Communication

“Co-ops are practical, not perfect” and as an entity, they can often get caught up with an expectation to be a utopian alternative to capitalist structures. Through a discussion of learned experiences, this session aims at providing an honest lens into managing collective work and lateral power, creating systems that empower cooperative workers in ways that make every individual feel heard, while keeping the expectations of what it means to be in a cooperative realistic, restorative, and hopeful.

Most co-ops strive to be places of care, community, and consensus, but even in co-ops, boundary crossings happen. How do we handle them in a way that prioritizes safety while treating everyone with fairness and respect? How can we create cultures where consent is so normal that major incidents are rare? We want to hear what happens in your co-ops, cross-pollinate ideas, and share our experience running non-punitive Consent Teams that provide communities with education, emotional support, and mediation.

In co-ops, we often pride ourselves on being inclusive and equitable—but what happens when harm shows up in the form of a joke, a question, or an everyday comment?

This session invites cooperative members to reckon with microaggressions as real structural cracks within our supposedly safe spaces. Drawing from personal experience navigating coded bias, racialized communication, and deflection within cooperative housing, the session will unpack how "small" slights carry big consequences—especially for marginalized members.

Together, we'll explore:

River City Housing Collective's visual for hand signals. This is reviewed during an information session with prospective members, and whoever is facilitating a meeting where a new member is present will review the hand signals before the meeting starts.

This workshop takes us beyond in-person meetings into the world of virtual meeting facilitation. In this slide deck, we will provide best practices for virtual facilitation and tools to build consensus within the group. This includes exercises to try out facilitation tools with group discussions.

This workshop slide deck reviews cooperative members' responsibilities to each other, future members, and the co-op as a whole. We will provide tools to describe and promote member roles and responsibilities in your co-op.

This is a discussion guide on member engagement including some recommended ways to encourage member engagement, preventative practices, and engagement measurement ideas. This guide aims to stir up new ideas in your co-op to continue the discussion on member engagement.  

Below, are the recordings for NASCO Institue 2020 sessions by room. Please share lessons learned with your cooperatives and communities. 

If you did not register for NASCO Institute and you'd like to support free and low-cost cooperative education, please consider contributing a donation amount that feels appropriate for you and/or your cooperative. Your donation makes it possible to offer cooperative education materials and resources free of charge. DONATE HERE.

Slide Templates for Engaging Remote Meetings and Webinars by Training for Change

Print out this meeting hand signals infographic to hang in your meeting space or to pass around before meetings to ensure that members are on fair footing when participating in group discussions.