For nearly 30 years, Equal Exchange has been a leader among Fair Trade food and worker-owned businesses. Less widely-known is that our worker cooperative has also been a major innovator in the way that social mission-driven companies can secure financing. But that’s changing as our capital program reaches new levels of success and inspires others to follow our financing model.
Baking is a job for early-risers like Miguel Calderon. It’s before 5am and the first shift of the bagel production crew is waking up, leaving their families sleeping peacefully at home.
Years spent working with Boston’s immigrants and homeless convinced Josefina Luna of one thing: If they were ever going to find a way out of poverty, they would have to do it themselves by working together.
One of the most difficult barriers to an employee buyout is the challenge of raising the capital necessary to buy a business as a going concern. How then might a group of workers raise the capital needed to buy a substantial business?
Sobeys is rebranding a number of Co-op grocery stores and gas stations it recently purchased in Atlantic Canada.
As part of a deal that saw Co-op Atlantic sell its grocery distribution system to Sobeys, the national grocery chain also picked up five corporately-owned grocery stores and five gas bars.
The former Co-op grocery stores will mostly become Foodland stores.
Whether or not these big companies change the products themselves, they’re also gaining more power over the market, making it harder for more truly socially conscious food startups to compete.
All of this prompts the question: Is selling out inevitable for sustainable food companies?
GUELPH, ON, June 24, 2015 /CNW/ - The Co-operators has announced that they will increase their pledge to the Canadian Co-operative Investment Fund (CCIF) to $10 million. The Fund, which will be launched in the coming months, will support the development and expansion of Canadian co-operatives with loans and other funding sourced from the co-op sector.
Many Owners = Much Accountability. Beyond whether or not Welch Allyn will continue to employ here in Central New York, they have given up their accountability to the region, by giving up ownership to an out-of-town corporation. The business no longer has those familial ties to its neighbors.
I have been part of cooperatives all my life; I lived in communes, I work in a cooperative now. I experienced firsthand how they can put people at the center of the equation but, at the same time, obviously there is nothing paradisiacal about them. They are not the silver bullet for capitalism.
This tells the story of a PMA held on June 27, 2015 as part of the US Social Forum in Philadelphia. This PMA was cohosted by the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, USA Cooperative Youth Council, Solidarity NYC, & US Solidarity Economy Network.
“This is about controlling our labor, and that’s what Juneteenth is all about. Wouldn’t it be fundamentally different if directly affected people were doing the trainings and own the companies that were doing the hiring?” Dominic Moulden, of ONE DC, asked.
The most important thing has been the local exchange trading system, the TEM, a form of barter system introduced by Volos residents because so many people were struggling to afford items in euros.
In the three years since I have been trading in TEM, by offering English and guitar lessons, second-hand clothes and bric-a-brac, I have earned and spent 9,500 TEM.
Earlier this year, The Guardian reporte
