Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy
Pachamama Coffee Cooperative has been named a finalist for the SCA’s Sustainability Award for the category Business Model. This award seeks to “recognize individuals, businesses, and organizations that have created innovative projects or business models shown to expand and promote sustainability within the coffee world while inspiring others to initiate similar endeavors.”
The Global Ecovillage Network – North America (GENNA) is producing a free online urban intentional communities discussion. The topic is the struggles and resilience of urban communities.
“Theoretically and practically the community land trust mechanism for preserving the availability and often the affordability of commercial properties works the same as for residential, or at least it can work that way,” says Mike Brown, a partner in Burlington Associates, a national consulting cooperative that helps nonprofit corporations develop real estate.
The social democratic movement has primarily been based on two simple organising methods. One was to get a group of workers together and have them elect a representative to bargain for higher pay and better working conditions on their behalf. These became known as trade unions. The other was to get a group of consumers together and have them elect a representative to bargain for a lower price and better quality goods and services on their behalf. These became known as consumer cooperatives.
The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw neighborhood opened in 1947, one of the first of its kind in the country. Since then, it’s looked like a typical mall, with a sprawling parking lot. But community members in the surrounding majority-Black neighborhood now want to transform the 43-acre site into something different—mixed-income housing, community gardens, and new worker-owned cooperatives, all run by a nonprofit that can return proceeds to the community.
Never before commercially available in English, this new translation of Mondragon founder Fr. Josemaria Arizmendiarietta's Reflections offers the wisdom of this remarkable social entrepreneur on a range of topics: the dignity of human beings, the dignity of work, the crucial role of the workplace as a school of humanity, and the power of cooperativism.
If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider.
Within days of receiving the sale notice, Hinkle contacted Thistle, a Boulder County housing nonprofit, for help.
The nonprofit is certified by ROC USA to help mobile home residents become resident-owned communities. It provides guidance and bundles together financing for residents seeking ownership. That move was critical to their success, residents said.
If it sounds unusual for a credit union to be part owner of a co-op, that’s because it is. Vermont statute allows state-chartered credit unions to invest directly into other credit unions and cooperatives both inside and outside of Vermont. Similar legislation exists in seven other states including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and New Mexico, although few credit unions know about it.
Considering legal structures for your intentional community? Whether you are creating an ecovillage, housing co-op, cohousing or coliving community, having a clear and appropriate legal entity is essential.
This e-book includes the seven steps every community needs to follow to create a legal structure, the benefits of creating a legal entity, and a brief exploration of the most common types of structures for intentional communities.
Download this free resource you and your forming community are sure to refer to time and time again!
On the second half of the show, Prof. Wolff interviews Prof. Marcelo Vieta on his studies of workers' success in taking over enterprises mismanaged by capitalists.
Data cooperatives are part of the landscape of people experimenting with community ownership in the digital economy. But why does ownership of digital platforms or protocols matter at all?
