By Hannah Nielsen, The Vancouver Cleaning Cooperative
It started with “Co-op Bingo” – an icebreaker game to kick off the 2025 CWCF annual conference. My eyes, darting back and forth between the multitude of new faces and the colourful bingo card in my hand, finally settled on one sentence in particular. This sentence hit me hard (I’m talking “bang” right in the chest) but you’ll have to read to the end to know what it said.
This was the first time someone from my co-op, The Vancouver Cleaning Cooperative (TCC), had attended a CWCF conference and, as someone new to both my co-op and the co-op world in general, I was excited to learn all I could about worker-owned cooperatives and the people who build them.
Looking around the auditorium, the theme of this year’s conference, “Democracy, Diversity, and Justice,” was an appropriate choice. Unlike the homogeneous leadership conferences I’ve previously attended, this crowd seemed to personify diversity. Yet it wasn’t our differences that struck me, it was the frequency with which I found myself uttering “me too!” When it comes to gender, age, culture, ethnicity, neurodivergence and more, the co-op crowd is populated with people from every end (and everywhere in between) of the spectrum.
From small-scale organizations like Old Town Glassworks, to national ones like Co-operators, from emerging industries like Hypha, to those centuries old like cleaning, the variety of worker-owned co-operatives is astounding. What do we all have in common? Our shared belief that there is a “better” way, a way that can benefit the whole not just the individual, and an awareness that we can learn from one another.
Juliet ‘Kego Ume-Onyido (of Black Women Professional Worker Cooperative and Whole Woman Network) set the tone for the next three days with a passionate keynote speech, urging us to look to our past, to “go back and get” the lessons from our history and bring that learning into today. We were encouraged to look with open eyes and acknowledge that within each of us there are degrees of power and privilege over others, that there is always someone we can make room for, just as there is always someone who can make room for us. We were reminded too, that the biggest threat to the worker-coop model, indeed to all our freedoms, is not an individual entity but our own apathy. We must be aware and make others aware of our presence, our intentions and our power to change when we work as a collective.
Later, Camille Drumond (of Waterline Coop) shared insights into conflict and ways we can use conflict as a source of growth. Michelle Tsutsumi, Keira McPhee, Zsuzsi Fodor (of Sunflower Facilitation and Counselling Co-op) gave a hands-on demonstration of how we can use co-regulation and co-operation to grow our capacity to practice democracy, allowing us to experience the practice first-hand.
On the second day, following the CWCF AGM, Daniel Brunette (Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada) and Hazel Corcoran shared insights into the sheer variety of industries that make up Canada’s co-operative ecosystem. In the afternoon we headed to The Multicultural Health Brokers (MCHB) Coop, who opened their doors and welcomed us in for a tour of their facilities. Speakers from MCHB shared their experiences building an intercultural co-operative where the culture of their member-owners was respected and represented in their governance. A joy (and tear) filled evening followed as we honoured the individuals, present and past, who have contributed to our federation, rounded out by a delicious meal and a group dance.
On the third and final day of the conference, we were treated to a selection of educational workshops covering governance, succession planning, marketing, community engagement and ways of supporting justice, diversity, de-colonization and inclusion in the Canadian worker co-op sector.
Throughout the conference, though the schedule was full to the brim with educational and informational insights, it was the spaces “in between” that I found the most memorable. Unlike the corporate-chic conferences I’ve attended in the past, where “networking” is an opportunity to seek out advantageous connections before one’s competition can, if found myself forging genuine connections. My conversations with attendees slipped from the professional to the personal, swapping stories of how we came to join this unique world of worker-owned coops and the ways we’ve found belonging within it. There was a universal eagerness to share our experiences and insights, to welcome knowledge whenever it was offered and to forge new friendships between our companies. It was networking in the truest sense of the word, we were weaving together connections.
Which brings me back to my bingo card. What sentence struck me so forcefully? What simple phrase brought the tickle of a tear to my eye? It was being asked to find someone who “joined a co-op because it felt like home.” At a time when my life was shifting in ways I’d never imagined possible, TCC opened their arms and welcomed me in, providing a safe space to land and catch my breath. I found home in my co-operative and, though I learned many things during the CWCF 2025 Conference, the most impactful lesson I learned is that I’m not the only one.