The BBC is the heart of the UK’s media system. Yet despite the BBC being publicly funded, the public have no control over how it works.
Politicians have too much power to pressure the BBC, and it is struggling to compete against global streaming services and social media companies. Without radical reform, the BBC faces a bleak future of dwindling audiences and the loss of public trust.
This paper uses two different examples of cooperatives to reflect on what might drive and what might maintain worker cooperatives.
From medieval monks who banned tools to weavers burning looms in the 17th century, people have long resisted technologies that they thought would take their jobs or otherwise hurt them. More recently, there has been a wave of resignations at frontier artificial intelligence companies, and opposition to data centers. What do past resistances have in common with current movements?
Join us for the launch and discussion about the first case study from the COLA Lab detailing housing co-ops in Chicago
We know little about how technology-mediated mutual aid communities navigate tensions between their solidarity-driven ethos and the commercial logics of the technologies that host them.
The Basic Law on Social Solidarity Economy, which includes the legal foundation for the activities of social solidarity economic organizations such as social enterprises and cooperatives and the establishment of a government-level support system, passed the bill review subcommittee of the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee on the 24th.
“Ownership doesn’t just happen because you filed paperwork. It’s designed.”
Worker ownership can sound deceptively simple: employees become owners (check!), decisions are shared (check!), wealth stays local (check!). But the reality is, successful worker cooperatives don’t emerge from paperwork or ritual alone. They are intentionally designed — shaped through hard governance choices, financial insecurity, and assumed shared expectations.
As a community-led group, NFFTT does not have its own, independent non-profit or charitable status. Yet, it has secured support and funding from the likes of the Peter Gilgan Foundation, the RBC Foundation, and the Toronto Foundation.
Access to this philanthropic funding would not have been possible without the support of the MakeWay Charitable Society, said project director Julia Girmenia.
Minnesotans like Bean have redistributed thousands of dollars—in some cases, tens or hundreds of thousands—to neighbors in need in recent months. Everyday people are adopting rent to help support families who have lost their primary earner or have been unable to go to work throughout Operation Metro Surge.
But as the daughter of an accountant, one small fear has nagged at me since December: Are they going to owe taxes on that money?
San Diegan Mariel Horner loves to help people.
In the far northwest of New York City’s northernmost borough, the Bronx, just south of Van Cortlandt Park, the site of Revolutionary War battles, is the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative. It’s due to celebrate its centenary next year, making it the oldest surviving co-op of its kind in the US.
Antonio and his partner Amara Watkin-Anson, who both come from farming backgrounds, moved to Maine in 2016 and purchased 15.4 acres of off-grid farmland in Porter. The property has a rich history of being used as a safe haven for artists and the LGBTQ community, the couple said.
Antonio and Amara hope to continue that legacy. They aimed to start a farm that was mission based rather than money based. They wanted to expand fresh food access to communities and ownership opportunities for BIPOC farmers and workers.
I asked Rebecca and Bill about the advantages they have seen from providing coop transition services like those described above.
“You can stand out in a competitive market by specializing in a growing, niche field,” Bill said.
NOFA-VT is deepening its support for collective land access and cooperative and alternative business models. After spending time in 2025 conducting dozens of one-on-one conversations with farmers around the state and holding conversations with partner organizations, this spring, we launched the Land Together Learning Network. This learning network is a ten-month-long cohort program designed to support land seekers and those with land to share in building financial, legal, and relational skills for successful collective projects.
As federal overreach erodes a foundational sense of safety across the U.S. that many with proximity to power or privilege took for granted, place-based organizing is a tangible way to bring about real social change—as demonstrated by movements for justice past and present.
