Catalysts for Common Good – Sharing strategies, tools, and skills to help organizations like yours build and empower community. Our work is adaptive and ever-evolving to best meet the needs of today's communities, but we remain grounded in cooperative values, self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity, honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others. We are on a journey together. Columinate is building [...]
The Abolitionists Challenge An Anti Racism Program Presented by LaDonna Sanders Redmond The Abolitionists Challenge, presented by LaDonna Sanders Redmond, is a movement for anyone who identifies as a cooperator and is interested in gaining an understanding of how they can commit to anti racism and eliminate white supremacy in cooperative spaces and in the [...]
The town of Astoria, Oregon has a strong independent streak. While other nearby areas are overrun with chain stores, their town has not sustained that level of attention or development. That doesn’t mean the 10,000 people who live there don’t want nice amenities, efficiency and convenience. The difference is that they are willing to create those opportunities for development from within their own community.
Raising capital is especially important for cooperatives, which don’t have a typical ownership structure that banks or lenders are used to. Mobilizing the co-op’s membership to raise funds through an owner capital campaign can be an excellent strategy.
UPDATED: March 2016
It seems like many co-ops are either in the middle of, just finished, or are about to start a project. And all of those projects need adequate capital to be successful. Raising money from co-op owners has become a standard component of project capitalization and the amounts co-ops are raising has been growing.
Capital campaigns can be a very important part of an expansion project - serving as a healthy test of member support. Will your members be willing to make a sizable at-risk investment because they believe in the co-op, its leadership and the benefits of the proposed expansion? Offering investment opportunities is also another benefit you can offer to your members. The planning phase of [...]
The Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op is uniquely situated in small town Middlebury, Vermont. When they were ready to expand, they reached out to Columinate for assistance with a member capital campaign.
Research suggests that public speaking tops the list as the number-one fear-inducing activity for most people. Put that together with asking people for money, and you’ve got a potent combination for high anxiety.
By Thane Joyal, Dave Swanson Change in the market, change in the world, can mean stress in the relationships within a cooperative as the organization adapts to the changing circumstances. Both having the right organizational structure and choosing the right vehicles to capitalize your co-op are important in making your cooperative responsive and resilient in the face of change. But their technical and legal [...]
