“Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives is a creative and exciting educational game about the growing co-op movement. In order to survive as individuals and to strive for the success of their cooperative, players make tough choices while putting their teamwork abilities to the test. This is a game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everybody loses.

By playing Co-opoly, players will learn about the unique benefits, challenges, and operations of the cooperative world and how the co-op model can strengthen communities and organizations – as well as the skills needed to participate in a co-op! We will also be developing a number of additional educational resources that can be used alongside of Co-opoly!”

Co-opoly is a sister project of Cultivate.Coop, and we need to raise $8,800 to manufacture and distribute the game. You can help out by going to Co-opoly’s Kickstarter.

Find out more at CoopolyGame.Com

This is an incredibly important step forward for Cultivate.Coop. When we started this website, our goal was to make it so that any cooperator and cooperative ally could share what they know about co-ops and cooperation with the rest of the world via a central, free, and accessible online hub. In this way, aspiring cooperators, existing cooperators, and those dedicated to advancing the cooperative community could easily access information and materials for educating themselves as well as others about everything related to co-ops, cooperative economics, and cooperation.

Unfortunately, when we first launched, editing materials on Cultivate.Coop required some knowledge about wiki-editing code. While we put together a tutorial that walked people through the basics of this, it was still understandably not on an accessible level for a large number of people. This, of course, created a barrier to our mission.

However, Chris Fenton,in his capacity as an intern with the Northwest Cooperative Development Center(NWCDC), took the time and effort to help us improve the site. Now, anyone who is familiar with writing and editing materials on Word, Google, and other text documents can easily contribute to Cultivate.Coop in the same way – and thus share their knowledge and resources with the entire cooperative community. For this, we are incredibly thankful to Chris and the NWCDC.

What editing a Cultivate.Coop page looks like now:

What editing a Cultivate.Coop page looked like before:

Please help us spread this important update far and wide to your cooperative contacts. We hope that this change will make it so that many more people will now find it easy, fun, and important to contribute to the growth of free, accessible information and resources on co-ops and cooperation for everyone. Of course, if you prefer the old way of editing Cultivate.Coop, you can always choose to “disable” the rich text editor from the editing page.

Stay tuned, because we have some more big and exciting advancements to Cultivate.Coop planned for the future.

***

P.S. Now that it’s so easy to contribute to Cultivate.Coop, we thought we might help start you off by sharing which pages on Cultivate.Coop are currently “stub” articles that need expansion – as well as those that don’t yet have any information on them.

Some stub articles:

• Obtaining Start Up Capital for Cooperatives
• Buy-In
• Cooperatives in low-income communities
• Education in Cooperatives
• Cooperative Vocabulary
• Marketing the cooperative advantage
• Rochdale Pioneers
• Reasons to start a cooperative
• Cooperative governance

Some articles that currently have no information, which you can help build:

• Student cooperatives
• Cooperative Bylaws
• Evergreen Cooperatives
• International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)
• Majority-based decision making
• Human resources in cooperatives

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Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook.
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.
Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.

Since our launch in December 2010, Cultivate.Coop has seen considerable success, with thousands of visitors coming to the site every month from all over the world. We’ve heard from existing cooperators, aspiring cooperators, and cooperative educators about how the site has been incredibly helpful to them in both teaching and learning about co-ops as well as cooperation. The website has been featured in numerous publications, such as: the CooperationWorks! newsletter, the Cooperative Business Journal, and NASCO’s “Co-op Voices.” The website already contains over 90 articles on cooperative subjects and over 20 educational resources for teaching and learning about co-ops. New content is being contributed to the site every week. Recently, the Cooperative Development Institute used content from Cultivate.Coop in their newly launched 10-month co-op development and education program in Conneticut.

Yet, we need your help to make sure this resource for and by the cooperative community has an even bigger impact. It is the nature of Cultivate.Coop that the more people who use the website, the more powerful it will be – and the more content and resources it will have for building and sustaining democratically-owned organizations.

