Important ExecutiveCommittee Election Info!

Letters of Intent Due: March 20*Send email entailing interest in what position and why to education@msu.coop*You will not be able to run for an EC position if you do not indicate so by this date.

Voting will begin March 23rd and end April 3rd.

All Member Meeting with EC speeches will beon March 28th, 2pm Phoenix.

Voting will only be available at MSU SHC office and at Pheonix during the All Member Meeting.

Voters will be cross-checked with a list of membership to verify their identity before voting.

Ballots will be anonymous.

Any questions, email education@msu.coop

105 Ted Talks Your Co-oper Heart Will Love -Rebecca Brunk

In case you didn’t know, TEDx is coming to MSU this March! That’s pretty exciting news, especially if you’re a Ted enthusiast, the way I happen to be. In case you don’t know TED, or maybe the difference between TED and TEDx (because I didn’t until yesterday), let me tell you.

TED is a nonprofit that aims to spread innovative ideas amidst a global community, usually through the performing and sharing of powerful speeches that are around 18 minutes or less. People who speech at TED are normally really distinguished professionals in their field, who have discovered a new, or innovative idea that they think is worth sharing with the community. TED originally started as a conference to discuss technology, entertainment, and design (hence TED).

TEDx, in comparison, was launched in 2009 to bring the mission of TED down to the local level, with independent organizers running these events for their community. That’s really cool for us, because it gives us here in East Lansing a chance to perform, participate and attend the equivalent of a TED talk without being incredibly distinguished, or paying a lot of money for tickets and plane flights.

In lieu of this, I want everyone to be as excited about TED as I am by, in true coop fashion, sharing some of my favorite TED talks. Here are five of my favorites:

#5 Jill Bolte Taylor “My stroke of insight”

I first saw this talk by Jill Bolte Taylor in my brain and behavior class last year. She had a major stroke, and had the opportunity of a lifetime: to watch as each of her brain func-tions- motion, speech, self awareness- all shut down. She describes them in this talk. I remember thinking it was an incredible story, while I heard the guy behind me whisper, “damn hippies.” That tells you all you will need to know.

#4 Joe Smith “How to use paper towel”Joe Smith makes the claim that each and every one of us is probably using paper towels wrong. This is a super short talk, but Joe Smith is enlightening, endearing and funny. It’s definitely one worth watching.

#3 Elizabeth Gilbert “Your elusive creative genius” Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite authors. She wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and in this presentation, she talks about how the ancient world viewed “muses” and their relation-ships with artists as a symbiotic relationship. Comparing this view to modern society, she hypothesizes about today’s relationship between artists and depression and sui-cide.

#2 Sarah Kay “If I should have a daughter...”Sarah Kay starts and ends this talk with two of her own personal spoken word pieces, and dives into describing her work with Project Voice, which travels to schools and teaches students the value of poetry and writing as a means of knowing and understanding themselves.

#1 Cameron Russell “Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model”Cameron Russell admits that she’s won the “genetic lottery”, by being tall, pretty, and an underwear model. However, she also asks not to be judged on her looks, as her talk goes into topics on beauty standards, privilege, and self esteem issues that come from working in an industry that had her looking seductive at barely 16 years old.

(Inter)National Cooperative News -Alanna Markle

Small Non-profit Awarded Big Nod from Kellogg Foundation for Worker Owned Business Development in Detroit

DETROIT, Mich. – “Employee ownership is one of the best ways to anchor local businesses that provide living wage jobs. Worker owners do not lay themselves off, they innovate.” said Deborah Groban Olson, Executive Director of Detroit’s Center for Community Based Enterprise (C2BE). Olson said “the grant C2BE just received from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of $225,000 grant ($75,000/ year for 3 years) will provide general operating support aiding C2BE’s mission of eco-nomic empowerment in Detroit through development of shared assets and community-based enterprises. This grant will help us provide education/collaboration resources for low-moderate income Detroit residents to generate jobs with worker equity. These funds will help us build a permanent technical assistance capacity to serve the demand created by the education programs we’ve been operating since 2007”.

Olson said, “We will open an office at the Cass Corridor Commons at 4605 Cass Ave., Detroit, MI 48201; provide an information clearinghouse and events highlighting best practices, build our staff, consulting capacity and referral relationships; begin building a deal stream of business succession and neighborhood business opportunities, a system to evaluate these opportunities; collaboration resources for these businesses; and find diversified funding to support our current and future projects. Our 4 new board members, Halima Cassells, Terry Lewis, Chris Michalakis and Aaron Timlin (see affiliations below) and our partnership with the Sugar Law Center are broadening and deepening our diverse community engagement and skill sets.”

Cont. on next page...

