by Robert McGarvey There are maybe 400 worker owned co-ops in the US today. How many will there be 10 years from now? Ask Michael Peck, a founder of 1worker1vote, and he says there will be four million. That's no typo. He added, "I really believe we are at a tipping point." Worker co-ops now are burning brightest in the constellation of cooperative initiatives. There is vastly more enthusiasm and energy around worker co-ops than any other kind. This year perhaps two or three new credit unions wi...
Sep 25, 2019•49 min
This podcast initially appeared the CU 2.0 Podcast series. It appears here as a for instance of a community coming together and creating a cooperative to meet local needs. Quick now, what country has the highest participation in credit unions? Say the US and you are wong. According to Mike Edwards, senior vice president for advocacy at the World Council of Credit Unions, it's Ireland, north and south, where 70% belong. In this podcast he tells why that participation is so high. He also tells why...
Sep 23, 2019•29 min
Update: Maine Harvest now officially a new credit union. Hard work makes miracles happen. This podcast initially appeared the CU 2.0 Podcast series. It appears here as a for instance of a community coming together and creating a cooperative to meet local needs. *** It has taken some years but finally Maine Harvest may be in the final lap before gaining an official credit union charter. That's because it's met its fundraising goal, $2.4 million, with last monies ponied up by the Maine Credit Unio...
Sep 07, 2019•29 min
by Robert McGarvey Co-op housing: a better way for seniors? Where to house the ever expanding numbers of American seniors? Ask Dennis Johnson, president of the Senior Cooperative Foundation in Minnesota, where seniors control their housing destiny. There are many such co-ops in Minnesota and Iowa and a handful more states, typically in the upper midwest. Why isn't this housing popular elsewhere? Johnson tells why in this podcast. The guiding principles behind senior co-ops spell out what make th...
Sep 03, 2019•34 min
Put Brel Hutton-Okpalaeke in your contacts if you are a college student searching for affordable housing. That's because he is the director of development services at NASCO, North American Students of Cooperation, where the primary focus is on cooperative housing, especially for students. Now is the perfect time for NASCO - colleges have been raising student housing and board fees at a brisk pace and, unbeknownst to most, schools run those functions as profit centers. They are not usually loss l...
Aug 06, 2019•35 min
Go ahead, tell me you don't think of Arizona when the conversation is about cooperatives. You would be right. The Grand Canyon State is not Wisconsin or Minnesota or Vermont. But your podcaster - me - lives in Arizona and so I asked Nigel Forrest, a research associate at Arizona State University's School of Sustainability, to update me and you about the state of cooperatives in Arizona. Keep in mind that Arizona, in its comparative indifference to cooperatives, is akin to perhaps two thirds of t...
Jul 22, 2019•40 min
Talk to Cathie Mahon, CEO of Inclusiv, and it's a fast ride into what mission makes a credit union special, distinctive and in her mind the answer is clear: serving the underserved and usually that means economically disadvantaged. She has tantalizing insights too. For instance: she tells why the business model of community development credit unions may in fact be primed for greater success than the model followed by most credit unions. This is all about making credit unions work for their commu...
Jul 03, 2019•40 min
By Robert McGarvey Corruption. Greed. Ignorance. Racism. Sexism. Words you don’t usually hear spoken about cooperatives. But brace yourself because in the next hour you will as The Cooperators Podcast talks with Jake Schlachter, founder and executive director of We Own It, a Madison Wisconsin based organization aimed at energizing the 130 million of us who belong to cooperatives in the US to seize control, to put our cooperatives in the directions we want them to go. We have that power. We just ...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 1 min
If you live in the sticks and want broadband, Chris Mitchell is the man to know. If you are a cooperator and want to hear a co-op success story, Chris Mitchell also is the man to know. That's because - as director of the Community Broadband Initiative - Mitchell knows the reality of what's happening in bringing high speed Internet to rural America. He also records a weekly podcast, Broadband Bits. It's a good listen. By his estimate maybe 85% of the lower 48 states land mass lacks high speed Int...
