Collaborative Governance

November 18, 2019 3-4:30 p.m. Mountain Time CASE E422 Activist Stacco Troncoso introduces the Decentralized Cooperative Organization Listen to the conversation here. Too often, the necessary care work that generates and sustains our lives occurs at the margins of the economy, unaccounted for and under-recognized. Spain-based activist Stacco Troncoso is...

Alphonse Desjardins (photo by Vista Stamps, used without permission) I have been trying for some time to put my finger on the difference—between the stories of co-op origins I read about for years while working on my book, Everything for Everyone , and what I encounter among many larger cooperatives...

In recent years, I have struggled to call myself an advocate for those with cerebral palsy. I’ve struggled to understand what that means both online and offline in the disability community. What do I advocate for? Whom do I advocate for? While attempting to answer these questions, I’ve come to...

Part of the appeal in being a worker on new gig-economy platforms like Uber or Taskrabbit is the apparent autonomy, the feeling of not having a boss. Sure, an app on your phone is your new boss, and through it a large, transnational corporation whose investors want nothing more than...

I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded. How does this work out for them? Not well. Usually one of two entirely predictable things happens as a result—and...

The law, perhaps by definition, lags behind people working for social change. I certainly found this over and over in the next-generation cooperative projects I profiled in Everything for Everyone . One co-op in Catalonia was, legally, a mishmash of entities that presented themselves as if they were a coherent...

Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model? We spoke with several cooperative-minded experts who...