immigrant worker owned cooperatives: a user’s manual

Immigrant Worker Owned Cooperatives: A

User’s Manual

Worker Empowerment Through Democratized

Knowledge History: El Centro Humanitario and Green Clean

for Life, LLC

Why Worker Coops Fail: Coop Governance and Ownership Issues

The Immigrant Worker Cooperative Manual: An El Centro-UC Denver partnership

El Centro Humanitario

El Centro Humanitario: The Women’s Project Scales Up

2009: Growing record of success of informal women’s empowerment project + economic desperation resulted in desire to “scale up” and found a professional, registered immigrant women’s cooperative cleaning business

U.S. Worker Owned Cooperatives: about 350 worker-owned coops at end of decade

Immigrant worker owned cooperatives in operation or in preparation: 40

El Centro Humanitarion and Green Cleaning for Life,

LLC

El Centro Humanitario: Coop Incubator Organization

Incubator Organizations

o New York’s Center for Family Life incubates Si Se Puedeo California’s Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security—

WAGES—incubates Green Cleaning Coopso El Centro Humanitario incubates Green Clean for Life, LLC

WAGES vs. El Centro

►Vision ►Fundraising►Tech support

►Strong Professional manager

►Goal: income increase first

WAGES ►Vision

►Fund raising►Tech support

►Weak professional manager

►Goal: ownership firstWhy? Social justice

El Centr

o

Workers

Workers

Governance and Ownership Challenges:How to Build Worker Ownership

Membership Structure(provisional members vs. permanent members vs. second-class members)

Board of Directors Structure (Homogenous Boards vs. Hybrid Boards) and tensions between Board and Worker Owners

The role of the coop manager vs. the role of coop members

Coop management structures (Centralized, professional management vs. elected executive committees vs. decentralized operations without management)

The Immigrant Worker Coop Manual

The Immigrant Worker Coop Manual

University-Community Partnership: El Centro’s Founding, Organizational Development and Coop

Growth

Producing the Worker Coop Manual

Community-University Partnerships:Issues

“Banking” model versus “Participatory/Dialogic” model of popular education

University Partnerships: Worth the Political Effort & Funding?

o HUD’s Office of University Partnerships declining funding

o COPC (“Community Outreach Partnership Centers”) defunded since 2005

Community-University Partnerships:Issues

In the end, how much of our challenge is educational, versus raw access to capital and power

Series of University-Community Partnership Studies