Building Local Economies: Cross Sector Collaboration

Every community needs certain goods and services to be vibrant and inviting, food is one of those “anchor needs” along with housing, financial services, retail stores such as hardware, a coffee shop and other locally owned businesses. Do people know that all of these goods and services can be provided through cooperatives? In many cases these stores might be a co-op or are members of a cooperative and are already in your community, but it is not easily known to most people.

This session will explore how you can go about finding the cooperatives that already exist in your community and how you can begin the process of organizing them for mutual business, legislative and social reasons.