Permaculture Cooperative

This workshop outlines a vision for a democratic, worker-owned, advanced industrial ecology society. We seek pathways to provide the burgeoning food education/justice movement with the tools to become economically sustainable, and to link the emerging green industrial worker cooperatives with them into sovereign networks. Once active, such networks can become the basis for sustainable, socially just communities that revitalize locales via open source sustainable agriculture and manufacturing methods. Our panel -- with academic, commercial, and school of hard knocks experience -- will frame the demonstrated solutions, numerous pieces of the puzzle that we as a society need to put together. Important pieces that will be presented here include the successful strategies employed in the worker cooperative networks/alliances of Mondragon, Ohio, and the San Francisco Bay Area, Permaculture design strategies implemented even in harsh climate zones, Denmark's national industrial symbiosis program, non-parasitic capitalization of non-hierarchical enterprises, and regenerative urban food justice paradigms. Participants will self-organize into groups to construct models that put some of the pieces together. Workshop participants will then seek to bolster viability of the proposed models, emphasizing possible pilot programs in Detroit, Oakland and in Brooklyn. Panel members include Dana Harvey of Mandela Marketplace and James Berk of Mandela Foods Cooperative, Tim Huet of the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, Mike Leung of the embryonic Worker Cooperative Credit Union, and Gavin Raiders of Planting Justice. Facilitator: Kirstie Stramler of Permaculture Cooperative. For updates leading up to USSF 2010, see the panel and workshop group pages on http://organize.ussf2010.org and videos on http://permaculture.tv/tag/ussf2010/ .

This workshop outlines a vision for a democratic, worker-owned, advanced industrial ecology society. We seek pathways to provide the burgeoning food education/justice movement with the tools to become economically sustainable, and to link the emerging green industrial worker cooperatives with them into sovereign networks. Once active, such networks can become the basis for sustainable, socially just communities that revitalize locales via open source sustainable agriculture and manufacturing methods. Our panel -- with academic, commercial, and school of hard knocks experience -- will frame the demonstrated solutions, numerous pieces of the puzzle that we as a society need to put together. Important pieces that will be presented here include the successful strategies employed in the worker cooperative networks/alliances of Mondragon, Ohio, and the San Francisco Bay Area, Permaculture design strategies implemented even in harsh climate zones, Denmark's national industrial symbiosis program, non-parasitic capitalization of non-hierarchical enterprises, and regenerative urban food justice paradigms. Participants will self-organize into groups to construct models that put some of the pieces together. Workshop participants will then seek to bolster viability of the proposed models, emphasizing possible pilot programs in Detroit, Oakland and in Brooklyn. Panel members include Dana Harvey of Mandela Marketplace and James Berk of Mandela Foods Cooperative, Tim Huet of the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, Mike Leung of the embryonic Worker Cooperative Credit Union, and Gavin Raiders of Planting Justice. Facilitator: Kirstie Stramler of Permaculture Cooperative. For updates leading up to USSF 2010, see the panel and workshop group pages on http://organize.ussf2010.org and videos on http://permaculture.tv/tag/ussf2010/ .