The status quo is that farmers sell their woodlots to middlemen or traders at farm gate as standing trees. Not every farmer is equipped with market price information. Farmers as individuals have less bargaining power when confronted with a middleman. This implies the need of a more transparent way of selling tree products, so as to create an incentive for tree growing in the long run.
Prof. Scholz said that over the past few years the institute had been busy developing an online co-op course and setting up a publishing house, and is conducting research into blockchain, data co-ops, and ways to fund and scale the movement. It has organised conferences and online chat sessions, and held meetings with the International Labour Organization, trade unions, policymakers and co-op leaders.
In blockchain circles, there is much enthusiasm for DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations. These are free-standing, self-organized groups of people who use blockchain tools to structure their members’ interactions and behave as “ownerless” organizations or institutions.
Situated in a tiny town near Nelson, BC, the Harrop-Procter Community Co-operative provides ecosystem-friendly forest management and lumber directly from their mill. They are also a community-owned co-operative with more than 170 members in the area.
If you’re joining a worker cooperative for the first time, building business skills is about a lot more than understanding balance sheets, profit margins, and your market. Certainly, these skills are important, and remain crucial for worker-owners to understand. Yet as new members join a co-op and move towards worker-ownership, it is also critical to build self-confidence, creativity, interpersonal skills, problem solving techniques, and a sense of ownership.
Employee efforts to take over an insolvent Quebec newspaper group are at risk of falling apart despite support from the Quebec government.
Desjardins Group has walked away from a project to support Groupe Capitales Medias, a move that has prompted union institutional investor the Solidarity Fund to question its own participation.
Read the rest at National Post
This month, Spanish activist Stacco Troncoso and his collaborators released the DisCO Manifesto (disco.coop), which proposes a new model for organizations that account for the care work that supports workers and their communities.
California Solar - A Worker Owned Co-operative, was voted Nevada County's best solar in 2016, 2017 & 2018.
Visit the California Solar website
I have started a simple platform cooperative to fund this sort of outreach, which works in the following way: - Members pay 1$/month to join. - They democratically request and prioritise articles and distribute the money to the members who have created content about coops to Wikipedia. - Members get a 20$ for writing their first article requested by the coop. I have donated 100$ to the fund to pay for the first 5 members for their first article. The group is organised through Loomio, a digital tool for group democratic decision making developed by a worker cooperative.
A few years ago I was sitting around an evening campfire at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, just jawing with a few of the folks on my volunteer crew when, for some forgotten reason, I mentioned the Mudsharks in the course of my rambling.
“What’s a Mudshark?” someone asked.
“The Mudsharks were a Hoedad crew,” I told them, thinking that would be explanation enough for anybody, until the next question hit me.
“What’s a Hoedad?”
