The 2013 Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy

Registration for the 2013 Eastern Conference for Workplace Democacy is open.  This year’s conference will be held July 26th through 28th at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  The tentative list of workshops is below.  For more information contact [email protected]

Raising Capital for Worker Cooperatives

Roy Messing, Ohio Employee Ownership Center; Rodney North, Equal Exchange and Maggie Cohn, Cooperative Fund of New England

Raising capital and borrowing money for small businesses has not been easy since the “Great Recession of 2008″… 

Herramientas para Comunicación y Resolver Conflictos en Cooperativas (Tools for Communication and Conflict Resolution in Cooperatives)

Nicole Marín Baena, Cooperation Texas

En este taller estableceremos (de forma muy breve!) principios básicos y metodología de la educación popular y participativa.

ENGLISH: We’ll explore the common causes of conflict in cooperatives, and use workshop participant experiences to guide a conversation around useful tools to improve communication…

Six Necessary Components for Successful Workplace Democracy

Paul Bernstein, Ph.D.

By seeking the causes for failure and success in more than 50 companies that had attempted democratic management (in 15 different countries including the US), Dr. Bernstein discovered six components to be essential for the long-term success of workplace democracy…

Filling the Cooperative Management Gap via Advisors with Industry Experience

Roy Messing, Ohio Employee Ownership Center

The individuals who form (or look to expand the business operations of) worker cooperatives have great business ideas, but lack the well rounded management expertise to implement or maximize the business plan or to compete with “seasoned” for profit businesses…

Horizontality: Collective Management for Democratic Workplaces

Esteban Kelly and kiran nigam, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA)

What does functioning collective management look like?… 

How to leverage your invisible capital to help your co-op thrive!

Prof. Chris Rabb, Temple University, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute

This innovative workshop will be an intensive overview of the highly interactive, day-long InvisiCap Mapping Experience™ — which trains individuals and teams…

Capitalization and Finance for Start-ups and Growth

Melissa Hoover, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives

Details TBA

Co-ops Aren’t Just Built – They Evolve

Rodney North, Equal Exchange and John Abrams, South Mt. Company

Entrepreneurs and other leaders  in and outside the co-op movement work hard to create the perfect business plan, to identify markets & potential customers, sources of capital, and to recruit the right staff etc.. 

The Way We Do the Things We Do: Healthy People Build Healthy Workplaces

kiran nigam and Jenna Peters-Golden, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA)

SPECIAL DOUBLE WORKSHOP – PLEASE ATTEND BOTH SESSIONS – How do we sustain our vision for change and not get lost in the day-to-day grind?…

The Co-op Index: A Workplace Audit for Measuring Success in the Cooperative Economy

Jim Johnson, Democracy at Work Network

This workshop demonstrates a powerful tool designed to help you assess your worker co-op’s strengths and weaknesses, and to guide you in creating systems that will help you function more effectively as a group, as a business, and as a cooperative…

Lost in the cloud: Protecting online information in the networked age

Antoine Beaupré and Matt Corks, Koumbit Networks

More and more, we depend on computers to manage our daily lives, and trust the “cloud” to take care of increasingly intimate information about ourselves…

Sharpening the Saw – Creating & Running an In-house Training & Education Program

Rodney North, Equal Exchange; and Adam Trott, Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives

By attempting to launch, sustain, and grow, democratic worker co-ops we all are trying to do something almost unheard of, but also inspiring…

Communications and General Semantics

David Woo, Weavers Way Food Co-op

Workplace communications can be improved by a practical application of techniques related to a better understanding of the human communication process…

Reaching Those Who Care:  A Curriculum for Building Home Care Co-ops

Teresa Young, Northwest Cooperative Development Center and Karen Kulp, Home Care Associates

This workshop will illustrate the importance of training and education in the development of sustainable home care cooperatives…

Lobbying Update: National Cooperative Development Act

Peter Frank, Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance

Details TBA

What Works for Students

Danny Spitzberg, Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive

Details TBA

Incubating worker cooperatives: strategies and challenges

John Duda, The Democracy Collaborative; Vanessa Bransburg, Center For Family Life and Omar Freilla, Green Worker Cooperatives

How can we build more strong and sustainable worker cooperatives in the economically marginalized communities that need them most?… 

Hyper-Coops: The Place of Egalitarian Communes in the Cooperative Economy

Paul Blundell, Acorn and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange; Sky Blue, Twin Oaks; Ira Wallace, Twin Oaks and Acorn; Paxus Calta, Twin Oaks and Acorn; Darla Eaton, Acorn and SESE and Jess Little, Twin Oaks and SESE.

We’re all working together for a more cooperative, democratic, egalitarian future and we know that for everything you can do in the economy there’s a cooperative way to do it… 

Unions and Worker Co-ops

Kristen Barker, Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative; Michael Elsas, Cooperative Home Care Associates; Jessica Gordon Nembhard, John Jay College; Bob Noble (moderator), Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance; Deb Olson, Center for Community Based Enterprise and Dennis Olson, United Food & Commercial Workers International Union

Strange bedfellows or strategic allies? Recent developments in both the union and worker co-op movements have brought to the fore the relationship between these two socially significant groups…

Québec Worker Cooperatives and the Ecosystem that Supports Them

Rachael Tanner

If worker cooperatives are so great, why aren’t there more of them in the US? Worker cooperatives do not exist at scale in the United Sates because there is little to no development infrastructure…

Worker-Owned as Workforce & Economic Development Strategy

Sally Stevens, New Orleans Cooperative Development Project

This presentation will look at the variety of economic and workforce development agencies and their programs and ways in which cooperative developers, advocates, activists and worker-owners may build effective relationships with such entities to benefit their communities…

Growing a Resilient City: Possibilities for Collaboration in NYC’s Solidarity Economy

Evan Casper-Futterman, SolidarityNYC and Annie McShiras, Responsible Endowments Coalition and former member of SolidarityNYC

The solidarity economy meets human needs through economic activities that reinforce values of justice, ecological sustainability, cooperation, and democracy…

Shift Change Film Screening & Discussion

Rodney North, Equal Exchange and John Abrams, South Mt. Company (hosts)

Shift Change is a documentary film by veteran award-winning filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin… 

Emerging Possibilities for New Economies in the South

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D, Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity; Kali Akuno, Jackson People’s Assembly and Ed Whitfield, Fund for Democratic Communities (F4DC)

Historic patterns of oppression and exploitation in the US South result from the seizure of the land from its original inhabitants, the importation of Africans who were forced into chattel slavery…

Not the IRS! Anti-Oppression Audits

Jenna Peters-Golden and Esteban Kelly, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA)