In recognition of National Dairy Month, Organic Valley has announced an ambitious plan to onboard more than 100 small organic family farms into its cooperative by the end of 2024. The cooperative, already the largest organic farmer-owned entity in the United States, has steadily increased its membership, reflecting its ongoing commitment to supporting and preserving small organic farms.
It was 1982, the year Britain had, for the first time in its history, become an oil exporter, and the Findhorn group had announced they wanted to create a ‘Planetary Village’, a living example of how people could make sustainable use of the environment around them in an harmonious existence with nature and each other.
This book represents an idea that has been put into practice and a gamble that has paid off. It is the result of an exchange of ideas that took place between Professor Monni and me when I was President of the Italian Co-operative Alliance and it uses the ‘traditional’ structure of a dictionary to present a series of ‘keywords’, with the aim of helping us to gain a greater understanding of co-operative enterprises.
This assessment underscores the significant yet undervalued contribution of community care in Colombia, where unpaid domestic and care work, primarily undertaken by women, accounts for 21.7% of the GDP. The National Development Plan 2022-2026 has introduced the National Care System and the Ministry of Equality and Equity to address these issues.
A lot of folks, first of all, when they do think of mutual aid, right, what do they think of? They think of just coming out to help be their brother’s and sister’s keeper, which ain’t nothing wrong with that. That’s a good thing, we encourage people to get involved.
But in doing that, you understand me, we all got limits. There’s only so much that you can give out, because the resources are going to run out. Unless you got a well that never runs dry.
On a recent rainy Saturday morning, eight organizers from All Power Books, a volunteer-run bookstore cooperative, gathered at the Church of Christ to distribute the leftover produce they had procured from a food bank. The day’s haul was unusually large: Crates of mini potatoes, frozen meat, green beans, apples and nectarines were stacked alongside snacks like fried spring rolls and Sour Patch Kids.
Today, people around the US are commemorating Juneteenth. Though advocating for Juneteenth to be more broadly revered in mainstream culture has been an arduous struggle undertaken by luminaries like activist and retired educator Opal Lee, since 1865, Juneteenth has been celebrated in the Black American community as a milestone in the abolition of chattel slavery and as an acknowledgement that freedom was further delayed for Africans who were enslaved in Texas.
[Editor's note: this piece was published in Spring of 2022.]
On a biweekly basis, you’ll find a farmer’s market set up on tables laid out in front of the cultural center in Ramallah. A number of agricultural cooperatives from the surrounding municipalities come to sell their organic produce to passersby and to regular customers that come out in their support. Most of these cooperatives are youth-led farms inspired by a surge of interest in new models of community-supported farming using agroecological methods.
What I rarely hear is the testimony of worker-owners to the fact that they jointly own a workplace which quite simply brings them joy and satisfaction. This is not merely one more feature of worker coops—in some ways, I think it’s almost the whole point.
We are here talking about the real-world possibility of creating something which sounds very utopian: liberatory workplaces! A contradiction in terms, many would claim!
Agricultural cooperatives can be broadly categorized into several types based on their functions and services:
Communal kitchens are assisting hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan’s embattled capital, Khartoum, providing regular meals as well as social and emotional support amid a deepening famine that international aid groups are failing to tackle.
Run by neighbourhood-based mutual aid groups called emergency response rooms, the kitchens are struggling with crippling funding gaps, security threats, and communications and electricity blackouts, volunteers told The New Humanitarian.
