This year is the United Nations International Year of the Cooperative. And on Tuesday the Common Council of the City of Buffalo honored local coops with a proclamation. "So what?" you might ask. Well, our little bakery is made up of folks involved in various coops around town, including Nickel City Housing Coop, the Buffalo Cooperative Credit Union, and Lexington Coop, and we're big believers in the cooperative movement. After a lot of thought and discussion, we decided that as Fancy and Delicious moves forward, we will be restructuring into a worker cooperative.
To steal Wikipedia's definition, "A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and democratically managed by its worker-owners." Our bread won't be drastically altered, but the way we run our business will.
Two of our bakers, Tori and Emily, will be attending the 2012 National Worker Cooperative Conference this month and will return to present their findings in a forum at Nickel City, the house where we distribute the bread. Join us on Wednesday June 27 at 8pm, 208 North St. to learn and discuss the worker cooperative model. Or come early for a house potluck dinner starting at 7!
Great to meet you at the conference yesterday in Boston. There are a couple of online resources from the Upstate Cooperatives Summit that I think are worth spreading the word about...
ReplyDeleteMaps of New York State cooperatives:
http://cny.coop/content/cooperatives-new-york-state
Slides from the presentation on worker cooperatives:
http://cny.coop/content/how-worker-cooperatives-work
Good luck!
Joe