Cultivate.Coop is a wiki for pooling knowledge and resources on cooperatives. It is a space to collect free information for those interested in cooperatives and where people can build useful educational tools for the co-op community.  Here's a list of the starting pages to add to or collaboratively edit.

A

1. Agenda Planning
2. Anti-Oppression Resources for Cooperatives

 

B

3. Benefit society
4. Bond of association
5. British cooperative movement
6. Budget sources for a start-up cooperative
7. Building cooperative
8. Business plan
9. Buy-In

 

C

10. Co-operative congress
11. Co-operative federalism
12. Committee charters
13. Community Economic Development and Cooperatives
14. Consensus decision making
15. Consumer cooperative
16. Cooperative
17. Cooperative Alliances, Federations, and Networks
18. Cooperative Bylaws
19. Cooperative Developers
20. Cooperative Economics
21. Cooperative Values
22. Cooperative capital
23. Cooperative economy
24. Cooperatives in low-income communities
25. Creating a shared vision
26. Credit union
27. Credit unions in the united states

 

Workers from the Blue Scorcher Bakery and Cafe collective in Astoria, Oregon are in­ter­viewed in 2007 by a news team from Mis­souri.

Rodney North, "Answer Man" for Equal Exchange, talks about the cooperative's mission, history, farmer relationships, and interfaith program as part of an environmental video series [non sequiter eco-tips bookend the chapters]. 

"I sold young, in 1987, at the age of 38. I re-structured my sole proprietorship to a worker owned cooperative corporation. It was a dramatic hinge point in the history of the company. Ownership became available to all after five years of employment, enabling people to own and guide their workplace. The responsibility, the power, and the profits all belong to the group of owners. There are no outside investors and no non-employee owners. We decide what kind of business ours will be. The decisions are partly economic and partly philosophical.

"So our challenge is not what to do with the business when it’s time to retire, but how to successfully navigate the transition to Generation Two. The oldest amongst us are now in our sixties. During the next 10 years there will be many retirements. For nearly a decade now we have been working on this new task by carefully hiring young, dedicated, passionate people to carry on. Seventeen of our 28 employees are currently owners; the youngest of these is 34. During the next year several more thirty-somethings will join the group of owners. One of these just turned 30. The transition is in full swing."

John Abrams blogs about South Mountain Company, Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place.

Mike Leung of Abolish Human Rentals interviews David Ellerman, theorist and activist for economic democracy.

"Why abolish human rentals? Can the problems with the human rental contract (employment contract) be fixed simply by legislating and enforcing better treatment and compensation for workers? By analogy was there anything wrong with slavery that couldn’t be fixed by legally requiring the benevolent treatment of slaves combined with effective enforcement of those laws? Or was there something else wrong which required the abolition of slavery under any conditions? "The ownership or rental of humans both seek to violate the same inalienable rights, namely a person’s of decision making authority and responsibility for their actions. The issue at stake is the legal non-personhood of the slave or employee. While the specific treatment of people matters, we must also ask whether the structure of working relationships is internally consistent with people providing labor. In the case of both human ownership and human rentals they are not."

Watch the rest of the interview

"Alvarado has created great working environment for its diverse group of worker owners, most without formal education. The bakery, which reaches out to previously unemployed individuals in its hiring process,  provides good benefits, including a comprehensive health plan, retirement saving account, extensive training, company paid ESL classes, and assistance with ongoing education.  Because Alvarado is an employee-owned business, worker owners are trained in reading financial statements.  The average employee tenure is a decade, and after that many of the worker owners have gone on to open and manage their own successful businesses."

“This is a significant award for the bakery and it is national recognition of the significance of what we do here at Alvarado Street Bakery. As a worker owned co-operative we like to think we are focusing on providing quality jobs and that we are looking after our workers. Receiving an award like this tells us that we are doing just that and that again we are providing corporate America with an example of a sound business that takes pride in looking after every worker with good working conditions, a living wage and quality benefits. This award following the recent positive focus on the bakery in the Michael Moore movie 'Capitalism, A Love Story' wraps up a great year for us at ASB.” Tuck also pointed out the bakery’s new solar panels. “The solar project will supply around 40% of the Bakery’s yearly electricity needs, enough electricity to power around ninety homes.”

