Collective Thinking: Zine Documenting Workers’ Collectives in the Twin Cities

“I’ve been working with many different volunteer collectives over the years; various Community Bike Shops, Wayward Council (a Record Store & Venue), All Ages Venues, Books for Prisoners, Food Not Bombs, a Cafe Collective, Community Info Shops, and more. All the while learning skills and trades and perfecting hobbies and crafts, and working ‘real’ jobs with bosses and managers and the like to make ends meet in the ‘real world.’

Worker Owned businesses are functional examples of the goals many of us share; working together towards equality and freedom in the workplace and our communities that is unprecedented by any other model.  Why the Twin Cities? Minnesota has a particularly vibrant history of co-ops and collectives, inlucding land and food co-ops facilitated by northern euorpean settlers in the 1800’s.

I went into the Seward Community Cafe and Hard Times Cafe in Minneapolis several years ago and asked if they could produce any publicized material on how they conducted business as a collective, with the intentions of finding working models to structure future collective projects. Neither spot could provide me with the information, most of the it are in folders and stacks of old documents in the basement, and both expressed that it would be a good idea to have it available in a way that was more understandable by other like minded folks that were interested in the Collective Process and possibly starting up a collective business or few in their own communities.  So I decided to be the one to do just that.“