Archive for category: GRASSROOTS ECONOMIC ORGANIZING

Mike Strode, a program officer with the Open Collective, is a writer, cyclist, IT consultant, facilitator, and solidarity economy organizer residing in southeast Chicago whose community engagement work has included ride leadership with the Chicago chapter of Red, Bike & Green; editorial and archival oversight for Fultonia; and co-facilitation of Cooperation for Liberation Study & Working Group. He is founding coordinator of the Kola Nut Collaborative, a time-based service and skills trading platform which promotes timebanking throughout Chicago. He also serves as a current board member for Dill Pickle Food Co-op.

EC :

Great to have you here, Mike. You have a long list of organizations you’ve worked with or founded. How about we start with your founding of the Kola Nut Collaborative in Chicago?

MS :

Sure. I was trying to figure out what were the possibilities for timebanking in Chicago. I was coming off of the heels of my work with the Healthy Food Hub in the food justice and food sovereignty space. The Kola Nut Collaborative was a discovery point, along with the 2018 Cooperative Economy Summit in Chicago and the discovery of the solidarity economy.

I came to realize it’s hard to tell the story of what timebanking can be outside of a larger shift in thinking about economic ecosystems. That’s when the Kola Nut Collaborative began its initial partnerships, trying to figure out if we can seed timebanking into cooperatives.

It turned out to be very difficult work to sell that message — until the world turned, right? Until the pandemic shift, where suddenly everybody was pod mapping, everybody was timebanking, everybody was engaging in mutual aid.

Read the rest at Ownership Matters

As Courtney Berner of the Center for Cooperatives wrote in NPQ earlier this year, between 2016 and 2019, 47 percent of new co-ops formed in the US were worker co-ops. If one considers a longer period stretching from 2011 to 2019, nearly one in three newly formed co-ops in which the ownership type is known (253 of 771) were worker co-ops, an extraordinary development given that historically fewer than one in 100 co-ops nationally have been worker owned. And while the current decade is still young, the pace of worker co-op development—especially in BIPOC communities—has only accelerated.

The need for educational infrastructure to support this growth is evident. Indeed, a half-dozen years ago, Melissa Hoover, Executive Director of DAWI, and Hilary Abell—co-founder of Project Equity, an employee ownership technical assistance nonprofit—identified education as a key element of what they labelled a cooperative growth ecosystem.

Now, with financial support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Democracy at Work institute (DAWI) has developed an online worker cooperative education curriculum, hosted by the New Jersey/New York Employee Ownership Center at Rutgers University, to fill a portion of that gap.

Course instructors include Vincent Green, who became a worker-owner in November 2020, when the nonprofit-owned Baltimore-based social enterprise ice cream business where he worked, Taharka Brothers, converted into a worker co-op. He is now one of five worker-owners of that business.

Read the rest at Nonprofit Quarterly

With customers staying at home during the pandemic, large numbers of businesses have shuttered permanently, unable to cover their payroll and rent. Emergency governmental assistance has sustained some businesses during this period of economic uncertainty, but the crisis has also stoked interest in a private sector remedy: cooperatives.

[…]

As Congress deliberates how to safeguard the country from future crises, policymakers should consider recent research that shows how so-called alternative enterprises can make local economies more resilient. Sociologist Marc Schneiberg finds that counties with more cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, nonprofit organizations, and universities experienced fewer job losses during the Great Recession and greater job growth in its aftermath. This path-breaking finding suggests that such organizations are better able than their shareholder-owned counterparts to retain workforces when the economy falters—and more willing to invest in their communities when markets pick up again. 

Read the rest at Fortune

CECOP presents the second episode of a three-part docuseries. In this second video, we interview Francesca Martinelli, PhD, in which she presents the research perspective on non-standard employment and platform cooperatives. This docuseries was made in the frame of our campaign “ALL FOR ONE” in 2020.

Read the report here.

Enroll to the conference on December 3rd, 2020 here.

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