A post from the excellent Mongabay, a U.S.-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform.
Read MoreWelcome to Planet Co-op
Planet Co-op is a free resource for those interested in Co-operativism, what it is, why it exists, how it can help you and how it could be a tool to save our planet. Co-operatives are member-owned organisations. That could mean they are worker or customer-owned, or even a mix of the two. This means people are invested and have a say in how the organisation operates, andd can influence its sustainability and carbon footprint. Whether it be a food, farming, energy, childcare, education or transport co-operative, the common factor is: all members can contribute and benefit directly. This, in turn, means that all members can be involved in ensuring that their co-operative and its benefits will endure, for their children, grandchlidren and their descendants, by taking decisions that are sustainable now and for the future.
Resources for co-operative action
Co-operatives are not a new phenomenon, they are as old as our most ancient cultures and a key to our success.
Weak, defenceless and relatively slow, without co-operation we humans could never have become successful hunters.
Nor could we have built the wonders of our civilisations.
Together, on the other hand, learning from one another, working in collaboration, we have achieved space flight.
So what is stopping us turning our global commonwealth around, to an enduring, sustainable future?
Our parasitic paradigm, that has elevated greed to a cult and made ecological destruction our cultural legacy.
So now we must collaborate to rebuild!
People coming together to meet our needs,
green our economy and save our planet!
Housing
How can Housing co-ops help people be safely, affordably housed and create jobs?
Transport
How can local carshare Co-ops provide cheap transportation services and create jobs?
Money and banking
How can mutual Credit Unions provide finance, investments, savings and create jobs?
Organic Food
How can local farming co-ops service local Food buying groups and create jobs?
Energy
How can community energy co-ops put solar panels on every roof and create jobs?
Farming
How can farming co-ops supply healthy food, protect farms, nature and create jobs?
Your choices, amplified!
How you can join forces with others to change your impacts
Join forces to succeed
Building Co-operative enterprise can be a way of succeeding where traditional outfits might fail. Spread the risks, the work, invite diverse skillsets and experiences, incorporate a range of visions and perspectives, build inclusion into a company or community initiative… the advantages are many, and they do not come down to wealth, but to reaching out, all around us.
Ethical Funding
There are different ways of collecting funds for community, co-operative and collaborative enterprises and initiatives. Collecting donations for specific activities, building-up a Fund to support specific groups or locations, or establishing seed capital for enterprise, all require a home for money raised. Ethical banks, Credit Unions or Jamaican-style Pardners are all options for collecting and saving money, but the choiceof which is best suited for its management and growth, can benefit from tthe advice of an Independent Ethical Financial Adviser. The Ethical Consumer Magazine can help groups look at the ethics of a range of services.
Prevent polution
The opportunities to prevent water pollution are as numerous as the sources of pollutants, and nothing can better address that than going to the source! From Farmers to Factories, Schools to Churches, Government to Householders, the sources of pollutants are as diverse as the substances themselves. Whether gaseous, liquid or solid, pollutants can and should be contained, preventing their entry into the natural and built environments, and the solutions are often as diverse as the challenges: policies, guidance, techniques, technologies and practices, all come down to the same basic starting point: KNOWLEDGE!
Education and Experience
The secret of Empowerment is preparation, and there is no better way to prepare young people and all kinds of disadvantaged groups than to equip them with an Education and then offering them ways to consoilidate it with Experience. Textbooks, Manuals, How-to Guides, Refernce books, Websites, Videos and Podcasts, can all contribute to age and audience-appropriate learning that is greared to the abilities and capacity of learners. But without experience, education is ujst theory, and so the next step in creating opportunities to gain hands-on experience, with mentoring and supervision, recording progress and so creating a diverse learners' CV.
Make the world greener
Greening a community is as simple as finding partners in the growing of tree seedllings. Co-operative initiatives can recruit local people, institutions, community groups and even companies in the growing of tree seedlings, so that, come early Spring, groups of children, youth, elders and families can all participate in community tree planting events that turn brownfield sites of bare ground into healthy young forests of locally grown, indigenous trees, suited to the location and climate.
Community Woodlands
Once a site is identified for tree-planting for a community woodland project, the other thing to attend to is the preparation of soil, and there too community action can yield fantastic results! Coming together by bringing domestc food wastes to a dedic ated site can produce masses of healthy compost, rich in nutrients, but also 'seeded' with worms and invertebrates that will thrive on munching all the good stuff that will one day become part of the soil. Digging it all into trenches and filling them with this rich resource will prepare the way for the trees, feeding them with the right balance of nutrients, for a vibrant, thriving, suatainable woodland that will soon be populated by all manner of wildlife. Note that regular maintenance will be needed, for areas that are likely to be invaded by weed, and special attention paid to invasive ones, like Japanese Knotweed or Hymalayan Balsam.
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has bee to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five ged. It was in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Alison Burgas
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has bee to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five ged. It was in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Alison Burgas
Product Designer
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has bee to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five ged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Alison Burgas
Product Designer
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