Category: Cooperation

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Fuel co-ops?

I think that Americans (in particular) need to reduce petroleum use, which is all well and good unless you think of people who rely on fuel oil to heat their homes. That’s when the notion of discretionary driving runs head long into people freezing to death.

Friend and ministerial colleague Hank Peirce’s comment gave me pause:

Thanks for the reminder Scott it is such a difficult issue as we don’t want to spend too much but can’t let the pipes freeze. I might call you soon to talk about changes going on in Medford, exciting things and scary too. But a lot of opportunities for church transformation.

I’d like to talk about this with you, too.

There was an article today in the Christian Science Monitor — “Connecticut businessmen take a bite out of home heating oil costs” — that addresses the issue of fuel costs: heating oil buying clubs. A bit of Web searching suggests these clubs or co-ops are commonly found in the Northeast, which may explain why I’ve never heard of them. Of course, as a native Southerner, fuel oil is a bit of a mystery to me. (I think my parents’ home is heated with electricity. But it never snows there.)

Co-ops evoke the hippy-granola health food store where you have to pay to be a member and perhaps even have to volunteer to work. But co-ops come in many different kinds — I write about them from time to time — but naturally those co-ops that deal with the biggest ticket items offer the greatest value to its members. In the South we do have electric cooperatives, for instance. Credit unions are financial services cooperatives, and many religious institutions sponsor them. And Unitarian Universalists are singularly identified (so many are administered out of Unitarian Universalist churches) with non-sectarian memorial societies, which are essentially funeral services cooperatives.

So why not church-administered, or at least church-spearheaded, heating oil coops? The life it saves might include your own. (And it makes a good counterpart to warm-weather home repairs against cold weather.)

I’ll passively look for fuel coops, as I find them I’ll link them from within my del.icio.us account here.

If you have experience with a fuel co-op or any kind of religious institution-managed cooperative, please comment. Or if you want to network.

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Kiva milestone!

Last May, I loaned four women $25 each through Kiva, a peer-to-peer (through intermediaries) microlending nonprofit. Though batched loans — in the hundreds of dollars; none huge by Western standards — these entrepreneurs were able to develop their businesses, improving their own lot and their communities.

In the meantime, Oprah and other celebs found out about Kiva and made it huge. Indeed, at points there were more lenders than borrowers. But I cared more about the little messages noting the borrowers were repaying their loans, suggesting at the very least they weren’t faltering. (More forthright status updates weren’t part of the bargain.)

The borrowers repaid their loans at different rates, releasing my capitol for reinvestment, which I did. (Or I could have withdrawn it.)

The milestone, reached over the weekend, is the last of my four original borrowers retired her loan. So the next group are working on their businesses and I don’t see a reason — apart from massive defaults — this cannot continue.

In the future, it is conceivable persons in the developing world could themselves be lenders to others in distant countries. And of course, the current work only touches a tiny sliver of the people who could benefit from peer-to-peer help.

But I think it terribly encouraging what a relatively decentralized group of people can do for one another. A lesson, perhaps above all others, about what is possible today.

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What common distributed work would work for UUs?

Two givens.

  1. My Day Job includes lots of interaction with software developers.
  2. My hobby — effectively — is learning more about my three computers, each with its own variant of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu Linux, like other free and open source software projects, have a open yet ordered and participatory style of development.

There are days that software is more of vital force than theology. But make no mistake: I don’t write code. There are plenty of basic things I don’t understand. I’m OK with the odd amount of installation, troubleshooting and look forward to helping out with documentation. But I believe in the process and the outcome to want to do my part.

I’ve thought that this attitude is the difference between a healthy church and a sick one.

Given, too, that the Unitarian Universalist Association is moving to an all-congregations, all-the-time format — a mistake on many levels; for one, by what moral authority does it then credential ministers? — but that issue has been examined at more length most recently at Transient and Permanent. So look there, too. (I’ll bring it up again later.)

Thus, it seems high time to (1) use new models of distributed work to (2) share the work that the has been customarily under the umbrella of the Unitarian Universalist Association, but for which there may be little political will to accomplish.

What would you nominate for shared work?  What work models unfamiliar to churches would you suggest?

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If you have some money, give

To make the most impact, I give to only a few charitable organizations, and one is the Friends of the World Food Program. The World Food Program has a good history of food relief, with an excellent record of efficiency and the capacity to make a real difference. The Friends is the US support affiliate.

