2011 Year End Fundraiser

Collaboration and movement-building has brought us to the place we are today. The Occupy Wall St movement has allowed us to engage hundreds, even thousands of people about workplace democracy - people who are eager to learn about the democratic alternatives that exist to the mainstream corporate hierarchy. We are thrilled to be co-organizing a Worker Cooperatives Training and Roundtable (insert link here) on January 8th in NYC for the growing cooperatives that are emerging from the Occupy Wall St. Movement. We'll be at Brecht Forum along with our event collaborators: the Occupy Wall St. Worker Co-ops Working Group, Solidarity NYC, and the Fund for Democratic Communities. If you can't make it, don't worry: we'll be creating both a video and a workshop template and materials to help worker owned cooperatives do outreach for the movement of workplace democracy in their own communities. 

If you consider yourself a part of this exciting movement, you can help. We at ECWD and in the worker cooperative movement know that the time is now to seize this historic moment and build toward a much stronger future for worker cooperatives.  As the past few months have shown, there is a huge demand for knowledge and options that can help to create an economy worth occupying. We believe, as I'm sure you also do, that the worker-owned cooperative movement is an essential part of creating an economy we can get behind!  

We know we want to strengthen the movement and create more visibility and awareness for worker co-ops. The ECWD can help make worker cooperativism available and accessible to those who need it most. Over the next two years, and at our conference in 2013, the ECWD, with your help, would like to:

• Contribute to ongoing worker cooperative education and outreach through collaboration with allied organizations to create workshops and other movement-building opportunities like our upcoming workshop for Occupy Wall St.
• Expand our ability to make our conferences and trainings accessible to a wide variety of audiences. At future conferences, through your support, we will be increasing our interpretation and translation services, offering childcare that includes cooperative education, and providing a sliding scale registration system.
• Create more equitable compensation for staff.Last year our outstanding conference organizers, Neily Jennings and Esteban Kelly, put a heroic number of hours into making our conference fantastic with very little pay.  As we move forward with our next conference and other projects, we need to be realistic about both our organizers' need to sustain themselves, and the worker cooperative movement's need to have full time staff devoted to making the cooperative alternative available to as many people as possible.

Donations of any amount will greatly aid us in moving forward with our goals.

• $10 will provide several of pages of bilingual material translations
• $100 will purchase interpretation for 2 workshops at our next conference
• $500 will make childcare possible for all of our next conference
• $1,000 will allow us to offer worker cooperative assistance to an area where its needed most, such as to our worker co-op friends at Occupy Wall Street.