Cooperatives

A Trans-Atlantic Cooperative Of Dairy Farmers

October 31, 2018 Staff, Agupdate.com Create! Cooperatives, Europe, Farmers, Food and Agriculture, New Economy, United States

Foremost Farms USA and Arla Foods, a European dairy cooperative, are in advanced discussions about forming a strategic partnership. Representatives recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding formalizing the possibility of future partnership. Henrik Andersen, Arla Foods Ingredients group vice-president, said the two farmer-owned cooperatives share many of the same values, plus their whey-market ambitions are compatible. Arla Foods wants to secure access to whey in the U.S. market, he said.

Union Co-op Initiative Seeks To Create Union Jobs, Democratic Workplaces

October 24, 2018 Staff, Ueunion.org Create! Cincinnati, Cooperatives, New Economy, Unions

Every election, politicians promise jobs. Regardless of who wins, good jobs keep getting scarcer in most UE communities. Is there anything else that working people can do to create — and more importantly, keep — good jobs in our communities? A group of trade unionists and community organizers in Cincinnati thinks they have an answer — union co-ops. The Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative is a nonprofit founded in 2009 with the mission of incubating unionized businesses that are cooperatively owned by their workers. CUCI believes that bringing together unionization and cooperative ownership creates a powerful tool to generate family-sustaining jobs that can be the foundation of an economy that works for everyone.

After Rahm’s Destruction, Can Chicago Creative A Cooperative Economy?

October 15, 2018 Matt Stannard, Occupy.com Create! Chicago, Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy, Politics, Revisionism

When Rahm Emanuel announced last month that he would not seek a third term as mayor of Chicago, he broke no hearts among people opposed to neoliberal privatization and the power of finance capital. In Chicago under Emanuel, as the editors of the 2016 anthology Neoliberal Chicago write, “neoliberalism led officials to privatize everything from parking meters to schools, gut regulations and social services, and promote gentrification wherever possible.” To take just one lurid example, Emanuel’s Chicago “privatized janitorial services for our schools,” organizer Amara Enyia told me, only to end up with rodent-infested schools, literally “rats and mice running around in classrooms. Those schools had to be closed and cleaned. This is what happens when you privatize services.”

The Co-op Farming Model Might Help Save America’s Small Farms

October 10, 2018 Annelise Jolley, Civileats.com Create! Cooperatives, Farms, New Economy, Ownership, United States

Across the U.S.—from New England to California—a small but growing movement of farmers is foregoing traditional farm ownership in favor of a cooperative model. In Maine, four Somali Bantu refugees raise crops on shared land at New Roots Cooperative Farm, growing both regional and Somali produce. To the south in Vermont, Intervale Community Farm shares farm ownership with its community supported agriculture (CSA) members. Next door is Digger’s Mirth, a worker-owned farm. And across the country in Southern California’s Pauma Valley, Solidarity Farmshares work and resources with other stewards of the land.

Worker Co-Ops Catch On In Philadelphia

October 3, 2018 Sandra Larson, Nextcity.org Create! Cooperatives, New Economy, Philadelphia, Workers

Last fall, Colombia native Luis Eduardo Lozano and four other immigrant day laborers, tired of the indignities of scant, irregular hours and wage theft from employers, formalized the PWA Handymen Cooperative in Philadelphia. Now the worker-owned LLC offers residential and commercial interior and exterior renovation services. “To work in a co-op means higher rates and secure work. The contract is secure and fair,” Lozano says, speaking through a Spanish interpreter. “A percentage of the fees will be paid to the co-op, and at the end of the year members will earn extra. We all gain from the success of the co-op.” In West Philadelphia, another new worker co-op launched in June. Formed by artists and social-justice organizers...

In North Carolina, Co-Ops Are Building A More Democratic Economy

October 2, 2018 By Junior Walters, Facingsouth.org Create! Cooperatives, New Economy, North Carolina, Revisionism

Nestled at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina, Morganton may seem like an unlikely place to find a large Mayan community. But since the 1980s, the Burke County city of almost 17,000 people, over 75 percent of them white and 12 percent black, is home to a growing Latino community, including Mayan immigrants from Guatemala. Like other immigrants before them, the Maya came to Morganton in search of economic opportunity. Many found work at the local Case Farms chicken processing plant but grew dissatisfied over low wages, poor working conditions, and unsuccessful labor organizing efforts. Searching for a better way to make a living, some have found it in cooperative economics.

Supermarket Chains Ignored This Black Community, So Residents Opened A Co-Op

September 26, 2018 By Eric Ginsburg, Munchies.vice.com Create! Cooperatives, Food and Agriculture, New Economy, Ownership

“This home had belonged to a white family,” said Graves, a Black woman who previously lived one county east. “I fell in love with the house, even though I missed Alamance County.” It was the early 1980s, and white residents were leaving the vicinity en masse. Homeowners who couldn’t sell started renting their houses, she said, and within about five years, almost all of the white residents had fled. Graves—who held “a really good management job” at a telephone company—liked her new home. She lived near a branch library and a city rec center, and just one block from a Winn-Dixie grocery store. But the neighborhood started to decline, a trend Graves blames on a lack of public investment and renters who she said didn’t care as much about the community. At the end of 1998, Winn-Dixie announced it would close the store, and other tenants of the shopping center quickly followed.

