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In the communities of Melfort and St. Brieux, Saskatchewan, local business leaders recognized a need for affordable and accessible housing. The region is known as the “Iron Triangle” because of the growth of manufacturing, agri-business, and mining in the area. The communities expect to need more than 600 new homes to accommodate the workers that come with all that economic activity.

As I started to build more of this business idea, I took some classes from Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative and I’ve been taking classes at Laney Community College in carpentry and this semester I started woodworking.  

Unlike traditional advocacy models that rely on in-person meetings, DAM stands out with its unique digital framework.

CESEC provides free legal support to community-based businesses, worker co-ops, and other city residents and collectives in Chicago’s solidarity economy movement.

FIC: What does receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you? And what do you think it means to BIPOC communities?

Ira Wallace: I sometimes think that in the last couple of years, I've gotten a number of awards for the same work I’ve been doing for the past 30-40 years to figure out how we can raise up the BIPOC communities. In agriculture, there are lots of black and brown people who are part of the work, but actually, the people officially in charge are mostly white, even more so than in some other [professional] areas.

I’ve been writing about and advocating for a publicly financed cooperative ownership model. My proposal is that a local government issues revenue bonds, backed by some source of revenue or tax. That means really low interest rates. The proceeds from the sale of those bonds can build housing which residents could buy, over time, with their regular housing payments.

Thirty years ago, a vision took root.

A vision of communities living in deep connection—with each other, with the land, and with the future. A vision of ecovillages as a symbol of hope for our planet.

That vision became the Global Ecovillage Network.

The idea of mutual aid is much older than its present resurgence. Cooperation, after all, has been fundamental to human history. And mutualism, as symbiotic cooperation is called in biology, is vital to life itself. As the Russian prince turned anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued more than a century ago with the subtitle of his Mutual Aid (1902), it is “a key factor of evolution.”

We unpacked our new Cooperative Business Playbook, previewed key advocacy priorities for 2025, and considered how recent federal executive actions could impact co-ops.

A perfectly planned meeting is great. We line up the agenda items, and appoint someone responsible — the meeting is a walk in the park.

But some things we can’t plan. Because not everything is predictable. We might hear a report and discover a big issue. We might want to make a decision but get stuck in the middle.

To achieve this, the Minister announced plans for restructuring the Federal Department of Cooperatives, enhancing institutions such as the Federal Cooperative Colleges and the National Center for Cooperative Development.

The goal, he said, is to equip these institutions to provide high-quality training and prepare Nigerian youths for a modern, people-centric cooperative movement.

“Here in Texas, we have a terrible situation with strays and rescues,” says Melody Shannon, founder of the Pet Care Co-op in Houston. “[The area is] overrun with animals, so we need a lot of out-of-state help. A lot of these issues come from the fact that our fosters have been completely abandoned. The animal rescues don’t know what to do. They’re inundated with endless bills,” which results in a lack of resources for advocacy.