Our Cooperative Board Leadership Development (CBLD) team is looking ahead to another great year of supporting your organization’s success through our award-winning CBLD program. Now in its 21st year, CBLD provides an annual program of board support that includes monthly consulting, facilitated board retreats, a wealth of online webinars and other board trainings, and a library of resources to support [...]
Meetings are foundational to cooperative culture. 2 levels of learning Thane Joyal Presenter "Playing together is the best way to learn. We've designed these workshops to allow participants to experiment with different roles and different voices and to have fun doing it." [...]
Leading an independent grocery store has never been as difficult as it is now. And leading a multi-stakeholder organization like a cooperative brings additional complexities to an already challenging role. Your Content Goes Here Leading an independent grocery store has never been as difficult as it is now. And leading a multi-stakeholder organization like a cooperative [...]
The new year is a time for reflection and revision, and co-op boards are no exception. Whether your board has just decided to implement Policy Governance® or your board wants to refresh existing policies, the updated 2021 Policy Register Template provides a great opportunity to start these conversations.
Enrollment for Columinate's Financial Training for Directors is open! This will be the last session of this series in 2022, and we'd love to see you there. Monitoring the financial health of the organization is often the most intimidating responsibility assigned to co-op directors—but it doesn’t have to be! This training “covers the most important and critical aspects of co-op finances in a thoughtful, easy-to-understand manner,” explains Dave Olson, senior director of retail support at National Co+op Grocers. “Whether [you] just need a refresher or are entirely new to financial concepts, this virtual series can empower [you] to understand and participate in financial conversations with confidence.”
Leslie Watson, Board Member Northeast Investment Cooperative, Twin Cities, MN Participation by all stakeholders is a fundamental force in cooperatives and other democratic organizations. The International Cooperative Alliance states in their Blueprint for a Cooperative Decade that “Participation is once again becoming one of the cooperative sector’s most valuable assets.” Leslie Watson, a board leadership consultant with CDS Consulting Co-op and a board member [...]
Ready for digital literacy Co-ops have a lot of teaching to do. To build a cooperative ecosystem with knowledgeable and invested stakeholders aware of what it is they have become a part of, it takes a lot of orienting, sharing, demonstrating, and educating. A cooperative can fail if it does not consistently apply Co-op Principle 5: Education, Training, and Information. Lack of strong education systems within a co-op culture can slowly erode its core.
The Columinate Cooperative Board Leadership Development (CBLD) program provides annual board support that includes monthly consulting, facilitated board retreats, board training, and resource development. CBLD helps boards take advantage of their collective knowledge and talents, identify their annual goals, and connect with specific resources for their challenges of the moment. The program is run and staffed by industry professionals with experience and expertise in a variety of areas, and it can help to broaden the knowledge base each co-op has to draw upon to meet their goals.
We all have an idea of what it means to Serve our Co-ops. In this smart and informative video, Leslie Watson "cracks open the 'Serve' nut" for us and shows us that Service can actually be a much braoder concept encompassing far more than the few of us that agree to serve on a board.