Jun 18, 2019•39 min
Need a loan? You want to know Christina Jennings, Executive Director of Shared Capital, a Twin Cities based loan fund that is itself a cooperative and makes loans only to member cooperatives and there are around 250 of them. In the past 30 years Shared Capital has made around 850 loans totalling $50 million. This year it will make around a couple dozen loans, said Jennings, with an average loan amount a notch over $100,000. Listen closely to this podcast to hear about the loan application proces...
Jun 11, 2019•40 min
by Robert McGarvey You want to know about community development financial institutions? Cliff Rosenthal is the man you want to talk to. He literally wrote the book on CDFIs and also the longstanding credit union initiative to serve the unbanked: Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement. This podcast also posted to the CU2.0 Podcast series which I run. That's a professional credit union series but the Rosenthal podcast has wider appeal because - ...
Jun 04, 2019•38 min
Bulk buying means lower costs. That's a fact of life in the US and it also works to the detriment of smaller, community oriented institutions - think churches, charter schools, various non profits. They are too small to win those discounts so they pay high prices for basic services and commodities. The Community Purchasing Alliance was formed to solve exactly that inequity for non profits in the Washington DC area. Right now about 75 non profits in the DC area are saving around $1 million annual...
May 28, 2019•28 min
For many of us, our warmest, most intimate connection with a cooperative is our local grocer and at the National Co+Op Grocers the business of that co-operative is helping its 145 members, each a consumer facing co-op grocer, successfully compete against increasingly powerful national grocers. The good news is that most co-op grocers are holding their own. There had been tough times for co-op grocers, admitted this podcast's interview, C. E. Pugh, CEO of the National Co+Op Grocers. A big reason ...
May 21, 2019•40 min
Call this podcast a deep dive into platform cooperatives and more broadly the sharing economy. That's what Neal Gorenflo, executive director of Shareable in San Francisco, spends his days noodling on. This is a wide ranging, largely unstructured conversation but there are headline moments strewn throughout, from Gorenflo's Road to Damascus epiphany that prompted him to resign a corporate job and become a sharing guru through his bareful perspective on Uber - sizzling stuff - and musing about Emi...
May 14, 2019•57 min
"Everything for Everyone" - that's the title of Professor Nathan Schneider's book that looks at many kinds of innovative co-ops and it's a book that gave me optimism that there just may be a bold, bright next act for cooperatives in the US. In some ways co-ops look to have stalled - where are the new credit unions, the new grocery co-ops? There just aren't many. Does that mean the end is nearing? Nope. Schneider in this podcast talks about wholly new energy for what he calls platform co-ops and ...
May 08, 2019•56 min
by Robert McGarvey Mark your calendar. Late June is when Marquette Brewing in Michigan is slated to open, making it one of around 10 cooperative breweries in the US. That number isn't big but just about all these co-ops have formed in recent years. It's a growing sector. Understand, Marquette is a small town, population maybe 25,000, in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula. There's not a lot of population to draw upon in forming a new co-op but over 200 have joined Marquette Brewing, ponying up $99...
Apr 30, 2019•31 min
From the Ukraine to Ireland and Dominica, this podcast travels the globe with Mike Reuter, executive director of the Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions, as he shares stories of the challenges faced by credit unions and also the generous willingness of other credit unions executives to help. Exhibit one may be the rebuilding of the Dominica credit union sector after that island's economy was flattened in a 2017 hurricane. Credit union execs want to help and they do. You may think credit union...
Apr 23, 2019•24 min
No country produces the agricultural bounty that the US does. We eat better, at lower costs, than anywhere else - and most of that food is produced through farmer owned cooperatives. That's why you want to meet Chuck Conner, CEO of NCFC, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Ask Conner what the number one issue facing his members is and the answer is blunt: immigration. The estimate is that the nation's farms are worked on by over one million workers lacking proper documentation to work l...
