A History of Cooperatives:
By The YES Camp
Our Values
The Cooperative Movement is for people who are fed up with the exploitation of capitalist systems. For people who want an alternative to those who abuse the authority of hierarchical structures. It is about creating a healthy community of support and collaboration. To build an environment where everyone can afford to live comfortably and advance regardless of ethnicity, gender, or financial status.
Getting Started
The Cooperative Movement is currently being developed by The Proxy Initiative’s media management LLC. Without an already existing and accessible community fund under current laws and regulations it is easier and more cost effective to start an LLC to produce a social media campaign which hopes to generate revenue that leads to the development of a cooperative organization. Once The Cooperative Movement has amassed a significant community it will become its own legal entity. Until then it is simply a landing site for those who share the hopeful ideology and want to make it a reality.
Formation of Organization
The first step in achieving our goals is to gather those who share our values and organize. Then we will need to generate funding to further our goals. The formation of a Social Media site will allow us to build community and advance exponentially without relying so heavily on donations and further the cooperative movement. How you spend time online matters. Most of the social media sites steal data and destroy community via toxic engagement algorithms. It’s our content, it should be used to improve the quality of our life, not make it worse as it has.
Promote Yourself
By having a Cooperative Social Media site that is meant to benefit our members we are working on ways to Monetize content creation via contests, awards, and giving value to likes. This promotes a meritocracy among members and deters “rage bait”, bots, or content theft. The value of likes is to be determined by the amount of revenue we generate. Revenue is planned to be generated via memberships, merchandise, donations, and advertising. The better our site does the more we can give back to our members and there is no barrier to monetize as with other sites. You can start by becoming a member today!
Expanding our Organization
After the Social Media site is established and generating revenue, funds can be used to invest in other community needs decided through a democratic process of petitions. Although not necessary it is encouraged to prioritize the expandable aspect investments have for the organization in order to benefit everyone. An example is that if investments save members money that creates more potential revenue to create more investments. Another example would be investing in services that generate more revenue within our organization rather than private entities. A perfect example of saving members money and providing services that generate revenue would be to invest in cooperative non-market housing.