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Watch the Recording: LOCAL Fund Info Session

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The Shared Ownership Center @ Nexus explains what a cooperative is, the impact worker-owned cooperatives and real estate investment cooperatives have on our communities, and the qualification criteria for the LOCAL Fund’s grants and technical assistance.

The LOCAL Fund: Worker Ownership offers grants and technical assistance for worker co-op startups, conversions of existing businesses, and existing co-ops in St. Paul. The LOCAL Fund: Community Ownership supports the development of shared-ownership commercial real estate in St. Paul, with grants and technical assistance for predevelopment, acquisition, demolition, and rehabilitation of commercial properties.

Learn more by watching our information session below!

The National Conference on Black Cooperative Agenda was a thought-provoking, community-building, and spiritually nourishing gathering of Cooperative folks across the country. Thank you to all the attendees, volunteers, and organizers who made it happen. If you missed it, you can listen to this broadcast from the conference! Everything Co-op’s Vernon Oakes interviews St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, Nexus’ Christina Nicholson, and Jessica James.

Listen here!

 

Did you hear that the People’s Canvass (formerly Knock Knock LLC) has become a worker-owned cooperative?

The Minneapolis team that built the nation’s largest deep canvassing team in November, and collected 16,000 signatures to put the Yes ‘4’ Minneapolis public safety initiative on the ballot, has broken new ground as the United States’ first political canvassing worker cooperative. Nexus Worker Ownership is proud to have supported them through this process.

“I’ll be the first to say it — I knew nothing about how any of this co-op stuff worked. I’m a canvasser. I go to the door and I talk to people about issues in their community,” said Charlie Bartlett, a lead trainer at The People’s Canvass and a member of the co-op transition team. “But working with Nexus gave us a vision and a pathway to achieve that vision. In the same way we feel called to do the work to improve our communities, the folks at Nexus are called to make that work itself more equitable.”

Are you interested in practical resources to rebuild, reestablish, and reignite your businesses through worker-ownership? Contact Nexus Worker Ownership Initiative for a free consultation at www.ownwork.org.

Nexus Community Partners is excited to announce that we are recruiting a diverse group of 8-10 dynamic leaders from Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities for our 2019 Cooperative Development Fellowship Program.

The seven-month program is targeted at individuals/consultants who would like to become cooperative developers, organizations wanting to add cooperative development to their services or incubate a cooperative, and other professionals (e.g. lawyers, capital providers) who are interested in supporting cooperative development. We are also interested in recruiting applicants who will focus on assisting business owners and their employees who want to convert to worker ownership. Please note that the Fellowship is not designed for individuals wanting to start their own cooperative.

The Fellowship includes the following:

  • Opening Retreat
  • 3 intensive, in-person trainings
  • On-line training modules
  • Group webinars with national cooperative practitioners
  • Local Site Visit
  • National Site Visit
  • Project design and presentations
  • Coaching and support from Nexus and DAWI.
  • Closing Celebration

All training, coaching and off-site travel expenses will be covered by Nexus.

The Fellowship requires a time commitment of between 75-85 hours over the course of seven months, with participation in all program activities mandatory. A timeline for the program is available in the application below.

Applications are due February 25, 2019.  Visit this link for our online application.

Before you complete the application, we request that you attend one of our information sessions. You’ll get the chance to learn more about the Fellowship program and ask questions. In the event you are unable to attend, we can schedule a short one-on-one phone call. Please contact Nkuli Shongwe at nshongwe@nexuscp.org  to register or schedule a call.

For more information contact program officer Elena Gaarder at egaarder@nexuscp.org or community wealth building coordinator Nkuli Shongwe at nshongwe@nexuscp.org.

North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship 2018/2019 cohort sessions have started off well! The first cohort meeting dug into the history of cooperatives and the society in which we live in that bread a necessity for cooperatives to exist. We also discussed how modern-day society makes it difficult for black businesses to remain afloat without systematic structures trying to tear them down. Our second session dove into the role capitalism plays into the overall success of a cooperative economy and the need to bring it to fruition. And our most recent cohort session dissected the cooperative bylaws and development – what makes cooperatives successful and what foundations are necessary for keeping the cooperative stable. It asked a difficult question: what is most important to the board – profit or the people? Through this, many of the members revealed the ingrained roots of capitalism and have continued to tackle the multilayered issue of social inequality with curiosity and understanding. The pessimism that surrounds our community due to the weight of social inequality can be back breaking, however, this is only true if you allow it to consume you.

In partnership with Hlee Lee of OMG Media, the East Side Funders Group is launching a series of stories to lift up the amazing business community on the East Side of St. Paul. Check out the first story: Cook St. Paul: From Childhood Memories to Community Collaborations

We all know Serlin’s, it was a staple on the East Side for what seemed like forever, well nearly 70 years. Edmond Charles

Photo credit OMG Media: Eddie Wu, owner of Cook St. Paul, bought the “weird food photos” from the original owners.

Hansen III, aka Eddie Wu, remembers it too. His father was a firefighter stationed on Payne Avenue.

‘My dad would get off work at the fire station and I would get dropped off there,” Wu said. “I’d help with his side job: washing windows or trimming trees. The deal would be he’d give me $5 but also he’d take me out to eat and usually he’d let me choose. And I could never remember the name of Serlin’s, but I remember the pictures on the wall. Those food pictures. So I would say, ‘Can we go to the place with the weird food pictures?’ And he knew.”

Check out the full story here.

Nexus’ longtime partner and board member, Pakou Hang, executive director of the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA), was recently featured in The New Food Economy:

Pakou Hang, 42, was born in Thailand, but she’s been an American for all but two weeks of her life. Hang, the child of Hmong refugees resettled in the United States and grew up in Wisconsin, where her parents supported the family by farming. Today, that history deeply informs Hang’s own work: She’s co-founder and executive director of the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA), headquartered on a 155-acre research and incubator farm 15 miles south of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Facing persecution as U.S. allies in the Laotian Civil War and the Vietnam War, more than 100,000 Hmong refugees have relocated to the United States since the 1970s. They brought their agricultural prowess with them. In past decades, Hmong-American farmers helped to pioneer the contemporary local food movement in California and the Midwest, popularizing ingredients like Thai chili peppers and bok choy; today, Hmong farmers account for more than half of the produce sold in St. Paul’s farmers’ markets. Founded in 2011, HAFA helps to sustain that legacy by providing pilot plots, professional training, and a food hub—the key piece of processing and distribution infrastructure that makes doing business possible. 

Hang spoke about her upbringing, her childhood resistance to the farm life, and why she decided to come back home and make agriculture her calling and career.

Read the full story here.

We are so proud to call Pakou a partner, and are excited to see the continued growth and support for HAFA and Hmong farmers both locally and nationally! Cheers to you Pakou!!