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An introduction to financial literacy for cooperators, from CooperationWorks!

Bookchin’s works on direct democracy and social ecology seem to directly resonate with the practices of countless contemporary social movements worldwide: from political initiatives directly or indirectly referring him or his concepts, to social media memes like the infamous “Google Murray Bookchin.”

When child care is hard to find and harder to afford, some communities aren't waiting for a fix. Kristin Forde Hurckes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension Center for Cooperative explains how cooperative models are helping - and where they hit their limits.

ASETT has three main objectives. One is to build for the future, which involves engaging in scenario planning. The second is to pilot and scale cooperative and social economy practices. And the third is to focus on knowledge generation and transfer to create a narrative that breaks down Mondragón’s isolation and builds support for a social and solidarity economy. 

Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.

Usually, cooperatives are created by people as a reaction to specific, most often local, conditions. Through their joint action individuals show collective or social agency and the conviction that they must work together to pursue their shared interests. In this way, each new cooperative is an experiment and an attempt to change and innovate.

This week, workers and community supporters launched the Pittsburgh Progress, “a cooperative news organization, owned and democratically run by its workers and members… dedicated to looking out for, and telling the stories of, the working-class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.”

The widespread use of LLMs in FLOSS is becoming a multidimensional attack on the trust between contributors and the very idea of convivial collaboration itself.

Unions and co-ops go together. This session outlines the practice of labor neutrality — when an employer commits to taking no position for or against their workers organizing and to voluntary recognize a labor union without requiring an election facilitated by a third party (commonly through a "card check" process) — and how workers in cooperatives can benefit from their employer proactively supporting their rights.

The Dorchester Food Co-op is a new community & worker-owned grocery store that aims to make healthy food accessible and advance economic opportunity and neighborhood engagement. General manager John Santos joins CommonWealth's Jennifer Smith to discuss the co-op's origins and business model.