Cooperative Development Institute: Northeast Center for Cooperative Businesses

In the tradition of the New Orleans second-line parade, the Coopalooza National Second-line Committee is organizing a cross-continent second-line parade to celebrate and educate about cooperatives all the way up the Mississippi, starting in New Orleans, passing through
Baton Rouge, LA
Jackson, MS
Memphis, TN
St. Louis, MO
Chicago, IL
and arriving at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June 2010.

Join their Facebook page, where you can join discussions such as the one below:

The Cleveland Evergreen Cooperatives, which have already been featured in the Nation, TIME, The Economist, and Yes! magazine (see earlier post), have now also been profiled in Business Week. Talk about buzz!

A Time to Learn: Upcoming co-op trainings, presentations, meetings, and more

These cold winter months are a great time to bone up on the topics that interest you most. And spring and summer are great for traveling to meetings that will inform and inspire. Below are the upcoming presentations that CDI will be doing, and a selection of offerings from other cooperative centers. If there is a topic you’d like to see, let us know.

The Business Matters radio show, aimed at exploring how businesses can shape our world for the better, took up the topic of Worker Owned Cooperatives in a recent episode.

CDI Cooperative Development Specialist Lynda Brushett is teaming up with the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance to work with a number of Community-Supported Fishery (CSF) projects underway in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine. Several of these were detailed in a pair of Boston Globe articles by G. Jeffrey MacDonald on January 24, 2010:

In the March 1, 2010 edition of The Nation, Democracy Collaborative researcher-writer-activists Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and Thad Williamson present the ground-breaking work of the Evergreen Co-operative model, and speculate on how the model could be deployed in other cities hard-hit by the economic crisis.

The Cooperative Fund of New England's Winter 2010 Newsletter is ready to read. This year marks the Cooperative Fund's 35th anniversary -- see photos of Rebecca Dunn's home office then and now.

Co-op Power's Energy Efficiency programs are launching this month under Paul Schmidt's leadership. Paul has 23 years experience in energy efficiency and Co-op Power excited to be able to now be able to insulate and air seal your home. Email pam@cooppower.coop if you're interested in finding out how to upgrade your home.

Several positions are currently available at the New England Farmers Union. NEFU’s goals for the next three years are to bring together policy makers in Washington with leaders and consumers in six states to fashion a food policy and a 2012 Farm Bill that benefits the farmers, foresters and fishermen in this diverse and resourceful region.

Positions include:

The Cooperative Fund of New England (CFNE) provides loans and technical assistance to cooperatives, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, nonprofit groups, low-income housing development organizations, health services, and community based organizations in New England. Thanks to the support of our generous investors, CFNE now has more funds available to finance start-ups, expansions, renovations, and upgrades, as well as to meet general working capital needs.