Including Members in the Ends Dialogues
How is your board spending its time? It’s easy to get caught up in the delegation and accountability portion of a board’s job. Yet there’s a whole other side to the work that is equally [...]
Courageous Leadership Today Stronger Co-ops Tomorrow – Fall 2016
Facing heightening competition and increased pressure from member-owners, what does it mean to lead with courage? Building off of his wildly popular talk from our last round of Cooperative Cafes, Dave Olson of National C0+op Grocers (NCG) [...]
Policy Register Template Users’ Guide
Co-op boards that use Policy Governance® write policies as a way to codify their agreements for how they will work together, how they will delegate responsibility to management, and what authority they will then actually [...]
Video Field Guide: Membership Growth
Ben Sandel is a board leadership consultant and capital campaign expert working with startups and established co-ops helping them to reach their fundraising goals using best practices and clear planning gleaned from a multitude of [...]
Master the Fundamentals of Governance Leadership
Good leaders often ask this question: what would set us up for success? Most of the time the answer is simple. Master the fundamentals. By being good at the basics—like being committed to consistent governance [...]
Getting on the Train: Social media and co-op boards
By Holly Fearing 185 July-Aug 2016 Picture this: A person stands on the platform of a train station, and as a train passes through the station she flashes a bright message, hoping everyone on the [...]
Connecting the Dots: Strategic Board Leadership in Action
By Thane Joyal 185 July-Aug 2016 The future is unknowable. Or is it? Courageous leadership relies in large measure on wise choices. In his entertaining novels, Robert Parker often references the military strategist Clausewitz for [...]
Do You Know What Your Employees are Thinking?
No matter how closely you work with your staff, there are some things they may not tell you. There’s a power balance, even though we don’t like to admit it. Your staff may not [...]
POP Report: Hiring For Diversity and Creating an Inclusive Staff Culture
Key Insights The major takeaways from interviews with three co-ops on their initiatives to improve diversity in hiring and increase cultural awareness on their staff teams are make staff diversity and cultural awareness a priority [...]
So Our Co-ops are Mostly White, Now What?
In the more than 30 years I’ve been involved with co-ops—student housing co-ops, food co-ops, even a worker-owned collective—almost all of the participants have been white. The same has been true for most of the [...]