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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.

When do cooperatives work well together, and when do they run into problems? This session uses real stories to explore how co-ops can build stronger networks—and what happens when good intentions hit democratic roadblocks.

We'll dig into the activities that make cooperative federations thrive, like shared buying power, pooled resources, joint advocacy, and member education. But we'll also look at the flip side—times when democratic decision-making led to crippling paralysis.

This collaborative roundtable session engages the principles of solidarity, collectivity, and shared power and equity across mutual aid groups and community cooperatives. Building on lineages of resistance, the facilitators will co-create a discussion of the celebrations and challenges in futurework. This includes knowledge and skill sharing practices in food sovereignty, direct action, and consensus building, etc. and organizing within and beyond the nonprofit industrial complex. 

“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.