Food

In this episode Nacho speaks candidly about the highs & the lows of his & Carla's 10 year journey with Black Cat Cafe. Even though from the outside Black Cat Cafe seems to be extremely successful Nacho shares about the constant challenges they faced - the difficulties paying members & staff fairly, and the set backs when trying to attract & retain worker members.

“Urban Recipe started in 1991 out of one church’s efforts to be in relationship with their community differently beyond the traditional food pantry relationship,” executive director Jeremy Lewis says. Urban Recipe has moved out of that church and now operates and facilitates six food co-ops similar to Co-op 1 and helps operationally support and source food for four additional co-ops in Atlanta that have been through their cooperative pathways training program.

This is a "nuts & bolts" session on transitioning existing businesses to worker-owned cooperatives. Attendees learn about the option and process of worker buyouts and hear a wide variety of company transition stories, from initial exploration through deal structuring, financing and post-transaction support. Business owners considering a sale to employees as well as current workers exploring or engaged in a buyout will find value in the session.

Celia LoBuono Gonzalez joins us on the show this episode to share her story and that of Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative.

We consider the relative contributions of changing technology and institutions for economic growth through the investigation of a natural experiment in history: the almost simultaneous introduction of the automatic cream separator and the cooperative ownership form in the Danish dairy industry from around 1880. Using a new database of statistics from creameries and the tool of stochastic frontier analysis, we find that both institutions and technology were important for the success of the Danish dairy industry and, by implication, the growth and early development of the Danish economy.

In this episode of Each For All: The Co-operative Connection, host Robin Puga sits down with Matthew Enright, the General Manager of the Battle River Railway Co-operative (BRR).

THE CO-OP WARS tells the story of the idealistic youth who tried to build an alternative to corporate capitalism, the violent struggle that almost tore them apart, and their eventual success in ways they never foresaw.

Shylah Wolfe spoke to Dru Oja Jay about what kinds of cooperative systems for food production, distribution and processing are already being built and how we'll probably have to expand them pretty rapidly to feed ourselves.

How a 50 year old food co-op in Ithaca practices diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“Multi-stakeholder” co-ops have become popular in recent years, but what does it really mean to bring different groups together for common ownership and governance?