"With support from the Citi Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, SJF Institute and Green For All have partnered to launch a Green Jobs Award Program, which seeks to identify, recognize, and promote private companies that are leaders in quality green job creation.  The program celebrates businesses that are making valuable contributions to both the economy and the environment. The application process was open to private companies with at least $500,000 in revenue, and with a business model that preserves or enhances environmental quality. Applicants were judged on their environmental contribution, quality of their jobs and benefits, the diversity of employment opportunities, and their level of community engagement."

Check out this sneak peek of J.J. Noire's "This Way Out: Step-by-Step Guide To Starting A Workers Cooperative (Explained By Those Who Have Done It)."  The film looks like it will be chock full of interviews, mostly with California cooperative members.  You can contribute funds toward the completion of the film which could be a great resource for contemporary cooperative organizers.

• Cooperatives and Community Development Education for Ownership. Deb Gray's UC Berkeley class curriculm and most of the readings are available online.
• Community-Owned Enterprise and Civic Participation.  Lynn Benander and Shakoor Anjawani's MIT seminar videos are online, as well as the reading list and assignments. 
• Win Win Solutions: An Introduction to Fair Trade and Cooperative Economics.  Equal Exchange's curriculim for grades 4 to 9 focuses on food and includes a unit on understanding cooperatives. 

UPDATE: See the Curricula section of the website for the most recent additions to the list. 

Living Cities. a consortium of the world’s 22 largest foundations and banks including the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, will award $14.7 million in grants to the Cleveland Foundation to continue their model of Community Economic Development which includes creating worker cooperatives to serve large archor institutions.  

Over the past five years, the Cleveland Foundation used its influence to enable discussions for the first time among the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University about how they could pool their collective buying power. The foundation also led the effort to create new worker-owned cooperative companies based on the promise of such spending.  So far, two companies -- Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Ohio Cooperative Solar -- are up and running and employing 52 workers. Another, Green City Growers, is set to launch...  The cash and loans from Living Cities will enable the foundation and its local partners to create eight or nine more worker-owned cooperatives by 2013. The companies could, for example, clean and maintain medical equipment, or assemble sterile kits of materials for use in hospitals.

"...they were told that the bulk of Select Machine’s value was in its client list. Much of the rest of the assets — including its employees — would most likely be jettisoned after a sale.  That gave the owners pause. “These are our guys, our family, and we wanted them to keep on working,”

Barabara Tayor describes the selling of a business to its workers - from the owners' perspective.   The  succession of Select Machine was a supported by the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. 

[Tim Huet is an organizer for the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, which opened two new worker-owned businesses in 2010 and had mayor Gavin Newson proclaim an "Arizmendi Bakery Day" in San Francisco.  Here is his Manifesto from 2004 via Grassroots Economic Organizing.]

A Manifesto for a Life-Changing Conclusion

When my colleagues, the editors of this publication, asked me to write a brief piece explaining why I got into cooperative development, I responded that this posed a perhaps insurmountable difficulty: briefly explaining how I arrived at the life-changing conclusion that (trumpets, please) There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development. I mentioned that I'd been thinking of writing an essay arguing that— while chaining oneself to a tree might be sexier; while blockading WTO meetings might seem more “front-line”; while busting-out Starbucks windows might seem more cutting-edge—There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development (hereinafter, TINMISCWYCDTCD). The editors responded with the generous offer of feature space in order to accommodate the TINMISCWYCDTCD argument. So, the editors having called my bluff (giving me enough space/rope to hang myself), here I am pounding out my Cooperative Manifesto.

In the following section, I've laid out six conclusions I reached some dozen years ago (in my mid-twenties) that premised my decision to devote myself to cooperative development. Before launching into those conclusions/premises, I wish to clarify that I don't use the term “cooperative development” in some restrictive sense to mean only starting new cooperatives or expanding/restructuring established ones. For me, anything that a member does to improve her/his cooperative or help it achieve its mission is cooperative development (could be excellent customer service, could be developing personnel systems). I'll argue herein that all such cooperative development work is inherently important social change work.

~"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."~

Carlos Perez de Alejo of Third Coast Workers for Cooperation promotes cooperatives in the Austin Statesman:

In the midst of mounting economic insecurity, fueled by widespread unemployment, foreclosures and budget cuts, many are seeking alternative models to business as usual. From community gardens to bartering networks, grassroots efforts are sprouting up across the country. One pillar of the trend is an international institution with over 160 years of experience in local, sustainable economic development: a cooperative.