“I liken cooperatives – newer cooperatives – to being like … trying to construct a plane while it’s flying,” explains Andrew Alford, who is involved in one of three solidarity co-ops based at Montreal's Concordia University in Montreal. A look toward a cooperative cafe, bookstore, and bar at Concordia shows how an alternative model of business and work is possible.
While the popularity of the model seems new, the idea of unions serving as vehicles for the establishment of cooperatives has a history, a contested history shaping the development of union co-ops still today.
In the wake of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, the Independent Media Center network started communicating alter-globalization struggles in unprecedented ways, as IMCs across the globe self-organized and linked together with an ethos of participatory democracy and web technology suited for such purposes.
After the grand jury announced that Wilson would not be indicted, challenges to prevailing systems of justice have been launched from activists across the country.
Faced with shuttered schools and top-down, profit-motivated reforms, parents and students in Chicago, Ill., are looking to autonomous pedagogical alternatives. The Washington Park Freedom School offers free, community-based education on Chicago's South Side.
Peace activist Cindy Sheehan stopped in Chicago to speak out in support of Bradley Manning. Sheehan started her cross-country bicycling tour in California on April 4, nine years to the day her son Casey was killed in Iraq.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019