You’re invited to this workshop to explore how to make healthy shifts in your leadership and a set of exercises to repeat over time.
Growing is not necessarily about trying harder; sometimes you need to change the framework for how you make change and how you understand WHY you want to make change.
Join this workshop to dive into your personal growth to become the cooperative leader you want to be…with compassion.
Here’s the story: A few months ago workers of White Electric Coffee decided to form an independent union, CUPS (Collaborative Union of Providence Service-workers). On August 28th we asked the current owners of White Electric for voluntary recognition of our union and on August 30th they agreed. On September 8th we held a card check confirming staff support of our union, and CUPS was officially born! That same night we heard from the owners that they were listing the cafe for sale and would favor the option of transitioning to a worker owned + run cooperative business.
Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures is rooted in the groundwork of visionary abolitionists who fight to end policing, criminalization, and carceral logics and technologies in all their forms. It holds the central idea of abolition as a vision and a political strategy. Hope and a more just vision for the future lies within the powerful resistance and abolitionist work of communities of color here in the United States. Movement organizers respond to increasing levels of surveillance and state violence with incredible ingenuity and resilience.
Explore how worker and community power can be deepened through the daily practice of cooperation at work
In this course students will foster and expand their leadership and management skills that apply to working in cooperatives, non-hierarchical organizations and self-managed teams. A deep exploration of the principles of "democratic control" and "economic participation" will be applied in theory and practice.
In Cleveland, Ohio, (part of Cuyahoga County, another Big City county) the Little Africa Food Co-op formed after the police killing of an unarmed black man in the summer of 2016. When the coronavirus began ravaging Cleveland’s Black population in neighborhoods where food insecurity was already a crisis, Mikki Smith, vice president of the co-op board and outreach coordinator, was not going to sit back and wait for “someone” to take care of it.
Ken Lewis grew up on the island of Grenada, and witnessed the progressive aftermath of its 1979 revolution. “I remember the power of cooperatives, people getting land, turning places that were barren into productive places,” he says. That image stayed with him after he moved to New York City for grad school and started driving a taxi on the side.
Through the WhatsApp group, these store owners shared information and aligned on strategies together. They collectively decided, for instance, to close their stores at 8pm even after a curfew was lifted. Some of them met with Mayor Moran to advocate for their needs as essential workers.
There were hints that some store owners were looking to organize themselves into something more, some sort of structure that would allow them to sustainably support and uplift one another. So Emma reached out to PACA.
Here, in North-East Syria, widely known as Rojava, the new paradigm of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, Democratic Confederalism, proposed by Abdullah Öcalan, is being built up.
This week I spoke to Creston Davis, founder of the Global Center of Advanced Studies (@GCASCollege), the first cooperatively run college using their own ethereum-enabled token (called GCASY) that represents shares in the college that can be used for paying for tuition and other expenses.
Neibo is a mobile phone cooperative, launched in Brussels in October 2018, which has just offered its first subscriptions. According to Neibo, around 500 of its 2,300 members have taken up a subscription, which is a discreet but solid start to life among the big names. Neibo's services are currently in the testing phase, and the cooperative hopes to go beyond its members and attract 12,000 subscribers within 18 months.
Research has shown that worker cooperatives help to circumvent precarious labor conditions (Berry and Bell 2017), reduce income inequality (Jones Austin 2014), and counter economic marginalization (Gordon Nembhard 2014). From a historical viewpoint, the cooperative movement has mostly flourished in economically difficult times: after the Great Depression in 1929, during the years of high unemployment in the 1960s and 1970s, and most recently in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2008 (Gupta 2014; Jackall and Levin 1984; Pavlovskaya, Safri and Hudson 2016).
