Adam Smith knows food. A trained chef who has worked in numerous restaurants, the 29-year old also knows firsthand how much perfectly good food is wasted. Smith hails from Leeds, England, but it was a year spent working on farms in Australia that inspired The Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP), which changed the direction of his life.
The Cleveland program, now entering its 10th year, expands on preexisting models—from recent initiatives in West Philadelphia to a priest’s campaign to empower Basque workers after the Spanish Civil War.
Green Worker Cooperatives is a Bronx-based organization dedicated to incubating worker-owned green businesses in order to build a strong local economy rooted in democracy and environmental justice. We train and develop worker cooperatives that have a positive environmental impact and enable the transformation of their members and community.
In 2006, Dr. Richard Warner opened Colorado Recovery, a treatment facility in Boulder, Colorado to serve people with serious mental illnesses. A UK-trained psychiatrist with 30 years of experience in the public sector in Boulder, Warner wanted to create a non-hospital treatment center that focused on respectful, compassionate, and optimistic care.
The Beacon Food Forest is a community gathering space overflowing with yummy, organic perennial plants in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, about 2.5 miles south of downtown. At about two acres, it’s already the largest edible garden on public land in the U.S.
The East End Food Co-op—one of Pittsburgh’s original sources of organic produce, vegan offerings and bulk foods—is looking to expand to a second location, in addition to the existing Meade Street store and cafe.
[Editor's note: This paper examines processes of cooperative degeneration and regeneration in two large European cooperatives: John Lewis and Mondragon.]
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Since 2007, the International Gathering of “The Workers’ Economy” (Encuentro Internacional de “La Economía de los Trabajadores-Trabajadoras”) has taken place every two years.
It is easy to get stuck on how we think about job creation. Often we hear that our community simply has to offer tax incentives to encourage businesses to move here and create jobs. What we know is that businesses lured in with financial promises can as easily move out when the economic climate changes.
“There is an old guard of the labor movement that hears worker coops and are highly skeptical, and don't want to have anything to do with them,” Freilla says. “But there is a place for a union within a worker coop. Particularly, when you talk about larger worker coops.”
Four Star Video Heaven, located on 449 State Street, is one of Madison’s few remaining video rental stores. The store, which is also one of Madison’s many cooperatives, has a long history in the community and employed some of Madison’s finest creative minds such as writer Dan Savage and creators of the the Onion’s sister publication, The A.V. Club.
A big question remains as to the role which co-ops, and the larger movement of that they are a part—a growing cluster under the heading of New Economy, Worker-Owned Enterprises, Solidarity Economy—could potentially play in fundamental social transformation, given the limitations discussed above.
