People power: a growing number of groups are flipping the Bay Area's housing market on its head
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is a for-profit company using cooperative housing and community land trust models to challenge the Bay Area's skyrocketing housing costs. Check out their unique approach.
Co-op Funding Success Stories
Join us in congratulating these three housing cooperatives, who recently secured significant funding opportunities. #CoopWins!
This Trans-Owned Beauty Co-op Wants To Be A Safe Space For Latinx And LGBTQ Workers
To protect workers from discrimination, the trans women of Mirror Beauty Cooperative are building a business without bosses. Read the full story here.
Resources for Your Co-op
Over the next few weeks, NASCO is wrapping up a series of free Fall Orientation Webinars for new and seasoned co-opers alike to learn more about how cooperatives work and how to be an engaged member.
On Saturday, September 28, NASCO Director of Properties Daniel Miller is presenting a workshop titled "Cooperative Staff Evaluations: Good for Everyone" at Laurel House Co-op with the Austin Cooperative Business Association. This session provides an overview of the various reasons to perform staff evaluations, best practices for creating a just and effective evaluation process, and tips to create a positive culture around evaluations. Learn more here.
Challenging Legislation to Facilitate Cooperative Growth
Many cities have regulations against unrelated people living together, which can act as a hurdle for new housing cooperatives. Attorney Nathaniel Maranwe is looking for a co-op or collective willing to work with him to challenge this legislation.
You might be in a position to sue if:
You are forming a new housing co-op and you would prefer fighting this to working around it
Your city is trying to or has tried to force you out
You are currently living in a housing co-op with more people than your city allows
Whether you are part of an existing co-op or a new one, this would mean asking the local authority for permission to have unrelated people living together. A lawsuit could result in the city backing down, changing its law, or ruling that you have a protected right to live with your housing co-op.
(Note: Cities are usually pretty happy to ignore this, so housing co-ops don’t need to live in fear of getting evicted. However, it may be an obstacle for new co-ops.)
Give back!
Help co-op businesses in the Bahamas recover in the wake of Hurricane Dorian
While national and local organizations focus on providing storm survivors with immediate access to food, water, medical care and shelter, the Cooperative Development Foundation‘s Disaster Recovery Fund helps local cooperatives get back on their feet after disasters.
Help Bahamian co-ops get back to business with a donation to the CDF Disaster Recovery Fund.
United Renter's Housing Cooperative
The United Renter's Housing Co-op is raising money to purchase their buildings in Minneapolis where families are facing gentrification and displacement. Housing cooperatives can be a solution.
The Cooperative Development Foundation's Howard Bower Fund grants support to board and staff education and training and has provided over $500,000 in grants to food co-ops since its inception. Individual donors of $100 or more will receive one pair of Twin Pines dress socks. Cooperatives donating a $1000 or more will receive dress socks for their board of directors.
New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives launched a $5k fundraiser to enable 50 NYC worker owners attend this year’s Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy (ECWD) in Baltimore! The biannual conference is the biggest worker cooperative event of the year and an amazing opportunity for cooperatives to skill-share, network, and learn from peers and experts.
If Darkness Takes Us is realistic post-apocalyptic fiction with a focus on a family in peril, led by a no-nonsense grandmother who is at once funny, controlling, and heroic in her struggle to hold her family together with civility and heart. Spoiler alert: The characters form an urban farming co-op to survive!
