Tools for cooperatives include online courses, decision trees, and multimedia information kits that assist with setting up cooperatives of all types, converting businesses to employee ownership, making business plans, and financing cooperatives. If your toolkit is not represented here, please contact us at CoopInfo@usda.gov.
The North Star Curriculum
Part of fellowship programs for building community wealth through cooperative ownership in the African American communities of the Twin Cities metro area.
Rural Grocery Toolkit
Resources for existing grocers and those establishing a new rural grocery store.
Solving the Child Care Crisis With Cooperatives Featuring Kim Coontz
Kim Coontz, director of the California Center for Cooperative Development, discusses the types of childcare cooperatives including employer-sponsored, worker cooperatives, parent cooperatives, and multi-stakeholder cooperatives. She describes how the cooperative business model can be used as an effective model to address the childcare crisis and describes how childcare cooperatives are organized.
State Strategies for Increasing Wages for Cooperative Health Care Workers
This National Governors Association Center for Best Practices toolkit includes strategies states can use to increase wages and facilitate ease of work for health care workers including workers providing care through a cooperative. State Medicaid revisions can increase home health care worker wages by assuring government funds actually go to caregivers. For example, reporting requirements, enforcement vehicles, and other mechanisms can assure that funds go to intended recipients. The toolkit also addresses how nonwage strategies with clear monetary value can help care workers including provision of transportation and childcare.
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
Extensive resources for community controlled affordable housing and low income cooperative homeowners.