Historic Federal Legislation Embeds Support For Employee-Ownership Within The SBA

September 19, 2018 Staff, Institute.coop Create! Cooperatives, Legislation, New Economy

Please join us in celebrating the first legislation in support of employee ownership in over two decades, and the first to explicitly name worker cooperatives as a priority for the SBA. This is a huge step forward for worker cooperatives, and we are proud to have played a role in making it. Along with many allies in the field, our organizations worked in depth with the bill's author and sponsor, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, with DAWI doing research and education, and USFWC doing advising and advocacy. We will also play a key role in supporting implementation. This is the power of an organized sector, and we're just getting started! Please see below for the official press release, and spread the word far and wide.

Surviving In A Post-Crash Economy

September 18, 2018 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast 2008 crash, Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy, Internet

The current generation is the first one in history that will have a lower standard of living than its predecessors and a shorter life expectancy. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, where there are more people in part-time jobs with lower wages, fewer benefits and massive debt, people are forced to find ways to make a living. In his new book, "Everything for Everyone: The Radical Traditions that are Shaping the New Economy," Nathan Schneider explains how his generation is incorporating old traditions, such as worker ownership, with new technology...

Are Media Coops The Business Model Of The Future?

September 16, 2018 Hazel Sheffield, Columbia Journalism Review Create! Cooperatives, Media, New Economy

As an early example of a publication prepared to share ownership with dedicated readers, New Internationalist serves as an experiment in a new models of financing media. Yet New Internationalist is not your typical magazine. It has an unusually engaged subscriber-base and a mission to draw attention to the unjust balance of power in both rich and poor nations. It also has a long history of experimenting with collective ownership. The monthly magazine first launched with financial help from Oxfam and Christian Aid, who wanted to encourage better understanding of the idea of international development. It nearly went bankrupt two years after the launch, in 1975, when postal charges almost doubled, but was rescued with funding from several charities and the Methodist church.

The Constitutional Turn: Liberty And The Cooperative State

September 15, 2018 By Dan Hind, Thenextsystem.org Create! Cooperatives, Revisionism

The English-speaking left has long tended to neglect questions of constitutional design. The dominant Labourist and Social Democratic currents (including American left-liberalism) have focused on securing material benefits for the working class through the institutions of the existing state. The junior, but still influential, revolutionary Marxist tradition treats the state as a fortification to be stormed. Big government alternates uneasily with the withering away of the state.1 But there is more to the left than fiscal redistribution or revolution. In what follows I argue for making the state a site for radical reform. The aim is to flesh out an account of a possible socialist commonwealth that takes full account of its political dimension—the extent to which national economies are produced and reproduced by the state.

Co-op Values In The Modern World

September 12, 2018 By Ed Mayo, Thenews.coop Strategize! Cooperatives, New Economy

It may seem like the soft side of business, but values are at the heart of every example of co-operative excellence – and core to the advisory work of Co-operatives UK. The International Co-operative Alliance has codified 10 values – six co-operative and four ethical. The co-operative values – self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity – describe the design of the business. The ethical values – honesty, openness, social responsibility, caring for others – describe its operation. Alongside these are seven principles – three on how co-op ownership should be structured, three on co-op culture and one on the independence of the business as a democratic enterprise. As Sion Whellens of Calverts Worker Co-op says, while the structure and independence of ownership makes you a co-op, it is your commitment to co-operative culture that makes you part of the wider co-op movement.

Co-op Movement Confronts Its Complicated Relationship With Racial Equity

August 24, 2018 Steve Dubb, Nonprofitquarterly.org Create! Cooperatives, Racial inequality

Last month, co-op educators and developers from Canada, the United States, and Puerto Rico came together in Minneapolis for the annual conference of the Association of Cooperative Educators (ACE). The group has met annually since 1952. A central theme at this year’s conference was the struggle to build a more racially inclusive co-op movement. While co-ops in communities of color, especially Black communities, in the United States have a rich history, they have often been ignored by what has been a largely white official co-op movement. But that is changing. Me’Lea Connelly delivered the conference’s keynote address. Connelly directs the Minneapolis-based Association for Black Economic Power, a group founded in 2016 in the wake of the police shooting of Philando Castile.

Writing The Next Chapter In NYC’s Cooperative History

August 17, 2018 By Mike Sandmel, Neweconomynyc.org Create! Cooperatives, History, New Economy, New York (NY), New York City (NYC), NYC

My name is Mike Sandmel. I’m here from NYC where I was born, have lived most of my life, and where I organize for economic democracy and cooperative development with a group called New Economy Project. We’re a citywide economic justice organization founded in 1995. We’re fighting, in close partnership with community-based groups throughout the city, for a new economy vision of economic development, grounded in racial and economic justice. NYC is a really interesting place to do New Economy organizing. It’s full of contradictions and opportunity, deep inequality and a history not just of popular mobilization but of building community-controlled economic institutions. In the late 19th century, when my immigrant great grandparents were working in Manhattan sweatshops, unions like the Knights of Labor invested heavily in organizing worker cooperatives all over the city.

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