~"In order to further articulate and illustrate the lessons of Nick luviene's  thesis, MIT's Community Innovators Lab (CoLab)  has created the guide “Sustainable Economic Democracy: Worker Cooperatives for the 21st Century.”

 This guide explores how worker cooperatives, when configured in a network, can promote progressive, place-based, endogenous economic growth. Here, we present two successful cooperative network models, Mondragon and Evergreen, and then offer a general framework for how to grow a cooperative network in any city. This guide is one of several products generated through the Collaborative Thesis Project.

A critical mass of students and CoLab staff has begun meeting regularly to collectively explore the importance of cooperatives.  Program manager Carlos Javier Espinoza Toro  convened the group and is facilitating their learning journey.   Back in 2007, when Carlos was a student at MIT, he helped put together a course on cooperatives that was taught by Lynn Benander.   Three years later, Carlos is still passionate about cooperatives and so he has organized this study group.  In this post, Carlos explains the purpose and meaning behind this endeavor."~