The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/LAF (FSC) seeks a qualified individual as lead organizer for a campaign to bring member democracy to rural electric cooperatives in the South, beginning in Alabama and Mississippi, and starting with the Black Warrior Electric Membership
Cooperation NC Gathering – May 22-23
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.
After Years Without a Grocery Store, Greensboro Neighbors Are Building One Themselves—And They’ll Own It
Fed up with waiting and, essentially, begging for access to affordable, quality food, residents in this predominantly African-American and low-income community decided to open their own grocery store.
With an Economy that Worked for All, Mike Brown Would Still Be Alive
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.
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century.
CoopEcon 2013 planned for October 4-6 in Epes, Alabama!
Following the success of CoopEcon 2012, organizers with the Southern Grassroots Economies Project began planning the second annual gathering for this year. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives will once again host this conference at their Rural Training Center in Epes,
SGEP celebrates a successful CoopEcon 2012!
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.
Community Wealth Creation / Retention and the Path out of Southern Bondage
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.
Launching the Southern Grassroots Economies Project
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
Of caulkers and quilt-makers
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