I love how good ideas seem to bloom concurrently. This week for example I sent my friend John Abrams a link. He is writing a book about the potential of combining the wealth held by retiring boomer business founders with the flexibility and agility of cooperative ownership structures. So I wanted to be sure that he'd seen this article: With Boomers Retiring, Worker Co-ops Are on the Rise.
He replied: "Yes indeed. I just got off the phone with Molly Hemstreet and Aaron Dawson of The Industrial Commons in NC. This is truly inspiring shit; they’re amazing. Not just talking - doing, in a very big way."
Bookmark that link. The site says that "The Industrial Commons founds and scales employee owned social enterprises and industrial cooperatives, and supports frontline workers to build a new southern working class that erases the inequities of generational poverty and builds an economy and future for all." As John says, they are doing this in ways that can be modeled, learned from and replicated.
In an inspiring video, Community Transformation in the Carolinas, Molly, who is Co-Executive Director of the Commons and the founder of a textile company called Opportunity Threads, says: "Manufacturing isn't the problem. It's really how we go about thinking about work to develop not only people but community as well. One thing we want to do with our work at the Industrial Commons is reclaim some of these words and give a new imagination and a new definition and a new pride to what industrial means, what rural means, what cooperatives mean, and then what a worker means."
Website: The Industrial Commons
|
|