You, your co-op, or your cooperative organization can help us spread the cooperative mission as well as materials on how to practice cooperation by including a link to Cultivate.Coop (http://Cultivate.Coop). However, some groups are opting to include a Cultivate.Coop badge on their website. This is tremendously helpful in spreading the Cultivate.Coop mission of democratizing knowledge as well as resources for democratizing our economy and workplaces.

Cultivate.Coop Badge

Therefore, we’ve made it easy for you to do the same! We have several versions and sizes of a Cultivate.Coop badge below. You can either save and import the image onto your website and link it to Cultivate.Coop OR use the code we have provided for you below!

For a Large Button

Code:

<p><a href=http://cultivate.coop><img title=CultivateCoop src=http://toolboxfored.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/button-image-option-2.png alt=CultivateCoop/></a></p>

For a Medium Button

Code:

<p><a href=http://cultivate.coop><img title=CultivateCoop src=http://toolboxfored.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/button-image-option-2-medium.png alt=CultivateCoop/></a></p>

For a Small Button

Code:

<p><a href=http://cultivate.coop><img title=CultivateCoop src=http://toolboxfored.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/button-image-option-2-small.png alt=CultivateCoop/></a></p>

For a Tiny Button

Code:

<p><a href=http://cultivate.coop><img title=CultivateCoop src=http://toolboxfored.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/button-image-option-2-tiny.png alt=CultivateCoop/></a></p>

If you want alternative text, here is another button image that you could use!

Code:

<p><a href=http://cultivate.coop><img title=CultivateCoop src=http://toolboxfored.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/button-image-option-1.png alt=CultivateCoop/></a></p>

Please e-mail us at CultivateCoop AT gmail DOT com if you have any questions. And thank you!

However, in the near future, our goal is to make it so that Cultivate.Coop can be edited almost as simply as any Word or Google document. Unfortunately, neither the time nor the resources are available to us yet to realize this aspiration.

In the meantime, if you want to contribute new articles, educational resources, or other content to Cultivate.Coop and don’t feel ready to learn the basics of editing a wiki, you can send content to us via e-mail (CultivateCoop AT gmail DOT com) and we’ll add it on your behalf!

Take a look at our list of articles currently on Cultivate.Coop – do you see any missing topics that you have pre-made content for that you could contribute? If not, would you be able to write something about a specific subject that is missing or lacking on the website? If you e-mail these to us, we can put them up on Cultivate.Coop for you! (As well as cite where the resources/content came from.)

In addition, take a look at our current list of educational resources for both teaching cooperatives and learning cooperatives. Do you or your organization have anything you could add that you’d like us to put up on your behalf?

Cultivate.Coop is built on the idea that by sharing knowledge and resources, we can catalyze the ability for aspiring and existing cooperators to participate in strong cooperatives, as well as teach others about cooperation. Therefore, we want to do everything in our power to make it easy for you and other cooperators on the ground to share your resources and information with the rest of the co-op community.

Cultivate.Coop also has a host of “stub” articles that need to be expanded. The content you contribute could address these topics! Stub articles on the website include: buy-ins, shares, obtaining start-up capital for co-ops, history of cooperatives in the United States, reasons to start co-ops, and more. See the full list of “stub” articles that need expanding here.

Please feel free to e-mail us if you have any other questions or comments about adding resources and content to Cultivate.Coop!

***

P.S. We’re also considering holding a webinar/workshop of how to edit and contribute content to Cultivate.Coop. Please let us know if this idea would be of interest to you or your organization!

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook.
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

1. New Year, New Articles, New Educational Resources

2. Let’s Show the World that Cooperation is Possible

3. Final Tidbits: Recent Press and Stay Tuned for Exciting News

Dear Wonderful Cooperators,

We hope that your new year has been off to a fantastic start! We’d like to take a little of your time to tell you what’s new on Cultivate.Coop as well as how, going forward, you can help democratize knowledge for democratizing our economy.

