In Converting Businesses to Cooperatives Just Got Easier, Isabella Garcia at Yes! magazine writes about the decision of retiring Tom Adams and George Chittenden to convert their glass-blowing business into an employee-owned cooperative:
In early 2017, the pair reached out to Project Equity, a nonprofit organization that helps businesses convert to employee-ownership. That model made sense for Adams & Chittenden, whose employees were career glass blowers, not laborers in unskilled jobs.
Project Equity was at the time finalizing its Accelerate Employee Ownership initiative, a collaboration launched in September with the Shared Capital Cooperative, a national loan fund that provides financing to cooperative businesses and housing in the United States.
The initiative aims to lower barriers for businesses converting to employee-owned models by providing access to individuals and organizations who are experienced in co-op conversions, and to lenders familiar with cooperative business models. The initiative is seeded with $5 million from Quality Jobs Fund, an initiative by the New World Foundation and the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco that invests in projects committed to improving quality job opportunities for workers in historically underserved areas. It aims to perform 30 conversions and maintain quality employment for more than 1,000 individuals over the next 10 years in California, Nevada and Arizona. The initiative also focuses on the positive ripple effects employee ownership can have in a community.
“It’s harder and harder for working people to make ends meet,” said Alison Lingane, co-founder of Project Equity. “We see employee ownership as creating a stable financial situation for people and their communities. This is something that addresses a lot of issues all at once.”
According to the Harvard Business Review, employee ownership can reduce economic inequality because the primary beneficiaries of profitable businesses are working- and middle-class people. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—ThinkProgress documents more foreign funding to Chamber:
ThinkProgress has a new investigation to supplement their story from last week that documented "the disclosure of fundraising documents U.S. Chamber staffers had been distributing to solicit foreign (even state-owned) companies to donate directly to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6)."
This new chapter of the investigation adds significantly to ThinkProgress's case with very specific donations documented that are far beyond what the Chamber has publicly acknowledged in interviews.
ThinkProgress began by documenting the three ways in which the Chamber fundraises from foreign corporations, and how that money goes into its "501(c)(6) entity, the same account that finances its unprecedented $75 million dollar partisan attack ad campaign." The Chamber has responded with a focus on just one of those avenues for fundraising—the red-herring AmChams, the network of Chamber affiliates internationally, composed of American and foreign companies. The Chamber acknowledges their existence, and that it receives money from them, but has stonewalled any attempt to determine whether or not that money is making its way into their attack ads for Republicans. To date, the traditional media has just bought that story, has accepted the Chamber's "just trust us" line.