#co-operatives

#co-operatives

Most for-profit companies still confine nonprofit relationships to corporate philanthropy. Donations flow through foundations, annual reports highlight community contributions, and nonprofit engagement is framed as evidence of corporate responsibility.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.

The study frames each of the models as 'emerging strategies' that can either complement or serve as alternatives to well-known sustainability certification schemes such as Organic, Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance.

Within the workplace, the content and conditions of work are largely controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work, both to increase productivity and to increase their control over employees in the workplace. Outside the workplace, employers have both an incentive and the power to undermine measures that would improve the quality of work through the political process.

Losing staff could be detrimental to the projects we worked on, and there was a growing dissatisfaction with how meetings were run. These mostly one-sided discussions left the quieter half of us feeling pushed aside, like our thoughts didn't matter much. If things stayed this way, I worried the good people on our team would start quitting one by one.

The pandemic changed Defector's course. New York shut down, the economy ground to a halt, and the offers of capital dried up. So the group decided to launch a new website on their own dime, this time structured as a worker-owned cooperative in which the journalists, rather than media executives, made all the decisions. The site became the kind of success that's rare in digital media nowadays, bringing in $3.2 million in revenue from over 40,000 paying subscribers in its first year alone.

Architecture is often evaluated through finished forms, yet some practices operate in a different register, one where design unfolds through relationships, time, and use rather than through a single outcome. For CatalyticAction, participation is not a parallel social activity, but the means through which spaces are conceived, constructed, and sustained over time. Based between Beirut and London, the practice has worked across the Middle East and Europe, developing public spaces, schools, playgrounds, and everyday urban infrastructures through long-term collaboration with local communities.

The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy manifesto was published in 2021, aiming to address the structural inequality between native and non-native speakers in academic philosophy. A number of journals and societies, as well as many individuals, have signed the manifesto.

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that sweeping industrialization would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality. He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy,

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is not a radical leftist institution, and its research economists are not Nimbys, or socialists, or anything other than classically trained academics who look at data. So it's interesting that two Federal Reserve researchers have just published a paper that adds to the clear evidence that "constraints" on the supply of private-market housing have little to do with the lack of affordability in cities like San Francisco.

The change in the administration's tactics in Minneapolis is not a retreat. Instead, they are regrouping and planning another mode of attack, with the hopes that their repression might be met with resistance that is easier to control and contain. People who garner their relevancy and power through the dehumanization and oppression of others will do whatever it takes to cling to their soulless sense of self.

Best known as the longtime co-editor of the Co-op News, the weekly newspaper of the Berkeley Co-op, Michael Fullerton lived in Berkeley for more than 60 years and was active in the community and in electoral politics, as well as the cooperative movement. Michael died on Jan. 5, at age 85, from complications of cancer. He told his wife, Sandy, to be sure that his obituary included his work on Ron Dellums's first Congressional campaign in 1970, when Dellums ran on an anti-Vietnam war platform.

In places where inclusion is part of the infrastructure of their economy-supply chains, procurement processes, capital access, or business ownership-people thrive. Inclusive economies create more resilience by expanding the base of potential business owners who can build, own, innovate, and hire. They allow more opportunities for homeownership and investing in the longevity of communities. As our economy becomes increasingly stratified and volatile, we need as much resiliency as we can get.

There's a myth in our society that real change requires force, strength, and domination. We celebrate athletes, CEOs, and politicians who crush their opponents. But history tells a different story. Lasting social change has often been triggered by humble people whose weapons were passion, principle, and an unwavering commitment to justice and the truth - not the truth we see on TV or read in print media, but rather the truth that we feel deep inside ourselves.

For justice-centered leaders, there is a stubborn dichotomy between our genuine commitment to equity, inclusion, and alignment in our organizations on the one hand, and our continuing self-diagnosis of high levels of misalignment, conflict, and turnover on the other. Three years after Maurice Mitchell's seminal piece, " Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis," rang the alarm of "urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces," the current discourse suggests that the needle has not moved much.