1) New Year, New Articles, New Educational Resources

Thanks to everyone who helped make Cultivate.Coop‘s launch an incredible success! New information is being added everyday and new people are finding their way to the website from listserves, search engines, friends, social networks, and more. New articles on the website includes useful software for cooperatives, starting a cooperative, starting a diversity committee in cooperatives, and more. In addition, some pages have also been drastically expanded, including the article on “cooperative economics.”

We also have a host of new educational resources on Cultivate.Coop, such as a list of films and videos on cooperatives (many of which can be viewed for free online) and facilitated discussions on power dynamics in diverse groups. New discussion threads have also broken out on Cultivate.Coop, including whether there should be additional cooperative principles and the importance of co-ops’ mission statements on their practices.

In addition, we recently updated and expanded Cultivate.Coop’s “guided tour” of articles due to the wide-range of new content on the site. The guided tour is a specific selection of articles that helps individuals read about cooperative subjects in a linear, start-to-finish fashion. It is similar to a table of contents and can be great for people looking to use Cultivate.Coop like a book on co-ops.

If you see any cooperative subjects that you think are missing from the site, it is easy to add your own article. Look at this tutorial for help!

2) Let’s Show the World that Cooperation is Possible

Cultivate.Coop is a unique tool that can be used by the cooperative community to demonstrate that cooperation really is possible. By recording the stories of cooperatives – new and old, aspiring and existing, successful and struggling, unique and established – we can inspire those looking to the cooperative model in schools, workplaces, governments, communities, and more. We can demonstrate the existing wealth of cooperative models, philosophies, and experiences. The stories of individual cooperatives can serve as powerful lessons to those looking to start new co-ops as well as for those seeking to improve their existing co-ops.

Recording our cooperative stories and histories will also help cooperative community members recognize the breadth of other cooperatives - thereby improving our ability to collaborate and mutually aid one another in accordance with the sixth cooperative principle. In addition, a page on Cultivate.Coop could be good exposure for any co-op – Union Cab of Madison Co-op‘s page, for instance, already has 170 views in a short time.

If you’re a cooperative do-er, supporter, or developer – you can help paint a broad-stroke of the cooperative environment by doing this with only ten – twenty minutes (or less) of your time.

If you want to add a co-op, consider including any of the following subjects: When did the co-op start? What is its history? What does it do? What are its mission and goals? Where is it? What type of co-op is it and who does it serve? What are any unique aspects of the co-op? You may also include any multimedia – from pictures to videos and more. Obviously, you do not need to add all of these content areas. Even a simple “stub” page – a paragraph or so – will help get the ball rolling.

Finally, if you’d like to add a co-op’s story to the website but don’t feel confident about how to edit content on Cultivate.Coop, send an email to CultivateCoop (at) gmail.com and we can add it on your behalf.

3) Final Tidbits: Recent Press and Stay Tuned for Exciting News

• Are you a subscriber to the Cooperative Business Journal? If so, keep an eye out in the most recent issue for a highlight of Cultivate.Coop!

• We’ve got some big things planned for the next few months, so be sure to stay tuned to hear about what we have in store for the cooperative community.

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook.
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

Cultivate.Coop has been live for a week now and is getting a fair share of attention. An excited buzz about the website is spreading! There is quite a bit going on, and we want to keep you in the loop to let you know what you can do to tap in.

Donate some knowlege

We understand that during this time of year, you’re being asked to donate money to a seemingly overwhelming number of great causes and efforts. While Cultivate.Coop could use some help, we don’t want to appeal to your wallets, but rather to your minds. The single greatest contribution you could make would be to start a new article on an important cooperative subject, expand existing stub articles, and/or contribute your educational resources on co-ops and cooperative economics. (Want to expand a stub article, but not sure which one to focus on? Check out our wish list on the community portal. You can also see a complete list of stub articles and pages with no information).

