Living Cities. a consortium of the world’s 22 largest foundations and banks including the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, will award $14.7 million in grants to the Cleveland Foundation to continue their model of Community Economic Development which includes creating worker cooperatives to serve large archor institutions.
Over the past five years, the Cleveland Foundation used its influence to enable discussions for the first time among the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University about how they could pool their collective buying power. The foundation also led the effort to create new worker-owned cooperative companies based on the promise of such spending. So far, two companies -- Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Ohio Cooperative Solar -- are up and running and employing 52 workers. Another, Green City Growers, is set to launch... The cash and loans from Living Cities will enable the foundation and its local partners to create eight or nine more worker-owned cooperatives by 2013. The companies could, for example, clean and maintain medical equipment, or assemble sterile kits of materials for use in hospitals.
Comments
I've been hearing about the
Submitted by Mark Rego-Monteiro (not verified) on
I've been hearing about the Evergreen Co-op, and am glad to get a better idea of this financing initiative by Living Cities. Without delving into some of the underlying ironies and complications of corporate financing, I would think the natural advantages of co-op enterprises would be related to local financing. A quick check tells us that Cleveland already has some 39 credit unions. While Living Cities may be providing funds in a more enlightened way than most funding intiatives, I'm encouraged to relate future entrepreneurship to the co-op bank model. The 2009 ILO report on co-op resilience gives a great overview of the latter.
I'm encouraged to relate
Submitted by Joe on
I'm encouraged to relate future entrepreneurship to the co-op bank model
When Ted Howard spoke at the USFWC conference, he had some draft slides of the eventual whole Evergreen organizational structure, and I'm pretty sure it included an internal financing program (frankly, it included every type of cooperative support structure you could imagine). In the meantime it looks from this presentation like each cooperative contributed a % of their surplus to a development fund that is being hosted by local Shorebank which, huh, recently got bought up.
The 2009 ILO report on co-op resilience gives a great overview of the latter.
Good reccommendation! I added it to the library.
Add new comment