Worker Co-op Finance 201: Part I
May 14, 2025 12-1 pm ET
Understanding your co-op’s financial systems and reports are the key to building your co-op’s financial strategies and resilience.
Join other worker co-ops in two webinars with Russ Christianson, a long time co-op developer. Before the first webinar (May 14), you will send your financial statements and budget to Russ for analysis, and during the webinar you will discuss this with your peers, and begin developing your strategies to improve your co-op’s financial systems.
In the second webinar (September 9, 2025), Russ will review your new and improved financial statements and budgets and discuss your co-op’s progress with your peers.
Please note these webinars are for members of CWCF members only.
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.