By Hazel Corcoran
Staff Retreats/Free Virtual Conference/Member Supports/ Federal Lobby Campaign/Co-operative Colloquium at Dalhousie Law School
As we move into fall, I hope everyone had a safe and relaxing summer. A highlight for CWCF staff was our retreat in Ottawa in late July, which gave most of us the chance to connect in person for both learning and social opportunities. We also had a second “mini retreat” in Halifax earlier this month, where two of our Common Good Capital program staff, Laura Ross and Josh Dyke and I met up for a game of mini golf and lunch at Glitter Bean cafe.
Over the coming months, we’ll be busy preparing for this year’s virtual Conference, Unleashing Worker Co-ops for Success, taking place November 19th through 21st. We’re excited to have lined up our keynote speakers, various other workshops and sessions, and simultaneous interpretation (English-French) through; we will soon have more details to share on other sessions and speakers (please see the interview in this issue with one of our keynote speakers, Júlia Martins Rodrigues). It will also be engaging and, I daresay, quite fun. We hope to see many of you there, gathered in some cases for the watch parties and other networking events, which we are pleased to support.
Providing support for both new and longtime worker co-ops remains a priority for CWCF, one we are fulfilling with our technical assistance grants program, our Worker Co-op 101 webinar series, and our Worker Co-op Academy. We are embarking as well on a significant federal government relations push to obtain a pilot version of our expanded Tenacity Works Fund, as outlined in Part 2 of our federal pre-budget brief submitted last month. Our goal is to work quickly, with allies in the federal government and in the solidarity economy to seek a pilot project, of about 1/10th of the full amount sought, to enable significant supports for conversions to worker co-ops. This will be critical because our Tenacity Works Fund is fully committed, and we expect significant demand for capital to fill the equity gap, once the legislation is enacted to enable a capital gains tax exemption for business owners selling to their employees as worker co-ops, or employee ownership trusts. That should be in place within a couple of months, for an additional two years. You can learn more about this at the CoopZone-CWCF co-op developers’ session of our Conference, November 20th in the session at 7 pm ET.
In addition to these longstanding supports, we remain on the lookout for new ways to help our members. If your co-op has an employment opportunity, online sale, or other event you’d like us to promote, we’re happy to do so in both our newsletter and our social media. We’re also exploring the possibility of offering a bookkeeping service to our members; please see the separate article in this issue about a brief survey that will guide this process.
Last but not least, I’m pleased to be one of the presenters at a Colloquium on Co-operatives and the Good Director, at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, September 27th and 28th. An excerpt of my abstract to summarize what I will cover, is “In the worker cooperative movement, the priority is on democratic agency and quality jobs for working people. Co-operatives extend citizenship – one person, one vote – to commercial enterprise. Good cooperative directors serve the members as equals.” I greatly look forward to the planned discussions among all the panelists. And it’s wonderful that this is being hosted at the law school from which I graduated. Way back when I attended, it seemed that almost none of the professors seemed to know that there were Co-operative Associations Acts across Canada. It seems that the times may be changing, at least somewhat, on this score.