The Cooperators Podcast Episode 16 Felipe Witchger Community Purchasing Alliance

Bulk buying means lower costs. That's a fact of life in the US and it also works to the detriment of smaller, community oriented institutions - think churches, charter schools, various non profits.

They are too small to win those discounts so they pay high prices for basic services and commodities.

The Community Purchasing Alliance was formed to solve exactly that inequity for non profits in the Washington DC area.

Right now about 75 non profits in the DC area are saving around $1 million annually on $17 million in purchases of electricity, trash hauling, security, copying, and other commodity services. That discount happens because they buy through CPA and its founder, Felipe Witchger, is the guest in this week's podcast.

He tells how his organization formed - he tips his hat to Paul Hazen, a longtime Washington DC co-op heavyweight as suggesting it function as a co-op.

He also tells how CPA wins discounts for its members.

Felipe also observes that CPA now also operates in southern Connecticut and North Carolina. It also is scouting cities for an expansion later this year and as many as five may be targets. Listen up to find if your city is on the list - and if it isn't, you'll hear what Felipe is looking for in partners.

A couple housekeeping notes:

* He says CPA's biggest member is Kipp DC. That's a network of college prep schools with an annual budget over $100 million.

* There's intermittent wind noise. Sorry about that. Some was deleted but some stubbornly persisted. The podcast can be heard and the content is valuable however, so persist.

Listen up.

 Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

The Cooperators Podcast Episode 15 C. E. Pugh on Co-Op Grocer Success

For many of us, our warmest, most intimate connection with a cooperative is our local grocer and at the National Co+Op Grocers the business of that co-operative is helping its 145 members, each a consumer facing co-op grocer, successfully compete against increasingly powerful national grocers.

The good news is that most co-op grocers are holding their own.

There had been tough times for co-op grocers, admitted this podcast's interview, C. E. Pugh, CEO of the National Co+Op Grocers.  A big reason is that in the past decade the big national grocers, from WalMart on down, all discovered the consumer appeal of organic, of brown rice, of soy and almond milk, the kinds of products co-op grocers had long depended upon for successes.

And then they had a lot more competition.

But co-op grocers also have a trump card, said Pugh. They can and should double down on local goods, local farmers, the local community.  They are truly of the local community and to succeed, they need to accentuate that.

Many are doing just that.

Consider this podcast a guide to running a thriving food co-op.

Want to know still more about food co-ops?  Tune into The Cooperators Podcast Episode 9 with Stuart Reid of the Food Co-op Initiative. That discussion has a focus on starting new food co-ops, where the Pugh talk is more tilted towards succeeding at an operating co-op.

Listen up to C. E. Pugh.

Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

The Cooperators Podcast Episode 14 Neal Gorenflo Shareable

Call this podcast a deep dive into platform cooperatives and more broadly the sharing economy. That's what Neal Gorenflo, executive director of Shareable in San Francisco, spends his days noodling on. This is a wide ranging, largely unstructured conversation but there are headline moments strewn throughout, from Gorenflo's Road to Damascus epiphany that prompted him to resign a corporate job and become a sharing guru through his bareful perspective on Uber - sizzling stuff - and musing about Emilia Romagna which he sees as something of a polar opposite of Silicon Valley because it's a place where cooperatives really matter.


Want some good news about cooperatives in the US? You'll hear it here. We just may be on the cusp of a boom in cooperatives as more of us come to see that this is a flexible business format with lots of benefits for workers, communities, owners.

Listen up

 Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

The Cooperators Podcast Episode 13 Nathan Schneider

"Everything for Everyone" - that's the title of Professor Nathan Schneider's book that looks at many kinds of innovative co-ops and it's a book that gave me optimism that there just may be a bold, bright next act for cooperatives in the US.
In some ways co-ops look to have stalled - where are the new credit unions, the new grocery co-ops? There just aren't many.

Does that mean the end is nearing?

Nope. Schneider in this podcast talks about wholly new energy for what he calls platform co-ops and also reimagined housing co-ops for instance.

He also is a big booster of purchasing co-ops which, he says, often provide significant benefits to their members but without winning much notice for the good they do.

There's also a lot of energy around employee ownership of businesses - worker-co-ops for instances - which, Schneider points out, won support from both Paul Ryan and Bernie Sanders and it is difficult to imagine them agreeing on anything else.

New times call for new kinds of co-ops and that is happening. Not always smoothly, not always easily, but it is happening.

Why aren't there still more co-ops? A lot of this podcast is an exploration of the infrastructure requirements that will help enable more co-op formation and success. It can happen. And you'll hear concrete ideas about the changes that should happen.

And co-ops just maybe can bring improvement to many areas of our lives.

Co-ops also faced what might be called PR problems in the cold war era, said Schneider. It was not a good thing to be seen as a cooperator which some believed was a step nearer Communism. But that stigma may be fading away.
And that may also help an ushering in of a boom era for cooperatives.

A word on format. This podcast started out on one medium - but after 15 minutes that signal vanished. Another 50+ minutes were then recorded on a different channel. If you think you hear differences you are probably right. But the quality is good throughout. And the ideas are provocative.

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.