Browsing by Subject "Cooperatives"

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“Civilization’s supreme test" : cooperative organizing in New Orleans, 1890s-2014
(2015-03-26) Gessler, Anne McGivern; Davis, Janet M.; Adams, Paul; Dooling, Sarah; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Thompson, Shirley
This dissertation argues that cooperatives in New Orleans have drawn on homegrown ethnic and religious communal traditions to confront the vagaries of capitalism and its fraught connections to race, class, and gender. To historically and theoretically anchor my project, I examine seven cooperatives whose shifting alliances with labor, political, and consumer activist networks sustained the movement’s commitment to fashioning a new, egalitarian society. In chapter one, I analyze how socialist Catholic Creole, Caribbean, and European cooperatives transcended racial and ethnic barriers to citywide labor organizing in the 1890s. Chapter two examines the racial and class assumptions undermining white female activists’ interwar cooperative movement. Chapter three explores multiracial, cross-class, and gender-inclusive Popular Front cooperatives to recuperate the history of the city’s integrated political organizations. Chapter four examines one family’s intergenerational cooperative career to reveal the influence of black cooperative enterprise on twentieth-century civil rights projects. Finally, chapter five studies the continuity and rupture between pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina cooperatives, as well as their vexed negotiation of neoliberal economic and political policies perpetuating systemic inequality. While my dissertation highlights New Orleans’ contributions to U.S. cooperative and social movements, it expands economic history more broadly. Using the methodological interventions of gender studies, cultural geography, oral history, and critical race theory, I contend that neighborhood context affects cooperatives’ ability to implement economic alternatives, while cooperatives’ moral economy is also inscribed on the physical landscape of their community. Studying scenes of cooperative members’ daily lives reveals an accretion of ongoing political activity that contributes to a genealogy of social protest and grassroots mobilization. My dissertation offers a new, on-the-ground perspective on how cooperatives remold communities to reflect and strengthen a larger ethical project of societal transformation in modern America.
Cooperatives as vehicles for community and economic development : a case for alternative ownership and expansion of the solidarity economy in Austin, Texas
(2023-04-21) Vallier, Shaw; Oden, Michael
Rapidly rising home prices in and around Austin, Texas has led to the displacement of residents, which in turn results in loss of community as well as increased traffic as most workers still need to access jobs near the city center. Increasing support for worker-owned firms and housing cooperatives could be community and economic development strategies for stabilizing residents. Cooperatives were able to better weather economic downturns brought on by COVID, keeping more workers employed and paid. This report uses review of existing literature, case studies, and analysis of secondary data sources to identify advantages as well as specific areas for intervention in both the productive enterprise and housing sectors. Austin has a small but established cooperative ecosystem that can continue to contribute to the growth of the solidarity economy in the area. This report specifically explores alternative models of ownership for firms and housing as a strategy for community development, and further, as strategies that will maximize the benefits of the systems already in place. The overarching point, however, is that alterative models of ownership would lend themselves well to the objectives of 1) ensuring that the incredible growth the region continues to see is sustainably and equitably distributed, 2) supporting the leveraging of community resources to return community benefits, wherever possible, and 3) to support parallel strengthening of worker and resident movements in the face of increasing returns to global investors
Craft brewing and community in Austin, Texas : the Black Star Co-op
(2011-05) Tonks, Nicholas Estabrook Hart; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-; Smith, Mark C.
This report attempts to determine what craft beer can tell us about American culture, and to situate craft brewing within the larger discourse on food and locality. Following political scientist Carlton Larsen, who posited that craft beer associations are creating a “nascent public sphere within the dynamics of profit-driven production,” and that proponents of the craft beer community see it as “constituting a pragmatic, alternative community to international capitalist mass production,” I investigate Austin, Texas’ Black Star Co-op, the first cooperatively owned brewpub in the United States. I also take inspiration from Amy Trubek’s formulation of the American “taste of place,” which builds on and adapts the French concept of terroir. Trubek argues that the taste of place in America needs to be entrepreneurial and based in community, and that “taste makers” in America are engaged in a process of synthesis, blending our nation’s many historical pasts with its present to create a new taste of place. I argue that Black Star’s unique position as both a taste-making institution and as a business based in the economic radicalism of cooperative self-management and participatory economics allows them the possibility of a degree of local influence that goes beyond what Trubek or Larsen had previously envisioned. I conclude by arguing for an expansion of Trubek’s model that would comprehensively chart the taste of place in a single location, such as Austin, Texas, by looking at various institutions in all aspects of community life.
Power in Community: The Cooperative Model as an Empowering Space of Refuge, Agency, and Support for Survivors of Human Trafficking
(2020-05) Kapuria, Nishtha
Human trafficking is a form of modern day slavery where traffickers use force, fraud, and coercion to control another person into engaging in commercial sex acts or soliciting labor and services against her or his will. The current rescue model is flawed because it fails to meet the basic needs of survivors, resulting in the common occurrence of re-victimization post-rescue when survivors voluntarily return to their traffickers. An examination of the issue showed that the current rescue model fails to meet the basic needs of refuge, agency, and support. I hypothesized that cooperative living could be a potential solution that provides all three. After extensive research into the background and current models of cooperative living, I tie the Rochdale Principles, which have guided co-ops since the 1800s, to the three core needs and offer recommendations for an adapted cooperative model that is modified for survivors of human trafficking, along with ideas for future research and steps towards actualization. Cooperatives have long been at the center of reformative justice movements by redistributing power to marginalized communities, like survivors of human trafficking who struggle to successfully re-integrate back into society. Co-ops can offer them a safe and consistent refuge, the ability to regain their agency, and a support system that offers them the chance at family beyond biology.
Providing support for the creation of manufactured home cooperatives : lessons for Austin, Texas community institutions
(2017-09-19) Schwenk, Joshua Brian; Mueller, Elizabeth J.; Lieberknecht, Katherine E
Manufactured housing is a housing type which theoretically offers an unsubsidized, permanently affordable housing supply to low- and moderate-income households. However, several factors lead to it being considered an undesirable housing type such as stigma, landlord mismanagement, potential displacement, and loss of home equity. Additionally, much of the current supply stands to be lost in growing cities where former manufactured home communities are being redeveloped into more profitable ventures. Community land trusts (CLTs) and resident owned communities (ROCs) offer two models for preserving manufactured home communities and addressing the concerns above to create truly affordable, desirable places to live. By reviewing existing iterations of these models as well as the existing array of organizations in Austin, Texas, it appears that both models may be good fits in the local context.