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Starting a Worker Cooperative from Scratch - Two Years Later

We overdid things at the beginning of the year. We went into it intentionally, but being intentional doesn’t make things less hard.

We had two clients starting, one client scaling up significantly, and another client who restarted work with us. Plus, we were going through the hiring process to handle all the work.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably make the same decision. Sometimes it’s ok to take what’s presenting and try to make it all happen.

ICA & CICOPA Statements on Informal and Platform Work

ICA & CICOPA JOINT STATEMENT ON INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO ADDRESSING INFORMALITY AND PROMOTING THE TRANSITION TO FORMALITY FOR DECENT WORK

Many people work in informal, unstable jobs or without proper rights and protections. As the International Labour Organization (ILO) holds its 113th International Labour Conference, there is a strong call to find new and practical ways to help these workers move into safe, secure, and fair jobs.

Worker-Led Media: A virtual panel on building a better media economy

The media industry has never been the most stable place to work; its history has been characterized by booms and busts, and the current landscape is no different. But there are signs that we need a structural reset, as we experience mass layoffs; corporate consolidation; and hedge funds, private equity, and billionaires coming in and cutting newsroom budgets of our longstanding media institutions.

June 5, 2025

Reshaping Work and Life Through Co-Operative Models

 In this conversation with John Abrams, author of From Founder to Future, we explore how founders can strategically pave the way for a more equitable future through the worker co-op model and how work can influence every area of life.

Addressing the movement's dependence on Big Tech by growing our autonomous technology ecosystem

The goal of Cutting the Cord is to provide an initial road map for reducing our movement’s dependence on Google in particular and Big Tech in general. It provides a political overview of the reasons for moving away from large corporate technology services and a deeper understanding of the obstacles facing activists and organizers motivated to make the move, while providing information to help autonomous technology providers better meet their needs.

Sociocracy in the Higher Ed Classroom

 

What might sociocracy look like on the small scale, less formally, enacted by college students who have just begun to feel it out? How might sociocracy’s resonance pervade an organization, even without the opportunity for thoroughly elaborated structure? 

Revisiting Argentina’s Recuperated Factories

The struggle of Argentina’s recuperated workplaces forms part of a wide range of capillary attempts to overcome the democratic deicits of capitalist production and hierarchical intra-company governance, and it simultaneously provides “a possible answer to marginalization, structural unemployment and unequal in

Marcos Antenor Morais is a Brazilian technologist and researcher specializing in Artificial Intelligence. He has contributed to the development of technology across companies, government institutions, and social movements.

He is a member of the Laboratory of Applied Artificial Intelligence (LiA²/UFU), which explores the economic and social implications of advancements in AI.

His current research focuses on the intersection of technology, politics, and economics, with particular attention to strategies for scientific, technological, and economic development in peripheral countries.

June 9, 2025

How Many Dreams Fit Inside a Train Car?

The Rede Mulheres do Maranhão (RMM) – Women’s Network of Maranhão –  is a cooperative made up of 16 solidarity enterprises, bringing together more than 200 members. Their activities include the production of sweets and honey, processing and cracking of babaçu nuts and cashew nuts, baking, vegetable and greens cultivation, and clothing manufacturing.

Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture.

June 12, 2025

Collective Governance and Solidarity Economies

Founded on women’s liberation, ecological sustainability, and direct democracy, Rojava’s political system provides a dramatic alternative to the status quo values of patriarchy, capitalism, and the nation-state that define the Middle East and much of the world. 

How to Survive a Budget Crisis

In December 2023, the organization where I work, the Post Growth Institute (PGI), lost half of its funding for 2024. Our major funder was withdrawing support for three-quarters of their grantees, and we were one of them.

Our cash-flow projections showed a four-month runway until we wouldn’t be able to make payroll. At the time, 10 out of our 23 paid staff relied fully—or almost fully—on income from our organization to sustain themselves and their families. This was the gravest threat we’d faced in our 14-year history.

Getting Out of the Nonprofit Box

Jim Kucher has been preaching the need for non-profits to realize they are a uniquely American failed experiment in many respects. For all the good work they do, most nonprofits remain in a precarious financial condition because they do not choose to offer paid services, whether through misplaced fears of the IRS or a lack of familiarity with basic business practices.

Visions of a Caring Economy

Focus on how caregiving in all of its forms serves to create the economic — derived from the Greek oikos for home — points to how the economic should be conceptualized, not as something outside of the interactions between people that make lives livable and sustain them, but as produced through those activities.

Why knowing your neighbors can be an important climate solution

Earthaven Ecovillage is a community of around 100 full-time residents tucked away in  the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. In late September, this idyllic place with its modest homes, babbling creeks and bumpy country roads was rocked as Hurricane Helene swept into the Carolinas, dropping torrential rainfall and bringing high winds. Across the state, more than 100 people died, and billions of dollars in property was damaged.