Comments on: Beautiful ruckuses

By: Gifts and promises « Slow Coast

Gifts and promises « Slow Coast — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:47:21 +0000

[...] a few friends and acquaintances started to meet to devise a regional cooperative to take on some food-related projects which need support and people to become [...]

By: David Parkinson

David Parkinson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:19:46 +0000

Thanks, ET. No one’s thinking of an abattoir, not yet anyway. But your point is well taken. Luckily there is a pretty active and vocal community of people here who get the importance of regional food sovereignty.

By: ET

ET — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:16:20 +0000

Find a site early if you are going to do anything even remotely contentious. Here in the West Kootenays the coop abattoir was nimby-ed to death.

By: David Parkinson

David Parkinson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:10:55 +0000

Thanks, Kevin.

I’ll go look at that (since I have your copy of the Transition Handbook). But I think that the cooperative I’m envisioning would also be running these projects, in the sense of providing capital, support, and legal responsibility for them. The incubation part comes from continually recruiting new projects and encouraging people with good ideas to bring them forward if they seem to fit well within a cooperative context.

It would be exciting if some of the projects spawned within the cooperative could become independent, but that’s getting way ahead of ourselves for now.

I’d like to find some good working models of this sort of thing. Do you know of any?

By: Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:26:33 +0000

Hi David, the kind of organisation you’re describing reminds me of the “Project Support Project” described in the Transition Handbook – a group whose purpose is to help other projects get up and running, rather than actually do those projects itself. Which is what our TTPR initiating group is supposed to turn into, eventually