This Southern Appalachian town uses co-ops to build new communities around old industries

In the foothills of western North Carolina, the small town of Morganton is home to a growing co-op movement that’s reinvigorating the region’s once-struggling textile and furniture manufacturing industries, and refashioning them around egalitarianism and localism.

Nathan Schneider’s Bounty of Fresh Ideas for Cooperatives

How can cooperatives serve as vehicles for social change, especially in online spaces?  What practical interventions could check the anti-social behaviors of Big Tech?  These are two questions that I explored recently with Nathan Schneider…

A Visit to Mondragon

Workers should be in charge. People who have their life on the line should make the decisions. Because those that have their livelihood on the line are more likely to make decisions that would benefit the company as well as themselves because the decisions that are made impact them and beyond.

Power for the People: How PG&E’s Failures are Spurring a Movement Toward Electric Cooperatives

But if there’s a silver lining to the PG&E disaster, it’s that — in the midst of filing for bankruptcy — they’ve opened up the space for conversations about alternatives. And perhaps one of the most interesting of these conversations is based on the idea of transforming the utility into a network of cooperatives: utilities owned and managed by the ratepayers themselves.