How do we ensure that the cooperative movement is grounded in anti-racism, justice, sustainability, and participatory democracy?

At CommonBound, the USA Cooperative Youth Council (USACYC) will host a Peoples' Movement Assembly process with a national group of #CoopYouth to explore how other movements have effectively addressed this challenge. Our goal is to make the cooperative movement stronger by engaging young cooperators around this question in a meaningful way that promotes their continued engagement. We will use this network gathering to:

1. Strategize about how we build an truly anti-racist cooperative movement.
2. Share tools to make our cooperatives and movements more participatory.
3. Continue to challenge the notion that cooperative movement spaces are “politically neutral.”

We are young people in their teens and twenties who are committed to economic justice as an integral aspect of our striving for collective liberation. We believe that equipping folks with the tools they need to collectively organize around issues that affect them is an essential key to this liberation.

We will share and use tools such as the PMA “People’s Movement Assembly” and our organizing strategy guides, which engage people in participatory democracy. These tools have been developed and used by many organizations in order to successfully break down complex issues and unify around cohesive action steps to resolve them.

We are seeking other young people in their teens and twenties who are committed to economic justice as an integral aspect of our striving for collective liberation. We will engage with these tools around developing a truly Anti-Racist Cooperative Movement. We don’t see that our national cooperative movement actively embraces and pursues social, economic, and ecological justice. Through this process, we hope identify the issues we face and engage people to build on this work in their movement spaces with specific goals in mind. We seek to challenge the notion that these movement spaces are “politically neutral”.

This network gathering is open to all attendees who identify as “youth” - (while youth means different things in different contexts, we define youth as late teens to age 30). The demographic we organize is the age group typically in the vanguard of social movements. For more information, please contact info [at] youth.coop.

For more information about USACYC, visit http://youth.coop, check out our dynamic postings on http://facebook.com/usacyc, or read an article that inspires us here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5Pyx9g3K1JFWXZLdDVMa0paUnM

Coordinators:

• Emily Lippold Cheney (USACYC Co-Founder, Traveling Cooperative Institute Director, cooperative developer)
• Payam Kaveh Imani, (USACYC President, President of the Lorin District Business Association Berkeley, Ca ; Alchemy Collective Cafe & Coffee Roasters Co-Founder)