Worker Co-op Finance 201: Part II
September 16, 2026 1 – 2:30 pm ET
This is a two-part series designed for CWCF worker co-op members. Finance 201 will allow you to get a more in depth understanding of your co-op’s financials, and how you can use financials for management decision making. Understanding your co-op’s financial systems and reports are the key to building your co-op’s financial strategies and resilience.
Please sign up for both Part I (taking place May 6) and Part II.
Join other worker co-ops in two webinars with Russ Christianson, a long time co-op developer. To participate effectively in this webinar, you will need to send your revised financial statements and budgets to Russ by September 9. Then during the webinar, Russ will review your new and improved financial statements and budgets and discuss your co-op’s progress with your peers.
Russ Christianson – Biography 
For over three decades, Russ Christianson has been working with communities, co-operative enterprises, unions, environmental organizations and private businesses to meet their strategic goals and develop good governance practices. He has helped launch over two hundred co-operatives, with a seventy percent success rate (for which he gives the founders credit).
Russ is the creator of the Co-operative Sustainability Scorecard, and in 2003, he received the Co-operative Spirit Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Ontario Co-operative Association (OCA). He has volunteered on the OCA’s Co-op Development Committee since the 1990s, he is co-chair of the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation’s Business Succession Committee, and is the Treasurer of CoopZone.
As a volunteer in his own community of Campbellford, Russ was the founding President of the Aron Theatre Co-operative and the Campbellford Seymour Community Foundation. He is currently the Chair of the Northumberland County Food Policy Council.
Russ lives on a reforested farm with his partner, Heidi Schaeffer, just north of Campbellford, Ontario. He graduated from Queen’s Commerce in 1981 and received a Masters of Industrial Relations from the University of Toronto in 1983.