The Evergreen cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio was the story everyone wanted to hear at the opening session on Saturday Aug. 7, 2010 of the U.S. Federation for Worker Cooperatives conference in Berkeley. 

Several video cameras - including PBS -- were rolling at the front of Krutch Theater as Ted Howard, executive director of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, which helped to organize the cooperatives and the strategy along with the late John Logue founder of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, spoke to an inspired audience of 270 worker cooperators from all over the U.S. and part of Canada.  Also speaking was Medrick Addison, operations manager at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry.

Today was another amazing day of presentations at the ACE conference!....

Unlike other conferences that I'm used to attending, you don't have to choose from workshops at the Association of Cooperative Educators. There is only one track, and everyone is on the same one.

I actually ended up being very glad that it was arranged this way, else I might have missed out some very important information and stories.

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland, Ohio
Worker coops in Cleveland to build wealth for inner-city residents

Past issues of GEO have reported on the emergence of a particular type of worker cooperative, the home care cooperative. In the 1980s, the federal government followed the lead of state governments like Wisconsin and acknowledged that elderly and disabled people who need help in day-to-day living are best served by in-home assistance. Medicare and Medicaid funding that would have otherwise been used only for nursing homes would now be applicable to home care services. With "the gray tsunami" of aging baby boomers looming, demand is only going to increase for the next few decades.

By Rob Brown, IHA office manager, and Bethany Schroeder, IHA board president

As the baby boom ages into the elder explosion in the world's industrial nations, more and more innovative solutions will appear in the effort to provide seniors with the many sorts of care they deserve and to which they are entitled.

Every year the Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation honors one of its members with the "Worker Co-op Merit Award"--an idea we might well want to consider for our own USA Federation. This year they selected Edmonton-based MCHB, a truly remarkable venture which is addressing, in a very special way, the otherwise unmet needs of that city's "immigrant and refugee" communities.

The keynote speaker at the Second U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperative Conference was Rick Surpin. In 1985 Rick founded Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the first worker-owned home care cooperative in the United States. CHCA now employs over 1,000 home care workers in quality jobs. Virtually all of the worker-owners of CHCA are African American and Latina women. CHCA aims to change the home health care industry by modeling their philosophy of "quality care through quality jobs." To that end, CHCA has spun off a number of partnership organizations.