With the cost of staple crops pushing essential yet modest foodstuffs out of reach for so many people — this BBC news story gives some background — food relief giving is going to be a major need this year and (I’m worried) years to come.

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All this talk of IDs . . . .

Several people have resumed discussion of General Assembly: of this, I have nothing to add.

But it leads me to a bit of good news. I am back to the weight shown on my driver’s license, long a fiction. More than 20 pounds down from where I was when I started to loose weight at Thanksgiving! The blogging upside is I will start ordering sweatshop-free, union- or worker-cooperative-made and ethically-sourced clothing.

Just a status update. Just another 25 pounds to go!

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Looking at worker cooperatives

Last night, the BBC America World News ran a clip about worker cooperatives in Argentina, evidently recycled from a domestic BBC report from last October. More than perhaps anywhere else — Spain might be the exception — Argentina’s worker-owned cooperatives pick up and recover what scraps the owners of failed businesses left behind. And it seems to me the greatest resource was the workers themselves. It’s easy to romanticize any cooperative venture, so I mentally added in the inevitable bickering, angst and fear of recreating and re-establishing a business.

Worker-owned cooperatives are pretty thin here in the United States. Perhaps the most famous ones are Equal Exchange, the source of many a Unitarian Universalists’ Sunday morning coffee and Frontier, the herb and spice supplier. (Here’s a US worker cooperative organization to note.)

Even though I do not work for a cooperative, they promise to be important in my buying decisions. Put plainly, I cannot think of a better protection against unjust labor practices than buying from worker cooperatives. Even better than union suppliers.

As it happens, you (Americans anyway; I don’t know how far they ship) can buy from some of the Argentine worker coops, including the balloon maker featured in the clip.


The Working World

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A good coffee for small offices, churches

I recommend fair-trade coffee, and that medium-sized and large churches purchase it from Equal Exchange, a workers cooperative. Unitarian Universalists may buy it through their Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Coffee Project. Other religious “gateways” include the Brethren, Catholics, Friends (AFSC), Lutherans, Mennonites, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ and United Methodists. Good coffee, ethically sourced.

But for very small churches and offices — or where there aren’t many coffee drinkers — this might not be a practical option: I have a back up plan.

Trader Joe‘s has a tasty, inexpensive organic and fair-trade certified assortment of coffees. I got a pound can of French roast for $5.99 here in D.C. for my Day Job office, and it seems to be well received. (I like their soy liquid coffee creamer, too, but I avoid their frozen vegetables: too many come from China.)

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BarCamp and credit unions meet

How good does it get? The BarCamp/Unconference mode of learning and teaching and the economic cooperative benefits of credit unions and alternative banking together. That’s the upshot of BarCampBankSeattle that met over the summer.

Some interesting features for those thinking of organizing an unconference:

  1. Judging by the list of those who said they were there, by the session list and the faces in the Flickr photo pool, there were less than three dozen participants and perhaps fewer than two dozen, not the 150 at DC BarCamp. Numbers aren’t the measure of success, but connections and outcomes.
  2. There were no t-shirts, which seems invariable and is a useful way of recognizing sponsors. They’re really optional.
  3. Oh, there weren’t sponsors in the convention sense; participants paid their own way.
  4. Pizza — that perennial favorite — filled in for catering.

Hat tip: Open Source CU blog

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Two cheers for credit union

The New York Times reports today (“Nonprofit Payday Loans? Yes, to Mixed Reviews” by John Leland) about a program between Goodwill and a credit union (a financial cooperative, thus the categorization) in Appleton, Wisconsin to help people jump out of a payday loan debt death spiral. The program — which does move those least able to repay into counseling and an interest-free loan — has some problems.

I wrote about the role credit unions could play in short-circuiting predatory lending before, and given the history of the cooperative movement, I would think it would have a strong role in this fight.

The Wisconsin program isn’t without criticism; despite the need, the interest rate is still shockingly high: the equivalent of 252% compared to 572% with the storefronts. I can’t help but think there should be an eighth-century prophet saying something about it, except that the sad thing is that (for some) 252% really is an improvement.

So two cheers for the credit union and Goodwill, and perhaps half a prayer to be shared for those drowning in debt.