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This spring marked the launch of a technical services co-operative led by four of the province’s most prominent tribal councils, with the help of Saskatoon-based organization Co-operatives First.

The Saskatchewan First Nations Technical Services Cooperative Ltd., which provides engineering, water treatment and housing inspection services to First Nations’ housing programs, launched in March with tribal councils and individual First Nations as the shareholders.

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Neighborhood parliaments in India. The two solutions to powerlessness and selfishness are: smallification and neighborhoodization.

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In the late 90s, Joe Carter, Director of Education for Onion Lake First Nation, recognized First Nations had similar financial services needs to their non-Indigenous counterparts, but those needs weren’t being met in the same way. He saw an opportunity and went to work.

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How did you get into this work?

Perhaps we all agree the current economic system is the problem. This is, of course, a generalisation which could be endlessly unpicked and elaborated. But if we’re concerned about global warming, biospheric damage, inequality, etc, the globe-sized elephant in the room, so to speak, is the dominant economic system powered by fossil fuels and predicated on endless consumption and growth. It’s efficiency-oriented and centralising, concentrating ever greater economic and political power in the hands of oligarchs and autocrats, which means change will not come easy.

Since 2008, ROC USA and its affiliates have helped over 130 parks to go coop, building on more than two decades of similar conversions in New Hampshire, a pioneer in cooperative mobile housing. Taken together, the total number of mobile homes put under coop ownership is 14,559. None of the coops has defaulted on its loans or reverted to outside ownership.

The tools and strategies of critical pedagogy and popular education models speak to me as a kind of community-envisioned and enacted social innovation and one which I believe can be employed to move forward developments within what is being called the solidarity economy, particularly as it plays out in the local food system here in New Orleans.