Commons

Go to the GEO front page