Aaron Tanaka joins us to share observations from a number of years of leadership in one of the U.S.’s more dynamic environments for solidarity-economy organizing — and comes to a root question of social change work, as cast by Boston Ujima Project’s Nia Evans: “How do we make the air that we’re breathing?”
Zebras Unite’s idea took root six years ago among a group of women whose common experience of “financing purgatory” led them to a thorough rethinking of investment capital. Entrepreneur and economist Astrid Taylor, one of the founders, talks with us about her own formation, the Zebras’ expansive vision, and the path ahead.
The team preparing to launch Good Scout Capital have a confidence in competition and market principles — and a combined wealth of experience channeling capital resources to to address economic inequities. They aim to prioritize both returns and impact with a 20% employee-ownership requirement and focus on underserved entrepreneurs.
We learn from Molly Hemstreet, co-founder of Carolina Textile District and The Industrial Commons, about the multi-layered developmental scheme unfolding in this remarkable U.S. regional cooperative network. In her thinking, the first principle of cooperative growth is “Build deeper.”
The role of Western corporate culture in international reluctance to address an atrocity of enormous scale in Asia today has something to teach us about values implicit in commonplace notions of the global economy. A Uighur expatriate urges us to reflect.
Veteran labor activist and cooperative developer Erik Forman talks with us about the strategy and structures giving the unprecedented project of a driver-owned, democratically run ridesharing service in New York City’s tough market a fighting chance.
Brian R. Corbin has spent decades in the trenches working for economic democratization in Ohio. We talk with him about the remarkable labor-cooperative coalition in Youngstown during Carter administration years, its legacy, and collaborating with Mondragon toward Rust Belt renewal.
Foundations for building the new institutions of solidarity economy — the structures that enable people to take charge of their own destinies in community — are not lacking. And the time to build is now.
What to make of the Green Bay Packers organization’s recent offering of ownership shares for public sale? Count us skeptical.
Evan Casper-Futterman talks with us about joining BCDI, the decade-old project for “thinking regionally” from cooperative principles in the United States’ poorest urban county, and its multi-pronged, long-range vision.
The Francesco Collaborative’s Elizabeth Garlow sketches for us a personal and communal journey from reliance on neoliberal assumptions about business practice and finance to a “homo cooperans” understanding undergirded by Catholic social teaching.
Our conversation with capital strategy advisor Daniel Fireside turns to changes in the funding environment, strategies for resourcing without sacrificing community control, and the ongoing effort of Downtown Crenshaw Rising in Los Angeles.
Capital strategy advisor Dan Fireside talks with us about coming into a political outlook as a student in the 1980s and finding his way into cooperative finance, subsequently, as Capital Coordinator at Equal Exchange.
LEAF Fund, formed in Boston four decades ago in affiliation with the ICA Group, today works with clients in 27 states and finds its focus on cooperative development a basis for sustained portfolio growth. We talk with current Director of Lending and Operations Josh Glickenhaus.
Lawyers are looked to for practical arrangements, which implies expectation that things can and will be conformed to legal boxes. But what of the lawyer whose purpose is transformative? What if the legal formulas don’t exist? Land craft is an expression suggesting new ways to think.
“Like any kind of politics, the cooperative movement needs to rediscover its purpose in every generation.” In part two of our conversation about his thoughts since publication of Everything for Everyone, movement identity and the character of cooperative difference come into focus.
“A more cooperative economy,” says Nathan Schneider, “would be one in which we are able to better allocate the things that should be at scale to lean-scale operations while keeping the things that should be locally controlled more local.”
In this latter part of our interview with him, Nonprofit Quarterly’s Steve Dubb reflects on an evolving U.S. cooperative sector’s limitations and potentials.