Current projects include:• Detroit Cooperative Community (“DCC”) – a monthly potluck and learning communities for cooperators, founded by C2BE in 2011, now co-sponsored by the ROC Cooperative Acade-my, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and Jobs with Justice; • Just Work Platform, a collaboration of business, union leaders and academics to provide living wage, worker owned jobs, initially focused on outsourced service work;• Assisting Community Growth Partners to provide retiring owners of local food businesses, tax-advantaged means to convert to worker ownership;• Assisting ACCESS to create a marketing and referral system for their small business clients;• Assisting Church of the Messiah (C2BE’s current home) create economic and youth devel-opment functions; including a monthly MichiganWorks job fair, assistance to its Maker Space and development of an entrepreneurial education program for community youth that includes building and operating co-operative and worker-owned enterprises into that curriculum;• C2BE’s website www.c2be.org provides access to information about worker ownership and other community wealth building tools and hosts DCC and C2BE listservs, and will be greatly enhanced by this new funding.

History:In 2007 C2BE created a comprehensive Scan of Community Based Enterprise Innovations and their Application to Detroit. In 2008 C2BE performed a pre-feasibility study for the Detroit Community Grocery Store Coalition. C2BE held 19 workshops in 2009 throughout Metro Detroit, featuring local, national and international successful CBE examples to inspire local CBE development and collaboration. These events were co-sponsored by universities, commu-nity centers, churches and unions throughout metro Detroit. In addition to local speakers there were speakers from the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain, Ohio Employee Own-ership Center; Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, and the employee-owned Maryland Brush Company. For the 2010 US Social Forum, C2BE provided a workshop about and tour of Detroit CBEs. In 2010 C2BE launched a local business mutual self-help network with a volunteer fix-up project at the 5E Gallery. In 2011 C2BE organized the Detroit Cooperative Community and per-formed a business services cooperative market study of businesses in the Woodward Corridor, focused on the North End and Willis/Canfield for Vanguard CDC. Ingenuity US, L3C (IUS), the mission-driven for-profit sister company of C2BE, is helping Mobellink Furniture plan a worker owned manufacturing operation.

Governance, Planning & Delegation

Workshop prepared for MSU-SHCBoard Retreat, Sept 20, 2014

Job of a Board of Directors

A board's primary task is to make decisions which will bring about actions that the achieve goals, mission, or purpose of the organization.

A cooperative is an organization whose purpose is to meet a collective need of a group of people (the Members). A cooperative is controlled by the members, with the Board of Directors acting on their behalf.

Anatomy of a Decision

NEEDS → OBJECTS → ACTIONS

Examples: I need food.A pizza is an object which will meet my need for food.I can obtain a pizza by taking the action of going to a pizza parlor and buying a pizza.

The members of the co-op need a warm home.A furnance is an object that can create warmth.The co-op can obtain and sustain furnances by purchasing appropriate furnances for each

property and maintaining them regularly.

Needs:Needs are general, functional conditions or inputs for a healthy and happy life. Individuals have

needs such as food, water, shelter, healing, friends, family, fun, growth, love, meaning, etc.Needs to do not specify the specific person, place, or thing that would satisfy the need.A co-op's mission is to meet one or more shared needs of a group of people. Thus it serves the

“needs” of its members.

Objects:Objects are things, environments, or specific conditions that fulfill (partially or completely) a

need for a person.

Actions: Actions are activities or processes that an individual or group can undertake in order to secure, obtain, create or sustain an Object.

Categories of Group Decision-Making

A) Choosing Select an action to get a result that meets a need.

B) Rule Making Prescribe a choice for certain situations. Saves time. Creates Predictability.

C) Delegating 1) Empower a person/sub-group (“agent”) to make a choice on behalf of the organization. 2) Define conditions of success. Define conditions of failure. 3) Afterwards, the agent reports. 4) The group evaluates outcome, takes further action as necessary.

D) Identity Assertion Making a declaration or assertion, such as a statement of mission, vision, values, or principles, which establishes the group's identity.

• Identifies the NEEDS that the group intends to serve. Sets the scope of all further decisions by the group. • Sets boundaries on the types of actions the group may use to persue needs. Creates broad guidelines for all instances of Delegation. • Allows members and potential members to determine whether the group is likely to meet their needs.

Planning

Adopting or approving a Plan typcially means one or more of the following:

1) Making a series of “Choosing” decisions that will be carried out over a period of time. The plan serves coordinate the decision-making process concurrently making many interrelated decisions.

2) Making a “Delegation” decision with a long time-period. The Agent may be assigned to carry out actions over a year or longer with multiple objectives to be achieved. A “Plan” maybe also be the report that an Agent makes back to the group when assigned to figure out how to achieve a long-term objective.

3) Making an “Identity Assertion”. Whether or not the aims of the plans are achieved, the fact of having agreed to the plan communicates the values and intentions of the organization. A plan can rally members and supporters if it gives them a sense of purpose beyond the day-to-day.

Interested in publishing an article?

Email education@msu.coop

----------------------------------------------Spring Break--------------------------------------------

EC Letters of Intent Due

All Member Meeting,Pheonix, 2pmEC

SpeechesApril 1 April 2 April 3 April 4

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