The Common Share

In the late 90s, Joe Carter, Director of Education for Onion Lake First Nation, recognized First Nations had similar financial services needs to their non-Indigenous counterparts, but those needs...

Aasa and Kyle are joined in this episode by Sisan Fregene, who spent the summer working on The Backroad Diaries. This Co-operatives First project uses video and other media to highlight Western...

Fred Khonje’s career has spanned the areas of community economic development, non-profit co-op housing, co-op and social enterprise business development, housing policy development, and social...

A conversation on the history of co-ops.

Dr. Brett Fairbairn has been researching co-operatives for over 30 years; as a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, he has become one of the...

In this episode, Kyle, Dan, and Aasa discuss what membership engagement looks like for co-operatives, given how many different types of co-ops – and different types of members – there are. Is...

At its most basic, every co-op needs a champion with a vision, a group with a shared interest and a market for the service or product delivered by the co-op. Creating bylaws, setting up incorporation...

The co-operative business model has been relatively underutilized by Indigenous peoples in western Canada. Corporate structures and limited partnerships have more often been the go-to tools for...

In this episode, Aasa sat down with Dr. Dionne Pohler to discuss her keynote speech from the Saskatchewan Co-operative Association’s 2018 conference. The keynote focused on leveraging the co-op...

In the last episode in our series on board governance, Audra, Kyle, and Aasa talk about the importance of board diversity. Having people with different backgrounds, life experience, and skills helps...