Hiya! Jess from Good Press here in Glasgow, we’re a bookshop, print service and book making studio, and project space/gallery. After 10 years of running as a collective of volunteers, we incorporated as a workers coop in October '21. Glad to be a member of this new workers coop federation! Looking forward to chatting and sharing more.
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What an amazing background - welcome to the forum Jess!
I’ll definitely drop by if I’m ever in the area 
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Hello! Alex here from Common Knowledge, a workers cooperative founded in 2019 that builds digital tools for social movements to multiply their impact and power. We are members of workers.coop
Excited to be here and excited to communicate with you all!
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Nice to see you here @alex! Would you be interested in joining the small digital infrastructure group?
Yeah sure. My participation may be low, but keen to learn and help out if I can.
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Hi folks, Stephen Reid from Dandelion Collective (dandelion.coop) here.
We’re collective of event-focused organisations devoted to new forms of culture and enquiry, structured as a not-for-profit worker co-operative.
I am the lead developer of our events platform Dandelion (dandelion.events):
We’d love to see fellow worker co-ops using Dandelion to host their events rather than Eventbrite etc!
(edit: I don’t seem to be able to post hyperlinks)
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Is the source code for Dandelion available for us to self-host? Or perhaps our existing CiviCRM install has this covered already, @Graham ?
Yeah CiviCRM provides our event hosting and delegate management.
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It is open source, but the advantage of using Dandelion is exposure - it was recently described as “the go-to place for progressives interested in personal development and societal transformation”
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Hey everyone, happy to be here and really amazing to see the mutliple ways to get organized with these tools. Some maybe know me from YCN meetings, I am from Germany, do research on democratic economy and used to be coop member as well, however, currently try to settle in Mexico with my family and there is no active network for the coop movement, this does not mean that the solidarity economy wouldn´t be a vivid here, especially the indigenous territories are key driver. I wish to work for the movement and with you help I am sure to be able to initiate some good processes. This for the moment, take care.
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Hi all! I’m Jay in Sheffield. I’m passionate about the co-operative model and so really pleased to be here.
I’ve worked in the non-profit community sector for twenty years, but am hoping to help the social enterprise I’m involved in evolve from limited company to co-operative. It’s still heavily reliant on grant funding as its revenue streams are still quite weak! It’s mostly small grants, predominantly National Lottery funding.
However, there is the age-old issue of our board of directors who kindly volunteer their time being separate from the freelancers who essentially run the company day-to-day; it’s just the nature of the beast with bureaucracy and hierarchy. We’ve been exploring the possibilities of becoming a co-op for years but still struggle with the potential challenge of a) access to grants through funding bodies who seem very keen on hierarchies and boards rather than workers running stuff themselves, and b) a lack of revenue streams.
Suffice to say, many questions abound: What chance would we have on survival on grant funding if we became a co-op? Have funding bodies changed their thinking on non-profit models? If workers took on responsibilities a board of directors had, would this require more work for them at lower rates? Does anyone have experience of being part of a co-op which is predominantly grant funded in absence of significant commercial revenue streams?
We may be missing something obvious, so if anyone has any insight, feel free to get in touch!
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Hi, If you want to talk about your potential worker co-op with one of our team (and the same goes for anyone else lurking on the forum). Book in a chat via: https://www.workers.coop/conversations
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Hi Jay.
I think the chances of survival on grant funding are an issue regardless of whether you are a co-op.
Unless you are registered as a charity, then you can convert your company limited by guarantee into a co-operative CLG with a change of Articles. If they still have charitable objects, a bar on profit distribution and dissolution clause that protects the assets then some funders will still happily fund you. Worker co-ops like Organiclea have managed to attract grant funding by taking this approach.
The lack of revenue streams is where I would focus my attention. Could the (soon to be) co-op identify additional revenue streams that you could add to your current offer.
Sorry, have to dash
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Hello coopers! I am looking to join efforts with other existing coops/freelancers dedicated to the consultancy/auditing/management of environmental and social development. I do have enough workload for myself, and I can share some of it as convenient and seek for further workload for the group if appealing. I am also open to do skills-sharing in both directions…
I do collaborate in other (non work related) coops.
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Hi, we’re a group of creatives based in Peterborough. Our Co-op is called Paper Rhino. Great to meet you all. We love collaborating on arts projects, murals, animation, illustration, design. This is great - love all the support in this group!
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Hi Dan, Unicorn’s ace! Wish we had something similar here in Peterborough.
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Hi everyone, I’m Leah. I’m part of a worker-owned co-op called fractals and I work mainly from Glasgow. We formed nearly two years ago and we’ve been taking most of that time to slowly step into being together and understanding how we work best together. We’re just ramping up to be fully operational in 2024.
We are called fractals because we help individuals and groups make small changes that shift big things. We do that mainly through facilitation, qualitative research and guidance using standard methods and/or creative methods like games mechanics, poetry, sketching, zine making, etc.
I am currently working up a service for individual professional guidance for user researchers and service designers who are interested in developing practice around justice and equity centred design approaches and I’m looking for one or two people to test it. If that’s you or someone you know, get in touch!
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Hi everyone, I’m Joe. I’m part of Yalla Coop, a web design and development agency owned and run by members in Gaza, UK and EU. We set up Yalla with a desire to use technology to transcend borders and empower a diverse and inclusive community that strives to create a fairer world in the way we work and in what we build.
At Yalla we want to promote community building, providing an open space where people from different cultures and backgrounds can connect, discuss and learn about each other’s values and experiences, hopefully creating a better model for collaboration in how we work and live together. These values directly influence the products we build.
Since launching in 2019, we have been working with charities, social enterprises and non-profits to build, launch and maintain digital products to support their missions and help tackle a variety of societal challenges, from adults who struggle to read in the criminal justice system through to people trying to navigate the Universal Credit process.
Looking forward to getting to know more of you and hopefully collaborating.
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Welcome to the forum @joefriel
@Sion @gneissgrrrl could workers.coop raise Yalla’s Gaza Crisis Fund with CECOP-CICOPA Europe to ask them to let members know about the appeal?
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Hi Chris,
looks like our workers international group will be meeting online tomorrow. I’m happy to raise this awareness about this appeal.
best
babs
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