Fall is here and with it we celebrate: C2BE’s birthday, Hispanic Heritage Month, and October Co-op Month, which is right around the corner!
September marks National Historic Heritage Month because it is the anniversary month of the independence of five Hispanic countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatamala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is a time to recognize the contributions of Hispanic Americans to the achievements, history and culture of the United States.
C2BE's birthday is September 28, 2007. Tomorrow we will be celebrating fifteen years of advocating for community-based enterprises and worker cooperatives through grass roots, organic, Detroit-based leadership!
One year ago, C2BE had its first online fund-raiser and raised over $30k. We continue to thank you for your help in making that happen! This year we will not have an event, but we will ask for your ongoing support as we continue to create more worker-owners and community-based enterprises. Our donation button is always active!
I am just back from the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives conference in Philadelphia and am en route to the CooperationWorks! annual meeting in Omaha. Both are my first in person meetings with cooperators around the nation, and I am so excited to meet folks like Omar Freilla, who is connecting the Black co-op diaspora internationally and doing such amazing work!
In Philadelphia, I met with my Southwest Detroit eco-system peeps from Grace In Action, Stitching Up Detroit and Bridging Languages and spent a day-long in the track for scaling work through worker-ownership conversion (selling a business to its workers). There is a lot happening nationally, and C2BE is working in partnerships to tap some of that genius for the benefit of our local community-based enterprise ecosystem. If you are a Detroit cooperator and were in Philadelphia, contact me at: Karen@c2be.org so we can compare notes!
C2BE is supporting Black and Brown communities in the quest for economic justice, and we hope you’ll be a part of the continued change we are making locally and across Michigan. Take a look at what some of our local Detroit community-based enterprises are doing to spread the word to other parts of the United States about the benefits of worker ownership of small businesses.