I’m writing, as promised, to let you know that we have just completed the transfer of York Supplies to the Society. This means that from today we now own and operate the business.
This could not have been achieved without your generous financial support and also the work of the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it happen. Everyone involved in the many aspects of the transfer process is now exhaling and just taking a moment!
Under the theme “Invest in women: Accelerate progress”, the 2024 International Women’s Day focuses on the need to provide the necessary and appropriate resources to ensure the success of gender equality policies and measures. It also stresses the importance of expenditure with gender focus, so that it truly mitigates gender inequalities.
I remember Wisconsin carpenter Tom Crofton trying years ago to convince his local officers to create a worker cooperative to build affordable housing. Housing was an urgent need, he argued—and the union had the skills, the labor power, the organization, and the financial resources to do it. But the officers wouldn’t even consider the idea.
The USFWC applauds Representative Ro Khanna (CA) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (NY) on the introduction of the National Worker Cooperative Development and Support Act, which aims to promote and expand worker-owned cooperative businesses in the United States by endowing the Small Business Administration (SBA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Labor (DOL) with responsibilities and authorities to implement programs and initiatives to support worker co-ops.
Internal growth is not an absolute and universal imperative for entities in the SSE. There is an appropriate size for every market and every business model. Internal upsizing may sometimes be needed, as is the case with many small worker cooperatives or large supply cooperatives (energy, telecommunications, credit, etc.), while in other instances it is merely an option, and an often dangerous one at that.
With an eye towards the International Year of Cooperatives in 2025, ICA is launching a "Meet and Greet" campaign to strengthen the voice of the global cooperative movement. For the last two centuries, the cooperative identity has offered tangible solutions for fighting climate change, reducing poverty, creating equal opportunities for all, and promoting positive peace in times of conflict.
The fire spread from the neighboring land and took out the kilns, the warehouse and all the woodworking spaces (called ECW). It also spread to the conference site and destroyed the pavilion, the kitchen and all of the material storage up there. Miraculously, Oz (which is the spray varnish building that had burned some years back and had been replaced by a steel and concreate building) survived the blaze.
Growing up in Canada as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Andria Barrett was familiar with the Jamaican concept of “partner”. What she only learned later in life was that while it has sometimes been overlooked in Western histories of the co-operative movement, partner is just one name for a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), a type of co-operative that can be found in different cultures globally.
