Cooperationsyracuse.wordpress.com Website Review

Yesterday, after weeks and months of outreach, planning, coordinating, and hoping, I began the development process with a group of four future worker-owners who are currently training in construction through Hope 4 Us Housing Corp. here in Syracuse, NY.  As part of the Cooperation Syracuse Alliance mission, I will be sharing here the story of the progress, summary of the curriculum and the training details, and answer any specific or interesting questions and situations as they arise. I had previously been briefly introduced to the four participants at a prior team meeting they regularly hold a few weeks prior.  At that time when they agreed to start the development process, I shared the first items of learning collateral with them to review in preparation > HANDOUT 1: Cooperative Identity – the Statement, Principles and > Values of cooperatives as stewarded by the International Cooperative > HANDOUT 2: Cooperative Development Continuum – an annotated > presentation of the cooperative development process along a We then started out with a short re-introduction of names, and what we would be working on regards starting a worker-owned cooperative together.  We then moved straight into a video presentation of the short docu*entary “Owning the Change: Building Economic Democracy The idea being to let other worker-owners from the video describe in their own words and experiences the requirements, benefits, and responsibilities that we would be delving into, and to demonstrate that there are real world examples of worker cooperative success Following the film, we had a small group discussion that centered around two components.  First, participants were asked to share about their connections to co-ops.  As was expected, most weren’t aware of any personal connections.  One participant mentioned having shopped at the Syracuse Cooperative Market on Kensington St, so we began with discussing what a consumer cooperative is.  We then moved