Written By Executive Director, Noemi Giszpenc The fifth cooperative principle is Education, Training, and Information. This may seem like a milquetoast, quiet principle, but it’s not. Would slaves have risked their lives to learn to read if education was optional? Would dissidents risk their lives to smuggle novels and leak documents past iron curtains if
In 2012, Somali refugees started farm businesses, aided by an incubator farm program called the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project (NASAP). A few years later, CDI offered assistance to the Somali Bantu community to provide support and resources that aided their ability to eventually acquire a thirty-acre farm! CDI’s Director of Cooperative Food Systems, Jonah
Jonah Fertig-Burd, Cooperative Development Specialist with the Cooperative Food Systems program shared a SparkTalk at the Maine Association of Non-Profits Opt-In Conference at the start of October highlighting how co-ops connect across different regional communities in Maine.
At the NCBA CLUSA 2019 Impact conference, Cooperative Development Institute’s Director of Business Ownership Solutions program, Rob Brown, joined a dynamic panel and showcased CDI’s role in helping to establish a cooperative ecosystem in Maine. The panel, moderated by Cooperative Fund of New England’s Cooperative Business Support Officer, Carolyn Edsell-Vetter, who also serves as CDI’s Board
This summer, BOS program director Rob Brown spent a week in New York’s North Country region presenting at a series of events organized by the Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA). ANCA is an independent non-profit organization working to build dynamic local economies that sustain thriving communities in Northern New York since 1955. Carolyn Edsell Vetter,
Nearly 50 community leaders spent a Saturday with CDI and ROC USA at a networking and educational gathering in lovely Kingston, Massachusetts, discussing the needs of resident-owned communities.
On April 29th, over 30 cooperators from around the state of Maine gathered in Gardiner to connect and learn together and to expand organizing for the Cooperative Maine Business Alliance. Cooperative Maine has organized for 10 years, and a focus of this year’s annual gathering was to review our past and look forward to what
Jeanee Wright, our Housing Program Specialist in CDI’s NEROC Program, shares how empowering affordable housing residents enables them to meet their needs—and what more we can do to support them.
CDI’s intern Arhi Tallon spent the summer researching policy and case studies and learning the ropes of cooperative development. His reflections on the experience can be found below. This summer I was really happy to get the opportunity to do an internship with the New England-based Cooperative Development Institute (CDI). I had found out about
UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn recently issued a manifesto that calls for cooperative ownership of digital platforms. Corbyn took a page from the growing movement comprised of efforts to collectively own and democratically govern our workplaces using apps, websites, and similar technologies. Platform Cooperativism takes many shapes. It could be a multi-stakeholder co-op whose work
