Canada

This research report identifies policies, structures, and financing mechanisms that can inform the development of appropriate models for Manitoba as well as suppot sector-controlled and self-sustaining co-operative development organizations. In so doing the report analyzes the context and history, sector infrastructure, tax legislation, and policies impacting cooperative development in Spain (Mondragon Co-op), Italy (the Emilia Romagna region), Quebec, and Manitoba.

By emphasizing wealth creation, communities can not only cultivate streams of income, but also build wealth. Through collectively owned and democratically governed assets, communities can build wealth. Economic development policy and practice should emphasize wealth creation. Employee ownership, through worker cooperatives is one way to build wealth. But worker cooperatives are rare in the United States; this is because there is not a supportive cooperative ecosystem.

This PowerPoint outlines the recommendations for item #107, which is the full masters thesis on building cooperative infrastructure in New York City based on Quebec's ecosystem

We will be using the US Federation of Worker Co-operatives (USFWC) as the example to examine the larger question of “authority versus liberty”; of which authority can be defined as a federation where co-operatives are members of a larger organization and therefore limiting individuals control over certain aspects and decisions; and of which liberty can be defined as the autonomy of individual co-operatives and their members to control their fate.

Over the last twenty years, a profound change has taken place in the relationship between citizens and their governments. In the western democracies, the gradual transformation of social care into a commercial commodity has fundamentally altered the role of government as the primary provider of social care and public welfare. This change in the relations between the state and the citizenry has been marked by starkly different perspectives, deep conflict, and the radical realignment of social and state institutions.