The Democracy at Work Institute has created a fellowship program to support the current and next generation of mid-career worker cooperative development leaders and their organizations to engage with the question of scale: what does scale mean, how can coop developers incorporate approaches to scale in their work, what tools and relationships are needed to direct the work toward scale? The Institute’s Fellowship Program creates the space and time for cooperative developers to step back and think about their work from this vantage point. For information about our 2015 Fellows, follow this link.
The Fellowship program anchors worker cooperative developers with:
- Action Learning – Support to design and implement an action-learning project to explore an issue of scale in an organization, cooperative or community in which they work.
- Peer Network – Connections to other leaders and allies in the worker cooperative development field to provide networking and intergenerational relationship-building opportunities.
- Supported Reflection– Supportive environment for fellows to reflect in a way that rejuvenates their daily work, and connects their work to the larger movement.
- Strategic Thinking – Engagement in a series of exciting conversations and explorations that strengthen commitment while challenging Fellows to ask, “How do we scale worker cooperative development?"
- Tools– Opportunities to learn best practices in the field, as well as to pilot tools that support thinking and working toward scale.
The program includes:
- Three in-person retreats combined with study-trips to models of scaled cooperatives.
- Four webinars that delve deeper into cooperative development best practices and introduce tools for scaling cooperatives.
- Periodic assignments to ground learning in work.