Apr 18, 2019•28 min
Want to control what you eat? Of course you do. Join a food co-op and become a member-owner. Across the country there are maybe 350 to 400 food co-ops and, said Stuart Reid, executive director of the Food Co-op Initiative, many more are attempting to form. That's his turf. The organization has helped some 140 food co-ops form in the past 11 years. Reid knows what a co-op needs to do to actually open and he tells how in this podcast. A lot has to do with money but Reid tells how many would-be foo...
Apr 11, 2019•31 min
Alex Stone's business is this: helping new cooperatives to start and helping existing ones to mature and do better. That's the core mission of CooperationWorks! where she serves as executive director. How is she doing? The podcast opens with a simple question: how many new co-ops form in a year? Stone explains exactly why that question is a lot harder to answer than you might think. For Stone cooperatives got into her being early, during her student days at UC Berkeley where she lived in co-op h...
Apr 03, 2019•31 min
Worker owned businesses just are better. Don't believe me. Believe Frank Shipper, an emeritus professor at Salisbury University in Maryland and editor of a book, Shared Entrepreneurship. Shipper is a scholar who has spent years studying worker owned businesses - both ESOPs and worker cooperatives - and he really is convinced that in many cases worker owned businesses just outwork their conventionally structured competitors. Why aren't there more worker owned businesses? Partly it's ignorance. Mo...
Mar 29, 2019•23 min
The deep dive into Workers Cooperatives continues in the Cooperators Podcast. Last week we talked with Esteban Kelly of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. This week it's Melissa Hoover, executive director of Democracy at Work Institute, self described think and do tank that is doing a lot of thinking about worker cooperatives and how to form more of them, and how to position them to succeed. Hoover throws out lots of big ideas in this podcast but a key thought is that just maybe for man...
Mar 21, 2019•35 min
Owning a mobile home park is like owning a Waffle House where the customers are chained to the table. That quip is attributed to a leader in the mobile home industry. It's a thought Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA in New Hampshire, often mulls. That's because his company is in the business of helping mobile home park residents join together into a cooperative to buy the land their mobile home sits on. Understand the weirdness. Mobile homes aren't mobile, not usually. If they are, it would cos...
Mar 14, 2019•32 min
Presented by Robert McGarvey. Listen in here That sound you hear just may be a tidal wave of worker owned cooperatives. At least that's what Esteban Kelly, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, is hoping for and working for and dreaming about. He believes that just now be the time for worker owned cooperatives. Why? Because for so many of us our economic lives are grim. Income inequality is the economic buzz work du jour but it's just that old saying, the rich are get...
Mar 08, 2019•32 min
Listen to Daniel Smith talk about cooperatives in the states where his Cooperative Network operates - Wisconsin and Minnesota - and you might think this has to be the promised land. Just about every legislator knows about cooperatives. Most belong to some. Just about every citizen does similar - many belong to three or five or more. But listen closely and what Smith is discussing are the crucial issues cooperatives just about everywhere face: the war for talent, the struggle for support in gover...
Feb 28, 2019•32 min
After 26 years at the legendary Union Cab co-op in Madison WI, John McNamara headed west to pursue a new mission: helping new co-ops come to life and also helping existing co-ops to survive. What's fascinating is how the Northwest Cooperative Development Center is bringing to life what might seem surprising co-ops such as mobile home owners who join together to create a co-op to buy the land their homes sit on and also home health workers, to name two areas where NWCDC has had great successes. A...
Feb 22, 2019•30 min
Buckle up for a fast journey into the world of cooperatives with branding guru Robert MacDonald who will tell you why she is optimistic about a world where cooperatives are delivering local - relevant - solutions created by people for people. Be prepared to listen again and again because this is a podcast with a lot of rich content. Along the way you'll even learn how Cabot got its name - and how many cooperatives there are in the U.S. Do you know? Take your best guess and listen up to get the a...
Jan 30, 2019•31 min
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