We’ve been delighted to be part of many educational, training, and networking events in the last two years, from workshops to tabling at co-op conferences. In that time, we led over 50 training events and reached about 1,700 people.
We led workshops on what co-ops are and how they strengthen communities at the Belfast Food Co-op, Common Ground Fair, and Lincolnville Library. Rob Brown spoke at the College of the Atlantic conference on “Cooperation, Community, and Complexity: Imagining a New Economy for the 21st Century.”
At the second annual New York Co-op Summit, Executive Director Noémi Giszpenc co-facilitated a presentation on co-op start-ups with Stuart Reid of the Food Co-op Initiative. “We didn’t want to re-hash what’s in our guidebooks,” said Noémi. “But we did want to draw people’s attention to important lessons and pitfalls to avoid.” So in the vein of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, they wrote several limericks with the last word or phrase missing, such as:
Our big dreams remain largely unrealized
As our costs climb higher than we’d surmised
With too little bank
We might struggle, then tank…
Oh, why did we start…UNDER-CAPITALIZED!
CDI staff members also presented at, among others, the Northeast Aquaculture Conference, Consumer Cooperative Management Association Conference, pvSustain Annual Celebration, Co-op Carnival, VT New Economy, USFWC 2012 Worker Cooperative Conference, Harvest New England Agricultural Marketing Conference and Trade show, By Land and By Sea: Leveraging Co-ops for Business Success, Cooperative Enterprises Build a Better Northern Adirondacks, and “How to Talk Cooperative.”