What does cooperation look like on a city-wide scale? How can we make sure community members know their voices are not just heard - but acted upon?
Nia Evans and Cierra Peters explain the ways that the Boston Ujima Project gets results! We also hear about their roots, and the shoulders of activists they proudly stand upon.
The Gotham Center is a university-based research and education center, devoted to advancing scholarly and public understanding of New York City’s rich and living past. The organization was founded by Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, after his landmark work Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, co-authored with Edwin Burrows, won the Pulitzer. Our goal is to support independent and professional historical work examining the various forces and figures that have shaped life in the city, as well as New York’s contributions to the development of the nation and the world. We endeavor to make research on New York City history accessible through a variety of public-facing initiatives, such as our free lecture series and digital resources.
As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. In Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City, Robert Fogelson, one of the nation’s foremost urban historians, tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.
Despite explosive interest and investment into worker and community ownership – particularly through foundation and local government responses to economic renewal – there’s still a significant shortfall of advisors in the sector.
Barefoot provides existing practitioners with specialist training to gain skills, knowledge, and confidence to work as advisors to co-operative and community businesses in the UK.
Are you ready to join a new generation of advisors who are committed to democracy in the workplace and local communities?
Worker-owned cooperatives (WOC) are often positioned by their advocates as having many potential advantages and benefits for workers and communities. These range from the “economic”–cooperatives can create stable jobs and build wealth, to the social and political–WOC can democratize the economy; to the truly transformative–WOC can reorient how people want to live and be in the world.
Join NCBA CLUSA and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff on Thursday, February 16 to hear about new funding for co-ops through USDA’s Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). Find out whether your cooperative is eligible ahead of the March 31 application deadline.
Chris Gilbert teaches Marxist political economy at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. His upcoming book, Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project, will be published by Monthly Review Press in 2023.
Gilbert and Pascual Marquina are creators of the Marxist educational program Escuela de Cuadros, broadcast on Venezuelan public television.
Cira Pascual Marquina is Political Science professor at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas and a writer and editor for PI Wire partner Venezuelanalysis.com.
What makes communes and their advances so important? To explain their significance, one has to appeal to something that is not immediately visible: social relations and especially relations of production.
These maps show forest cover in Kābhrepalāñchok (Kabhre Palanchok) and Sindhupālchok (Sindhu Palchok), districts in the Bagmati Province east of Kathmandu.
Further afield in Saskatchewan, Canada, Crocus Co-operative was established in 1982 by community members who were seeking peer support after receiving psychiatric care. Starting with simple meetings at home, Crocus now runs a space which hosts around 75 people a day. Everyone who accesses the space becomes a lifetime member of the co-op and the board is made up of 51% co-op members.
Entrepatios, a cohousing building in Madrid, is now home to 17 families and boasts the title of the first zero carbon footprint housing cooperative in the city.
The decline of Twitter and the rise of Mastodon raise key questions for people in the tech world: how should social media and other tech be owned and governed? Who should control the data and moderate the content? Who maintains the software and minds the servers? Who pays? Who benefits?
Cecosesola was established in Barquisimeto, capital of the State of Lara, in the central western region of Venezuela, as a cooperative integration organization on December 17, 1967. It is a meeting place where more than 50 community organizations are active, integrated in a network of production of goods and services that brings together more than 23,000 members from the popular sectors. Our raison d'être lies in a transformative educational process based on equity, mutual support and responsibility.
Cecosesola is established in Barquisimeto, capital of the state of Lara, located in the central-western region of Venezuela, as a cooperative integration organization that has been established since 1967. It is a meeting space where we make active life of more than 50 organizations, integrated into a network for the production of goods and services that brings together more than 20,000 associates from popular sectors. Through this network, we develop a wide variety of activities such as: agricultural production, small-scale agro-industrial production, funeral services, transportation, health services, financial services, mutual aid funds, distribution of foods and household items. We are made up of about 1,300 associated workers who manage daily activities through participation that is open to everyone, without hierarchical positions.
