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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Detroit church hopes to boost worker-owned businesses in Latino community

As she was leaving a supermarket in southwest Detroit in 2015, Maria Perez spotted a note on a bulletin board near the exit, saying a church not far from where she lived was training people for jobs. Perez had been looking for work and had a feeling this might lead to something.

When she arrived at Grace in Action, an old funeral home-turned-church in the heart of Detroit’s Mexican community, she realized that this wasn’t job training, but a meeting about worker-owned cooperatives. She had no idea what a cooperative was, but decided to stay anyway.

[...]

And then Perez met Carolina Torres-Merlo, a recent immigrant from Venezuela, at the meeting. The two hit it off and decided they would work together. They attended weekly training sessions in 2017, and after more than a year of brainstorming ideas and regular meetings on how to build a co-op, they launched Cleaning in Action, a green cleaning company.

Read the rest at Bridge Michigan

 

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