Consider Cultivate.Coop a knowledge commons that we all need to build together. By pooling our collective knowledge and resources, we can catalyze people’s abilities to build and participate in co-ops. Therefore, your donation would not just be to Cultivate.Coop but to the entire cooperative community. (Need help adding or editing pages on Cultivate.Coop? It’s easy, see our tutorial here).

Build our cooperative histories, present, and futures

Cultivate.Coop is poised to be a tool in which we can we record and utilize our cooperative histories and present to build a better future.

By adding your co-op or a co-op you know to Cultivate.Coop, we can begin to paint a broad-stroke of the cooperative community – what co-ops are out there, what are they doing, what lessons can we learn from them, and how can we collaborate with them?

If you want to add a co-op, consider including any of the following subjects: When did the co-op start? What is it’s history? What does it do? What are its mission and goals? Where is it? What type of co-op is it and who does it serve? What are any unique aspects of the co-op? You may also include any multimedia – from pictures to videos and more – of the co-op. (Need help adding or editing pages on Cultivate.Coop? It’s easy, see our tutorial here).

Help us start to make this happen by getting the story of at least 20 cooperatives and cooperative organizations on Cultivate.Coop by February 1^st.

New pages and discussion areas

• New articles and educational resources: Since Cultivate.Coop’s launch, people have added a number of new articles and educational resources for co-ops. These include pages on the Mid-Atlantic Food Co-op Alliance, the Union Cab of Madison Cooperative, membership database schemas, as well as facilitated discussions for teaching about power dynamics in diverse groups - and more!
• Discussion topics: Don’t forget that Cultivate.Coop was built so that you could discuss and practice cooperative issues! Each page has it’s own discussion area – and there’s a number of topics already begun, including: “the importance of mission statements on a co-op’s practices” and “common mistakes in writing business plans for co-ops.” These discussion areas allow people to really collaboratively synthesize and discuss the content as well as raise unique questions about co-ops subjects.

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook.
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

We decided to bake a cake to celebrate the launch of Cultivate.Coop, because building the cooperative economy is just like eating a delicious cake with friends – awesome.

So if you haven’t had a chance yet, go to Cultivate.Coop now and start democratizing knowledge for democratizing our economy. (And you can read our exciting announcement letter here to see what you can do with Cultivate.Coop!)

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

Dear friends,

It’s time to democratize our economy by democratizing knowledge: Cultivate.Coop is officially launched and live. Visit the website now!

Cooperators and cooperative supporters have already contributed a great cache of articles and educational resources to Cultivate.Coop, which you can read, build upon, share, and implement.

Cultivate.Coop is designed to be a collaborative resource for the cooperative community. By harnessing the power of the internet as well as putting our diverse set of strengths, knowledge, resources, and skills together, we can create powerful means for people all over the country – and even the world – to learn and practice cooperation.

How can you utilize and take action with Cultivate.Coop?

• If you know it, share it! Cultivate.Coop already has articles ranging from meeting facilitation methods to self-management techniques, anti-oppression resources for cooperatives, steps to starting a cooperative, writing and using cooperative mission statements, and much more.  But there’s a whole world of cooperative knowledge out there, and we need you to expand these articles’ depth. Need help learning how to edit Cultivate.Coop? It’s easy, just check out our tutorial here. Or simply read some articles and learn what the community has to share!

• Learn about co-ops; teach about co-ops: Besides being a space to build and read articles on all cooperative subjects, Cultivate.Coop is also a place to collaboratively develop and employ educational resources for cooperatives and cooperation. You can see what’s already on the site that will help you teach about co-ops as well as what you and others can use to learn more about co-ops. If you have educational resources for co-ops and cooperation, please share them on Cultivate.Coop and help grow the educational capacity of the co-op community.

• Build it and fix it: Should there be articles on co-op subjects that are currently missing from Cultivate.Coop? Then get the ball rolling by starting an article! Do you see a fact or claim that’s inaccurate? Help improve Cultivate.Coop by fixing it! See our editing tutorial here.

