Drew here from The Bristol Bike Project. I’m our HR & Governance Coordinator.
We are a member co-op (50 members - comprising 10 staff and 40 of our volunteers). We been established for 15 years and were able to buy our premises 2 years ago with the help of a Power to Change grant.
We run a busy community bike workshop refurbishing donated bikes which we provide to refugees, asylum seekers, people who are homeless or facing long term unemployment.
We also have programmes for people who are socially isolated, young people and women / non-binary only spaces. People can also use the workshop to fix their own bike and we run maintenance courses.
We are largely self-sufficient as the profits from our bike shop cover the costs of the community work. Although it’s becoming increasingly hard to make ends meet and we are looking at other funding streams.
I’m up for organising an event for co-ops in Bristol.
Hi Drew & welcome. I’m in Bristol and delighted to hear you’re up for organising a co-ops event in Bristol. If I can help at all, just let me know.
In solidarity
Kate Whittle
I’m Oliver from fractals co-op. We’re a worker owned co-op. I join here with @LeahLockhart and @kierancutting. We are four worker/co-owners.
I am based in Bolton in Greater Manchester. My work is mostly research and evaluation, service design, and facilitation with charities and government clients. I am also a part-time researcher at Lancaster Uni, where my work focuses on using design to help build sustainable and equitable futures for energy and work.
I’m here to bring my experiences in education, grant writing, tech and research to help build workers.coop in its support of co-ops and those who are co-op curious.
Looking forward to getting involved this year and meeting many of you at the meet ups.
Hi Jay - join us at the Yorkshire worker co-ops get-together, 7 Feb at Doncaster Skate Co-op. Grant funding is a useful discussion topic for a number of workers co-ops.
I am Ivan from Bulgaria and I would love to ask some practical questions of how to run a coop. Coops are uncommon in my country, so I am looking for know-how from all possible sources.
Hi Ivan, so glad to have your voice here.
I recommend having a look at the How to Set Up a Workers’ Co-op guide, co-authored between Seeds for Change and Radical Routes (scroll down to 'Resources for Co-ops) - although it is written for co-ops setting up in the UK, it still has useful tips for self-organised businesses anywhere
Also the brief guide on this site has the link to the worker co-op code which is relevant to worker co-ops anywhere - mostly relevant to smaller co-ops, admittedly.
My name is David Abramson; I work with CoLab Cooperative, an international worker-owned co-op that develops tech in service to the cooperative movement and other values-aligned causes.
We’ve worked on all kinds of projects but some of my favorites are a the platform co-op technology we built alongside housecleaning cooperatives in New York City (and now Philadelphia), called Up&Go, a volunteer signup and training management system for a non-profit involved in election protections, and a pilot project to map data and allow researchers to explore local viability of regenerative solutions.
My main focus right now is exploring how we can collaborate to build useful, open source, and cooperatively owned, governed, and funded tools and tech to help us shift away from our dependencies on extractive big tech platforms and economies into structures more aligned with our values. Would love to connect here with other folks working on similar/complementary pieces of this puzzle.
Hi David Abramson, have you comes across the CoTech Discourse forum, it hasn’t been very busy recently but there might be some interest in what you have been doing there.
Hi everyone. I’m Alex Bird, a (very) long-time worker co-operator. I’m currently Chair of union-coops:uk a pressure group promoting the idea of union organisation amongst worker co-ops. Trade unions and worker co-ops come from the same roots and share the same ambition to create decent work, but the two groups of organisations have famously not gone on well together for a very long time. We work with colleagues in the US and Europe to promote this idea as we believe we have much to gain from each other. If you want to find out more contact me at alex@alex-bird.com or go to https://www.union-coops.uk
It would be great if you / others from union-coops.uk could come to a movement building online meeting, @samnord is the person organising these (I don’t think the date for the next one has yet been set), I’m sure we could have a productive discussion about strategies we could potentially work together on to promote worker co-ops in the wider Labour and Trade Union movement .
Chris
Yes it would be a good idea if I joined the movement building meetings so we can share ideas about influencing the TRU and Labour movement.
I dropped out of the mobilisation meetings due to pressure of time, but I’ll try to find time again for this. @samnord please drop me a reminder when next meeting date is fixed.
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