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In rural central Missouri, where even Walmart hasn’t ventured, an electric distribution cooperative with less than 50 staffers and 7,500 members is about to change the future for the communities it serves.

Gascosage Electric Cooperative has won more than $15 million in federal and state funds to deploy gigabit broadband.

But how did this small co-op, which will hire its first IT administrator this year, manage to enter the fast-paced, highly competitive world of retail internet?

Major assistance from its generation and transmission cooperative.

Australia’s federal government is turning to the co-op and mutuals sector to help improve the quality and diversity of services provided to older Australians, people living with disability and veterans.

The government has allocated AU$6.9m in the 2022/23 budget to the Co-operative and Mutual Enterprises (CME) Support Program – a national drive to advise communities on how to start new co-operatives in elderly care and other care sectors, and to help existing co-operatives to grow.

Five years ago, the only full-service grocery store in the Walnut Hills neighborhood in Cincinnati closed. 

Principle 5, the Sheffield-based co-operative resource centre, has published the latest in its series of re-discovered pamphlets from the history of the co-operative movement, called The Future of Co-operation, originally written in 1927 by Alice Honora Enfield.

Since Maine passed solar-friendly legislation in 2019, there has been a boom of mostly out-of-state corporations setting up massive solar arrays and signing up subscribers into community solar programs.

The Japanese government encouraged the development of cooperatives beginning in the early twentieth century. At times, the state closely controlled cooperatives, particularly in agriculture, in order to ensure food supplies during wartime. Even today, questions remain about the autonomy of the cooperative sector at large, given the direct involvement of the state in the economy and many civil society activities. Nevertheless, the organizing and advocacy of the cooperative societies themselves have given them influence over public policy.

I’m thrilled to announce that MSPP has closed on our second acquisition: Denver Ted’s Cheesesteaks in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood!

For co-founder James Rasza, Democracy Brewing was always going to be a worker-owned cooperative. He’d held low-wage service jobs earlier in his life and spent years in labor and community organizing, but had grown disillusioned with the lack of practical, actionable, alternative paths forward.

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OrganaGardens started as an LLC, where founders Becky Elder and Brian Fritz consistently worked alongside other gardeners who held their own LLCs. “This model is not like a typical business structure, so the founders started researching what other options look like,” said Rachel Ribich, Lead Gardener at OrganaGardens. “Luckily, the State of Colorado educates around employee ownership and cooperative structures, so the founders started moving in that direction.” 

Co-operatives are built on stories. Come share yours at this year's Institute, focusing on Justice, Reconciliation & Co-operative Education!

Register for the Institute on Eventbrite

Haitian agriculturalists build solidarity by working and socializing together. In towns such as Camp-Perrin on the southern Tiburon Peninsula, groups of poor farmers called kòltiz complete periodic wage labor throughout the year to set aside enough money to purchase a cow in December.