Coop Financing Project: The Co-op Start-up Fund

Proposal:
To create a fund to support cooperative living in the Boston area

Your feedback is needed!

This proposal is in its development stage. Right now, we need input, ideas, critiques, and questions from as many stakeholders as we can reach.

We invite co-opers, co-operative organizations, housing rights activists, students, and other interested people to read through our proposal and give us both specific and general comments.

Read the proposal and submit comments at the Co-op Resources Wiki!

Yardsharing website launched!

Want to garden but don’t have space?
Got a yard but no time to do anything with it?
MyCityGardens.com lets you make requests, offer land, and find local listings through a neighborhood map.

Announcing the launch of My City Gardens, a local Boston-area yardsharing website that links landholders with little time or interest in working their outdoor spaces with neighbors who want to roll up their sleeves and start planting.

How it works:
We connect people based on proximity (via email exchange), then leave it up to you – as the gardener or the landholder – to decide if the match is right and arrange the details, such as days and times the gardener can access the space, what will be planted, how the crop will be shared, etc.

The vision:
Instead of urban and suburban areas being a sea of buildings connected by streams of concrete and monoculture lawns, imagine the places where you live and work surrounded by lush strips of tasty vegetables and beautiful flowers. Instead of running out of your apartment to buy salad that was grown in another state or continent, you could be running around the block to pick your own.

For those of you in co-ops, read why the Collective House Assembly supports yardsharing!

March Assembly Notes are Posted!

Happy 6th month anniversary, Collective House Assembly!!

This month we talked about what we’ve done and where we’re going. Some highlights include:

• Sparkling new websites– check out the Co-op Resources Wiki (!!!!) and the updated BostonCoops.Org, with a database of local collective houses!
• Ongoing skillshares, a popular success!
• Connecting co-op food systems with an eye towards regional food sovereignty.
• Financials: a co-op house accounting group
• Fun festivals including our inaugural bash, a harvest season potluck, and co-op games!
• Beginning the legwork for solid solidarity activism for housing justice, including going to meetings & volunteering with City Life/Vida Urbana as well as organizing a Co-op Start-up Fund

Plus discussing process, Operation Cooperation, forming new co-ops, and more.  Thanks to Charlie for the wonderful notes!

Next Assembly : 14 April
14 Apr, noon-2pm, at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison St.
Theme: TBA

February Assembly Notes are up!

This month we discussed partnerships with worker co-ops and housing justice organizers and continued to develop our idea for a Co-op Startup Fund. We also began compiling links and info for the Co-op Resources Wiki (ok, it’s still a static page for now, but the wiki is on the way!). Thanks to Oren for these great notes!

Next Assembly : 10 March
12 Feb, noon-2pm, at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison St.
Theme: Reaching Out, Reporting Back
It’s the Boston Collective House Assembly’s 6 month anniversary! We’re going to take this meeting to catch up on all the projects we’ve been working on, reportback on what’s been done, reflect on how we’ve been effective and what’s lacking, and make plans to better engage our neighborhoods and multiple communities in these co-op living adventures.

Yardsharing for Collective Gardens

At our last Collective House Assembly, folks wondered how we could cooperatively share yards big enough to cultivate with all the landless co-opers who would like to garden and eat homegrown produce. In an effort not to reinvent the wheel, two Collective House Assembly members met up this week with the founders of My City Gardens, a Boston-area yardsharing website that is about to launch this spring. We were really impressed!

The goals of My City Gardens are simple: match prospective gardeners with landholders in their neighborhoods. To do this, they’ll be launching an interactive map of yard space and gardener profiles in the next few weeks, allowing prospective yardsharers to talk it out and match themselves up (don’t worry– they won’t release any addresses publicly). In the meantime, they’ve already begun connecting folks who sign up on their website with gardens or gardeners in their area.

This project elegantly fills a need co-opers have already expressed at our Assembly meetings, and does so without limiting the benefits of cooperatively sharing garden space to those who already cooperatively share living space. Co-op houses that welcome a new gardener or two onto their land can act as ambassadors to their other collective projects and better integrate their co-op into their neighborhood. Meanwhile, big collective houses full of hungry housemates can work as gardener teams on large gardening projects, helping to maintain the momentum that has a tendency to dwindle as dog days and busy summer nights set in.

So co-ops, we encourage you to check out the site and consider signing up!

