We're pleased to announce that the program for the 2015 Staff & Managers Pre-Conference has been finalized! This all-day program, held on Friday October 30th, serves as a networking and learning forum for co-op staff, managers, and administrators from across Canada and the United States. The Staff and Managers Pre-Conference supplements NASCO Institute programming offered on Saturday and Sunday and allows more space for participants to connect with one another and dig deeper into specific issues.
The pre-conference will feature a four-hour interactive workshop, led by Matt Hancock of the Praxis Consulting Group, that will engage participants in exploring how their co-ops can be developing a culture of collective leadership, share best practices from cooperatives in the United States, Spain and Italy, and explore the role that leadership plays in a co-op’s success as a profitable business. This session will focus on ways of incorporating mentorship (staff-to-staff and staff-to-members) into the process of leadership development and the vision of collective leadership.
Additionally, in response to feedback from last year, we've organized a course track for Staff & Managers during the main conference on Saturday and Sunday. These courses are open to all conference participants, however they are specifically tailored for co-op staff so that they may network with their peers, share best practices and skills, and learn new ways to tackle the issues that they face in their day-to-day jobs.