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Last month, the US Congress passed the Rural Act, protecting the tax exempt status of more than 900 electric co-ops across the country.

Recent law changes had meant electric co-ops would lose their tax-exemption status if they accepted government grants for disaster relief, broadband service and other programmes that benefit members.

The Rural Act, signed into law as part of a sweeping tax and spending package, was designed to remove this risk – which had threatened the survival of many of the not-for-profit co-ops.

Undergraduate students from UCLA's Chicanx Studies major teach us how worker co-ops can be a viable, democratic alternative to the gig economy.

It turns out, a shipping container can change a community.

During the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term “pod” to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who would turn to each other for support around violent, harmful and abusive experiences, whether as survivors, bystanders or people who have harmed.

Ampled, a small arts start-up founded by a group of musicians, designers, and software engineers, appears to be building an alternative way forward.

In 2008, Judy and Mike Schlecht, the owners of the Wimbledon Community Grocery, wanted to sell.

They couldn’t find any buyers, but the residents of the town didn’t want to lose their only grocery store. So some of them came together and formed a corporation, which sold shares of the store at $100 each, and raised enough to stay open.

Virtual Co-op Connections are FREE webinars that bring together people from co‑ops of all types to learn about a range of topics, and to share experience and learning through lively online events.

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In January 2020, the employees of Happy Earth Cleaning purchased and converted the successful, nine-year-old business to a worker cooperative.

Wells House in Bronzeville is one of four homes in the Qumbya Housing Cooperative on Chicago's South Side.

"Some people look at me like I'm from Mars when I tell them I live with 14 other people," said Scotty Hendricks.

Hendricks, a freelance writer, moved into Wells House two years ago when he moved to Chicago from Iowa. In Wells House each person pays a few hundred dollars for their room and a couple hundred dollars for food and utilities for the whole house.

The effort to incorporate democracy into socialist frameworks taught those engaged in the project that the same task applied to capitalism. Systemic differences had blinded the 20th century to some basic similarities between capitalism and conventional socialisms. One key similarity is the internal structure or organization of workplaces and the related nature of the relationship between workplaces and the state. In both systems — recognizing all their variations — workplaces are organized in a starkly undemocratic manner.

This online conference is a great opportunity to come together and learn about the challenges and successes of Affordable Cohousing. Because it’s online, there are none of the travel costs association with a conventional conference, and with no food to buy, we’ve been able to keep registration costs lower as well.

The Association of Cooperative Educators (ACE) is interested in receiving proposals for its 2020 Annual Institute, which will be held this year in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from June 10 to 12, 2020.

Sustainability and the Co-operative Difference. We are specifically interested in the following formats:

Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change.