• Talk, talk, and talk some more: If anything, Cultivate.Coop is built to be interactive. And that doesn’t stop at creating articles and powerful educational materials. Built into each article and resource page is a Discussion Area that will allow you and others to discuss the content as well as to collaborate on how to further strengthen resources for cooperation.

• Pass Cultivate.Coop on: This website is designed to be a collaborative project by and for co-ops and cooperators, existing and aspiring alike. The more people using and contributing to it, the stronger resource it will become.

I look forward to seeing you on Cultivate.Coop and working with you to build a powerful resource for a new economy.

In cooperation,
Brian Van Slyke
Cultivate.Coop Project Director

P.S. Some more tidbits:

• Did you know that Cultivate.Coop has a feature that will transform any page into a printable version? This makes it easy for you to print and share articles, resource lists, handouts, workshop facilitation instructions, and more. Just look for the “Printable version” button on the left hand side of the website.

• We will still be adding a few more features and making a few more aesthetic changes to Cultivate.Coop over the coming week, so keep your eyes peeled for changes!

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

What can you do?

Well, first, get excited. Then, second, tell a friend, colleague, and/or family member about Cultivate.Coop and help spread the word! If they haven’t heard about it yet, you can send them this introductory link. The more people using Cultivate.Coop, the bigger an impact it will have for the cooperative community.

Finally, keep an eye out on December 10th! We’ve already received a number of contributions in content and educational resources. But we will need your help to build articles as well as to expand and improve upon existing materials. Together we can collaboratively create powerful content and resources for cooperators and co-ops, existing and aspiring alike. Together we can democratize knowledge for democratizing our economy.

In the mean time, we’re still accepting contributions in content and educational resources for the site before it launches. And, of course, let us know if you have any questions.

P.S. The website is currently going through a testing-phase. We still have a few spots open, so if you’re interested in participating in this process, please send us an e-mail at cultivatecoop AT gmail DOT com. Your contribution will help strengthen Cultivate.Coop.
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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook.
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.

This is an incredibly exciting time: Cultivate.Coop’s launch is only a few weeks away.

Our goal is to make information on all things cooperative radically more accessible, as well as to collaboratively build effective educational resources for the cooperative community. We’re forging a space where cooperators from across the country can work together to share and harvest cooperative knowledge; discuss how to utilize this information and explore ways to practice cooperation; and strive alongside each other to create, develop, and utilize educational materials on co-ops.

Yet, in order to make Cultivate.Coop a truly useful and powerful tool for the cooperative community, we need your help. The more resources and information on the Cultivate.Coop website, the better suited it will be to impact a broad community of existing and aspiring cooperators. Do you, your cooperative, or your co-op organization have any materials you can contribute to Cultivate.Coop before it launches? Can you write a short “stub” (one to three paragraphs) to begin an article on Cultivate.Coop’s wiki? Anything you can share will go a long way towards making cooperative information more accessible to anyone from aspiring cooperators to college students, educators, cooperative developers, community organizers, high schools, entrepreneurs, existing co-ops, and much more.

By pooling our knowledge, we can make co-ops a more viable reality for those seeking to start a co-op, explore the option, or work with others to build a cooperative economy. By pooling our educational materials, we can help people teach about co-ops in communities and schools, and we can empower groups to educate themselves and their friends on cooperative practices.

So, please, help us in our mission of strengthening the cooperative community by freeing knowledge and building useful tools for cooperation. If you’re interested in contributing to Cultivate.Coop, see our original announcement here. See our content wish-list here. See our educational resources wish-list here. All you have to do is send us an e-mail (cultivatecoop AT gmail DOT com).

P.S. Have questions about Cultivate.Coop? Check out our FAQ or send us an e-mail. Want to get our newsletters in your inbox? Just send us an e-mail!

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Watch Cultivate.Coop’s demonstration video.
Read the Cultivate.Coop blog.
Follow Cultivate.Coop on Twitter.
Like Cultivate.Coop on Facebook
Make a tax-exempt donation to Cultivate.Coop today.