Announcing: Cultivate.Coop

Cultivate.Coop is a new, innovative tool by and for the cooperative community. It is an online and interactive hub for developing knowledge on cooperatives and skills in cooperation. With Cultivate.Coop, cooperators and cooperative allies can pool their knowledge to collaboratively increase the amount of information on co-ops freely accessible to all people, as well as build useful and effective educational resources for the cooperative community. In fact, using this website is an act of cooperation in itself, as people develop and expand it based on their own experiences and insight for everyone’s gain.

To see Cultivate.Coop in action and find out how it may useful for you, please watch our demonstration video by clicking here http://bit.ly/bNkc62. (Or visit our website at www.cultivate.coop. )

Cultivate.Coop will go live in late November 2010. To stay up to date with Cultivate.Coop, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and read our blog.

P.S. Want to stay in the loop with Cultivate.Coop by e-mail? Send us a message at CultivateCoop@gmail.com with your e-mail address and name.

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Support Cultivate.Coop

Cultivate.Coop is an online hub for sharing knowledge and resources on cooperatives. It is a space to collect information and build educational tools for the co-op community.

In order to make Cultivate.Coop an effective and powerful tool for the cooperative community, we need your support before the website launches in late November. You can help Cultivate.Coop strengthen the cooperative community by supporting the project with knowledge, educational resources, and/or funds:

1. Help us gather content. Write one to three paragraphs on a specific cooperative subject. This can range anywhere from topics such as decision-making processes in co-ops to the history of co-ops, cross-sector cooperation, the story of Mondragon, how to start a co-op, co-ops as a tool of community economic development, where and how to raise funds for starting co-ops, etc. If your personal focus is within a specific sector, i.e. worker-cooperatives or grocer co-ops, your contribution can focus on that area. Every contribution will help us make more information on co-ops freely available to everyone. To contribute content or discuss the possibility, send us an email at cultivatecoop@gmail.com! Interested in participating but not sure what you’d write about? Send us an email and we’ll work with you to think of something. Or you can view our content “wish list” here.

(All information and resources donated to Cultivate.Coop will be licensed under a Creative Commons license.)

2. Help us collect resources for teaching and learning about co-ops. Have you put together a handout, a workshop, a lesson plan, a curriculum, or anything else for teaching about cooperatives and cooperation? Have you constructed a tool that helps individuals or small groups learn about co-ops? If you contribute these materials to Cultivate.Coop, many more cooperators and aspiring cooperators will be able to put them to use. What’s more, other individuals can collaboratively build on these materials to make them more impactful resources for the co-op community. To contribute materials, or discuss the possibility, send us an email at cultivatecoop@gmail.com! You can also view our educational resource wish list here.

3. Help us raise funds for our efforts to cultivate the cooperative community. A donation of $5, $10, $15, $25, or even $250 will go a long way towards ensuring that Cultivate.Coop is a powerful tool for strengthening and advancing co-ops and a cooperative economy. All your donations to Cultivate.Coop are tax-exempt, thanks to the Cooperative Development Institute (CDI), our non-profit fiscal sponsor. In addition, this project is being built by co-ops and co-op organizations, so any money that you contribute will stay in the cooperative community.

To make a Paypal or credit card donation, click here (or go to http://bit.ly/9CCrHR ). Alternatively, you may send a check to: CDI, PO Box 244, South Deerfield MA, 01373 with “Cultivate.Coop” in the memo line.

Any individual that supports Cultivate.Coop in one of these three ways before the website launches in late November will be featured on a permanent “Thank You” page. If you are a member of a co-op or a cooperative organization, we will list your cooperative/organization at the top of the page with a brief description and link to your co-op’s website.*

Finally, keep in mind that not only is this resource being built and implemented by cooperatives, but Cultivate.Coop is also guided by a growing Advisory Board. This board is composed of individuals from co-ops and co-op organizations and will maintain Cultivate.Coop’s dedication to and usefulness for the cooperative community.

* If you would like to support Cultivate.Coop but would prefer to not be listed on the Thank You page, just let us know.

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.