Cleveland Owns' Educational Programming
This Spring/Summer, Cleveland Owns engaged in our biggest educational venture yet…75 participants in three study groups, each highlighting a different “bucket” of focus: cooperative workplaces, cooperative housing, and cooperative energy democracy!
Here at Cleveland Owns, we believe that cooperatives are about leveraging collective power, and to leverage collective power, we must build with a basis of collective political education.
Co-op Workplaces
In this 4-week study group facilitated by Bogdan Vitoc and Ms Mikki Smith, a cohort of curious cooperators learned about the foundations of the cooperative model in the workplace and why we think co-ops are a critical strategy for building community self-determination! We learned about existing co-ops in Northeast Ohio, how co-ops can help build the solidarity economy, an outline of the process for starting a co-op, and some processes for navigating interpersonal communication in ways that deepen collaboration.
Sign up here to be notified about future iterations of the class!
Next up on August 14th, we’re getting ready to begin our third cohort of Co-op U, our 16-week incubator program for teams ready to launch cooperative workplaces. Teams will be busy bringing their projects to life over the fall to get ready to share with the community at Dolphin Tank, our post-capitalist version of Shark Tank, on December 4th. Sign up to attend Dolphin Tank here!
Co-op Housing
As Cleveland-area median rent hikes outpace the state and nation, building the cooperative housing ecosystem and using it as a tool to decommodify housing has felt increasingly critical. It was so lovely gathering folks together for the second cohort of our cooperative housing study group. For 8 weeks, we met building knowledge around cooperative skills, housing development and localizing our knowledge of the Cleveland ecosystem. Thank you so much to Neighborhood Connections for hosting us! Read more about the study group curriculum here.
We also steward a co-op housing email list-serv so folks can stay connected to various housing events, co-op connection opportunities, and future cohort offerings. Join the list-serv at tinyurl.com/coopstudy!
Solar School
Working people are seeing the urgency of the climate crisis and the failure of our current for-profit energy system to provide the solutions our communities need. This failure is why Cleveland Solar Cooperative exists and why we’ve collaborated to host Solar School, a six-week, hands-on cooperative learning course that covers the current political landscape for solar development in Ohio, where and how to evaluate what places are best for solar, how to work with property and building owners to build solar, and what goes into financing a solar array.round cooperative skills, housing development and localizing our knowledge of the Cleveland ecosystem.
Solar School is co-facilitated by CSC member-owned Ayat Amin and Energy Democracy Organizer Craig Ickler. They’ve been joined by over two dozen Clevelanders who are sharing their collective knowledge and building new skills needed to build their own seat at the table.
Learn more about Cleveland Solar Cooperative at https://www.clevelandsolar.org
Thanks to St. Luke’s Foundation for their generous support of Solar School and New Era Cleveland for hosting us at their beautiful Love Project Movement Community Clubhouse on Buckeye!
We want to shoutout to the all-stars who participated in multiple of these classes and/or came to these classes and joined us on the co-op tour!!! Thank you so much for your commitment to cooperative education. We hope to run these cohorts again, so keep your eyes peeled for future cohort sign-up forms!