It is that time of the year again, as 2020 wraps up, many of our members may have noticed that filing your Annual Report looks a bit different this year. BCCA is here to help! BC Registries has launched Cooperatives Online and has replaced paper report filings with an online service. You can now change … Continued
The recent sale of Mountain Equipment Co-op without its members’ consent has exposed significant vulnerabilities related to federal and provincial legislation. The current acts clearly do not provide adequate protection of members’ rights or recognition of the co-operative difference. To wrap up Co-op Week 2020, Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada (CMC) held a National Town Hall … Continued
Buddy Up! is an online social network designed to connect co-ops and co-operators across Canada! BCCA is excited to be launching Version 0.1 of this tool this winter and is looking for your input to help shape it. Curious? Sign up here to be a user tester and receive early access to the tool once … Continued
What do Mavins Marketing, Queens of Pop, Open City Events, Fusion Five, BLAC: The Black Arts Centre, Just.Us Instincts, and Daily Dose of Blackness all have in common? They are all co-ops associated with Solid State Community Industries. Using the co-op model, Solid State works with youth from racialized backgrounds to form enterprises to earn … Continued
An active, engaged, and informed membership and staff community are critical to the success and sustainability of your co-op. The BCCA offers educational workshops, training, resources, and consultation services for our member co-ops that can help you build literacy around the co-operative model, cultivate a sense of co-operative identity, and boost participation among your membership. … Continued
During our MEC Townhall on October 15th, we all watched this video about the story of La Siembra, a co-op that came very close to losing their co-operative identity to a sale, much like MEC. This video tells the story of how instead, the La Siembra community leaned into the co-operative principles and values and … Continued
As part of our Annual General Meeting on October 15th, BCCA hosted a public townhall dialogue around the sale of MEC and what BCCA and the co-operative community as a whole can do moving forward. We were joined by organizers Kevin Harding and Yuill Herbert from SaveMEC to speak about the valiant organizing work that … Continued
The news of MEC’s sale to a US corporate investment firm has raised many questions amongst the co-operative community, most of them centering on how a co-operative could be sold without engaging its members. Given there’s been little public information available around the conversations that transpired around the MEC boardroom, it would be speculation to … Continued
Co-op education is one of the most important tools we have for sustaining our co-operative organizations and growing the co-operative movement. Over the summer, one of BCCA’s major focuses was on building out free and openly accessible resources for our members and other “co-op curious” groups to use for educating their members about the co-operative … Continued
Defined by Wikipedia, renewable energy is “energy that is collected from renewable resources, which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. Renewable energy often provides energy in four important areas: electricity generation, air and water heating/cooling, transportation, and rural (off-grid) energy services.” There are groups dedicated to providing access to renewable energy resources and September’s Co-op Café will review the Community Generation Project … Continued