We're back. After a hiatus we have resumed recording The Cooperators Podcast...drum roll...presenting the current podcast with Adam Trott, executive director of the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives which aims to stimulate formation of new worker co-ops in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont.
VAWC also helps existing worker co-ops perform more successfully.
VAWC members include Collective Copies, a copy and print shop, Green Mountain Spinnery, which makes yarns, Oxbow Design Build, which offers design and construction services, and Pedal People which is a human powered trash and recycling service in Northampton Mass.
Trott acknowledges that his geography is a fertile breeding ground for worker cooperatives: "They have been in this area since the 1970s." So knowledge of them is high.
In this podcast Trott talks about the obstacles to starting a worker co-op, the benefits they bring to their community as well as to the worker owners, and why some worker co-ops succeed and others fail.
Consider this talk a primer on how to get this done - and know that in the current economic downturn interest is high in this alternative form of ownership.
