The North Carolina Cooperators Gathering is an opportunity for social justice activists and those interested in growing cooperative businesses and economies in North Carolina to gather, learn more about cooperatives and network with like-minded people across the state.
We dedicate CoopEcon this year to Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and the many other victims of police and other racist violence; We honor the heroic people of Ferguson, Missouri and the countless ordinary people in communities across the country who know a change must come and are willing to participate in creating that change.
We dedicate CoopEcon to the people of Appalachia who see the tops blown off their mountains and their streams poisoned. They watch as their children get cancer at high rates. Their beautiful homeland is sacrificed to the greed of the coal companies then abandoned when there is little profit left to extract. We honor those who organize and resist this devastation.
People from across the Southeast gathered in Epes, Alabama at the Rural Training and Research Center of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives from July 27-29 to begin the hard work of building democratic ownership in our communities. Those new to the world of cooperative business development learned what it takes to put together a business that is responsive to the community it grows from. People involved in functional cooperatives gained valuable insight into the steps needed to grow them, make them more sustainable, and contribute to region-wide development.
The South is the poorest part of the USA. This is due to historic patterns of oppression and exploitation that date back to the seizure of this land from its original inhabitants, the importation of Africans who were forced into chattel slavery, the immigration of indentured servants who worked out a variety of terms of servitude, the settling of Europeans fleeing various oppressions and seeking opportunities and more recently, the immigration of our neighbors from south of the border.
From March 18-20, 2011, people from across the US South convened at the highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, Tennessee to launch the Southern Grassroots Economies Project. SGEP is building networks across the US South to promote and
By Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Published by the New Internationalist Jessica Gordon Nembhard tells the little-known story of the part played by co-ops in forwarding the rights of African Americans THROUGHOUT his life, African American scholar WEB Du Bois proposed that