The Cooperative Movement is on the Rise

“The Evergreen Model in Cleveland has been a high-profile success; in California, in the Bay Area, there are a lot of interesting things going on,” said Earle. “Certainly there aren’t as many cooperatives as there are in Argentina or Italy, but it is an interesting first group of cooperatives…and it is one that is growing.”

Cooperation and affiliation amongst cooperatives has also solidified through a world-wide federation where huge cooperatives across the world meet to talk about furthering the movement. In October of this year, a summit will be held in Quebec where representatives from Mondragon as well as Hazel Corcoran will attend.

Applying to work in cooperatives is easy, provided you find one and that they have work available.

“In Toronto there’s not a huge number – if you look at the CWCF website you can see a list of members which are most of the worker co-ops in Toronto. And you go and you put in an application to any given one,” explained Corcoran. Some of these are the National Food Store, Big Carrot and Urbane Cyclist. Usually there is a small one-time fee members have to pay to be part of the cooperative, normally followed by a period of time where you are a “member-in-progress,” meaning you have to put in some time as a regular worker before you are accepted as a full member.

If you are interested in renewable Energy, you can also look to affiliate yourself with TREC, WindShare or SolarShare.
For instance, Lipp told me, “people can buy bonds of $1000 denominations and they earn a five percent return on that bond.” That is the product being sold by the co-op to raise money for the project. “As the generation of these projects are producing power, and the co-op gets paid for that power [through the FIT program], [they] use that revenue to pay back investors.”

You can also pitch your own project to them.

Lipp explained: “A group will already be down the way with their own project, and then they [can] come to us and say: ‘now we’re at the stage where we need help with our business plan or financial modeling or offering statement. We are signing up members and we’d like to use your [reference]…’ Co-ops usually originate from the community and for the most part people who have that idea want to be quite heavily involved. So we sort of get brought in on a periodic basis rather than us developing it from scratch.”

For those who bring their own renewable energy project to them, TREC offers “a number of tools…as far as checklists are concerned, and there are a number of resources through the Ontario Co-op Association that [they] will direct people to.”

The Cooperative Business Model provides people with all the tools to be their own leaders and empowers the communities in which they are erected. The workers have all that is needed to run a profitable business, as proven time and time again.

I think it was Nietzsche who spoke about finding that “great contempt” – those characteristics in man that make him worthy of contempt and which, if eradicated, would allow human beings to evolve. Well, it appears to me that the world has found that great contempt, not necessarily in man, but in the system that man perpetuates at the expense of the “99%”.

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