ANNOUNCEMENTS
Join us for the California Co-op Conference on April 5 & 6 in Los Angeles! We’ll celebrate cooperatives by sharing successes and provide you with the most effective ways you can help strengthen and expand the cooperative movement! Click here for more details on the Conference, including workshops and schedules.
Workshops will reveal how cooperatives revitalize and fortify local economies by creating jobs, housing, and locally owned businesses. You will learn how to start a new cooperative, how to develop and to strengthen your own cooperatives. The conference offers you an opportunity to engage with other cooperators and discuss ideas, experiences, and strategies.
Ready to register for the conference? Simply click here to register online or download the registration form if you would like to mail/fax it in.
Position Announcement: Cooperative Facilitator
Location: Lompoc, CA
The initial focus of the position will be on developing Green Broom Brigade as a profitable business and as a successful worker cooperative including working with members to develop the business to full capacity. This will include member development and cooperative education, as well as expanding the business with an emphasis on producing quality environmentally green cleaning services to clients. The facilitator will assist members with accounting by costing product and services, tracking payments; and working with CCCD’s bookkeeper to maintain a system of wage and accounts tracking.
Qualifications & Expectations
• Bachelor or Master’s degree or equivalent experience in Business Administration, Community Development, Economics, Sociology, or other related field
• Experience with cooperative development and leadership; experience with worker cooperatives preferred
• Experience in community organizations and team development; experience working in diverse communities
• Demonstrated experience of strong verbal and written presentation skills
• Superior organizational and interpersonal communication skills
• Entrepreneurial/Business or comparable skills
• Ability to learn quickly and have an interest in developing a variety of new skills; be able to manage multiple tasks and meet deadlines; have the ability to work both autonomously and with groups.
• Experience interacting with the press and other communications media a plus
Hours: Full Time. Schedule varies week to week. There is an average of 1-3 evening meetings per week and some weekend meetings.
Languages: Must be bilingual in Spanish and English, with good writing and speaking skills in each language.
Salary: Starting salary based on Full time Equivalent (FTE): $3,000 to $3,333/month, based on education and experience. Position includes paid holidays, vacation time; full time employees are eligible for health insurance.
Application Process: Deadline: Open Until Filled. Applicants for the Cooperative Facilitator position must submit a completed CCCD application, their full resume along with a brief cover letter by email to CCCD at coops@cccd.coop (subject line: “Cooperative Facilitator Position”), or mailed to: CCCD; 979 F St. Suite A-1; Davis, CA 95616.
Please click the link below to download application.
INQUIRIES BY EMAIL ONLY, NO PHONE INQUIRIES, or WALK-INS PLEASE.
Click here for full job description Click here for application
Excited yet? We thought so. Download the app and go cooperate!
Fast Company Magazine recently featured the Liberty Ship Cafe, and Richmond, CA's movement for cooperative development. The Liberty Ship Cafe, a full-service catering operation, is an incubator project of CCCD. They provided food for our 2012 CA Cooperative Conference, which was fabulous! (You can peruse their menu online, contact them for catering in Richmond, CA, and enjoy a meal from their booth at the Richmond Farmer Market.)
Check out an excerpt below, and read the full article on the Fast Company website.
Hippie Capitalism: How An Impoverished U.S. City Is Building An Economy On Co-ops
Fast Company Magazine
By Emily Badger, 05-14-2012
With sky-high unemployment, Richmond, California, is not a place where traditional business models alone can dent poverty. The city has turned to co-ops in hopes that people who might be unemployable in the traditional economy gain access to both jobs and control over their own labor. At the height of the recession, the unemployment rate in Richmond, Calif., topped out at a dismal 19%. That figure has more recently crept down about three points, an improvement that might be worth celebrating if the city didn’t still have so far to go.
City councilman Tom Butt deadpans that Richmond, a city of about 100,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area just north of Oakland, is a place with “more than the usual number of socioeconomic challenges.” A large share of the immigrant population doesn’t speak English. Crime is high--Richmond is regularly ranked among the most dangerous cities in the country--meaning local residents who’ve gone through the criminal justice system have even rougher odds of landing a job. This is not, in other words, a place where traditional business models alone can dent poverty....
..In January, the Liberty Ship Café launched in a booth at the local farmer’s market, with the help of the California Center for Cooperative Development, which is also working with the city to fulfill McLaughlin’s vision. The café today has just three worker-owners, immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, and it does not yet provide a full-time job for any of them. Every Friday, they sell healthy sandwiches, salads, and empanadas at the farmer’s market, and the business is expanding into lunchtime catering around town. Richmond has a long way to go from this one fledgling co-op to a community that will be transformed by the idea in the way that Mondragon has been over decades.
But already the Liberty Ship Café has begun to put a tangible face on all the talk around town about co-ops. “The whole worker-owned co-op thing, it’s most beneficial for the people directly in the co-op, but there’s a trickle-out effect, and we want to talk to people about that,” says Lexi Hudson, a co-op specialist with the California Center for Cooperative Development who has been working with the café. “When one person in the community feels empowered to own their own business and make their own decisions, they’re absolutely going to be affecting everybody else in the community.”...read the rest at the on the Fast Company website.
Proudly Fly a Co-op Flag!
