Last week, 12 students of the OD&M training visited the training nodes (Florence, Bilbao, London, Dabrowa Gornicza) exploring the local ecosystems of alliances between Universities, makers communities and enterprises. The mobility gave the possibility to build mutual knowledge and relations between students from the four countries, and has been a very positive experience for both visitors and hosting organisations.

Student’s experiences describe the rich learning environment of the four nodes of the project:

• In Poland, students had the occasion to work together on robotics based on open source hardware, and visited Łódź where they were able to customize their robots and see how revitalization of textile city looks like.
• In the UK, the week has been focussed on Social Enterprise and Intellectual Property in a context of Open Design, Co and Participatory Design Practices. Through tours, design activities, and workshops the students worked in teams to develop enterprise propositions focused on OD&M activities.
• In Spain, mobility focused on transferring to students the experience of the exercise carried out in collaboration with Fekoor – Etxegoki, an association that manages a group of apartments that provide autonomy to people with reduced mobility. During the week the students had the possibility to know the city of Bilbao and its transformation model, and they visited the most important open work spaces in the city.
• In Italy, they visited the spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi, and reviewed the solutions for the space developed by Italian students, with the aim of adding elements draining from their local learning experience in their OD&M training. Mobility students also presented, as a moment of peer learning, the solutions developed on their own challenges/contexts. Moreover, they participated to the event “Erasmus4Ever, Erasmus4Future” organised by Impact Hub Florence and INDIRE – Italian National Agency for Lifelong Learning Education.

The mobility has been aimed at defining commonalities and differences with their local context and with the solutions prototyped in their learning experience to inspire and influence both visiting and local students and their ideas/prototypes. It has been a success that hopefully will be replicated in next years.

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Adding to the body of existing tools and training material on cooperative development, ILO now launches Think.Coop, a new training tool for those interested in cooperation and its benefits for improving businesses of potential members.

A great new initiative from ILO to encourage new cooperators!

Think.Coop  is an orientation tool that helps participants understand how mutualism and cooperation can improve livelihoods opportunities. It provides the basics around the cooperative business model, and helps participants understand whether joining or forming a cooperative would be a feasible option. This one-day training tool uses a peer-to-peer, activity-based learning methodology, without an external facilitator or expert to guide the process. Instead, the participants work together as a team, following the simple step-by-step instructions for activities provided in the manual.

Think.Coop was tested in Cambodia among workers in the informal economy , and in Myanmar with farmers and rural workers . The manual is easily adaptable to different contexts, and it can be used as a first step in learning about the cooperative business model. Following the sessions on the importance of relationships, benefits of collective action, types of business structures and types and advantages of a cooperative, the participants are expected to have sufficient information to decide whether the cooperative business model suitable to them.

The manual is copyrighted under the Creative Commons licence. Hence it is free to use for non-commercial purposes, as long as the ILO is clearly attributed as the original source. For more information about Think.Coop, please contact [email protected] .

Further information

Publication

Think.COOP – an orientation on the cooperative business model  [pdf 5542KB] 

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When and Where

Full title: Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth: Pathways to a new political economy

When: September 4-23, 2016

Place: Monte Ginezzo, Tuscany, Italy

Invitation (by John Restakis):

“Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth – Pathways to a New Political Economy, is an intensive 3-week program that links the global with the local through the diffusion of transformative ideas, models, and practices that advance game-changing solutions for progressive change in the following key areas:

• Co-operative Capital & Social Finance; Alternative Currencies
• Co-op & Commons-Based housing & Land Tenure; Community Land Trusts
• Renewable Energy; Community-owned energy systems
• Local & Sustainable food systems; Community Supported Agriculture
• User-controlled health & social care; Social & Community Service Co-ops
• Co-operative and Commons Governance
• Platform Co-operatives, Digital Commons & Peer-to-Peer productions systems
• Convergence and the New Political Economy; Principles, Propositions, and Practices

Download the Synergia program (available here) for complete details. If you like what you see, we hope that you and others in your organization or network will find an opportunity to take part.

We are now in the process of constructing the Synergia website, but information on Synergia and the Summer Institute may also be found on our Facebook page you can also follow us on Twitter. Those wishing information on registration for the course can send an email to: [email protected].

We hope this first Synergia Summer Institute inspires you and your colleagues to spread the word to others who are committed to building a new political economy for the world we want. The need for system change is clear and urgent and Synergia is promoting solutions that can make it happen.

We look forward to your joining us for this unique learning experience in Tuscany this September.”

Photo by blueskyfantasie

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