Looking for space to grow a garden?
Have extra space in your backyard?

My City Gardens is a free Boston-based yard sharing service launching in 2012. Visit our site:
• Sign up for updates
• Check out listings in your neighborhood
• Prepare for next spring! Post your available space or your gardening space needs.

Questions? Suggestions?
Interested in volunteer opportunities?
www.mycitygardens.com
info@mycitygardens.com
617.383.9523

ps don’t forget!
Next Assembly : 11 February
11 Feb, noon-2pm, at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison St.
Theme: Housing Justice with CityLife
Come meet with representatives from CityLife and the Cooperative Fund of New England to deepen our discussion of practical ways co-op houses can support housing justice in Boston. Bring your own projects and ideas!

January Assembly – Notes

Our biggest Assembly meeting yet! Members of Boston’s collective houses turned out in droves to discuss our local food system, from CSAs to Fair Trade.

Check out the Notes!

Next Assembly : 11 February
11 Feb, noon-2pm, at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison St.
Theme: Housing Justice with CityLife
Come meet with representatives from CityLife and the Cooperative Fund of New England to deepen our discussion of practical ways co-op couses can support housing justice in Boston. Bring your own projects and ideas!

January Assembly: Sat the 14th, 12-2pm @ E5

Our next meeting is approaching and we would love for you to join us. All are welcome!

This month’s theme: Food Sovereignty
Join us and members of Red Sun Press, Equal Exchange, and Boston Food Not Bombs for a discussion of urban agriculture, food distribution, bioregional farms, international solidarity and ways in which we as a community can make an impact and achieve autonomy through our food

Time: Saturday, January 14th, from 12:00 noon – 2:00 pm
Place: Encuentro 5, 5th Floor, 33 Harrison Ave, Boston MA 02111
Who: At least one representative from your house (other interested folks welcome too)
What: Potluck, planning, and working group discussion
RSVP on Meetup.BostonCoops.Org!

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. See you there!

“The cooperative is the physical entity of cooperation”

Human cooperation is the fundamental building block to solving all our problems.

Yesterday, some Collective House Assembly members met with Peter from Red Sun Press, a cooperatively owned and managed printing press in Jamaica Plain.

Red Sun Press is launching a campaign to promote coops for the 2012 Year of the Coop. We met yesterday to ask how housing co-ops and worker-owned cooperative businesses can work together to shift the capitalist economy to a more cooperative model.

Come to the next Collective House Assembly to hear a reportback and build on these ideas.

In the way that “Occupy” has come to define protest in 2011, so “Cooperation” can be the banner under which we define solutions in 2012. Cooperation is to embrace each others struggles and know that each is part of the whole.
–> read more at the Red Sun Press blog

December Assembly – Notes

Big co-op things are in the air for the upcoming year, which the UN has declared the Year of the Co-op!  Even my mom is excited– she handed me an an article from a recent NY Times about worker-owned businesses the moment I arrived on a recent visit home [link].  With the US Fed. of Worker Coops bringing their annual conference to Boston in June, we who live collectively have a unique opportunity to unite with worker-owners and the energy from the Occupy movement to leap forward towards a coooperative economy.  Our January’s Assembly theme is Food Sovereignty– beginning with the food system, we can seriously tackle the basic infrastructure of our economic system this year.  Please come out to Assembly meetings and help plan the transformation!

Anyway, on with the notes.

Next Assembly : 14 January
14 Jan, noon-2pm, at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison St.
Theme: Food Sovereignty
From gardeners trading labor for land at collective houses in town to expanding coop house purchases from nearby farms, from international solidarity with Global South farmers to examining food deserts in Boston, January’s assembly will be a winter planning moment to network local food needs and cultivation resources with the energy and power of our collective houses.  Bring your own projects and ideas!

December Assembly!

Time: Saturday, December 10h, from 12:00 noon – 4:00 pm
Place: Encuentro 5, 5th Floor, 33 Harrison Ave, Boston MA 02111
Who: At least one representative from your house (other interested folks welcome too)
What: Potluck, planning, and working group breakout
RSVP

This month’s theme: International Year of the Coop
Weekly workshops, monthly assemblies, seasonal gatherings, and actually actualizing dream projects like a new co-op startup fund… we’re gonna make 2012 Boston’s Year of the Co-op, too.