We Can Fix This: Repairing Harm & Resourcing Resilience in Our Co-ops is a participatory workshop exploring how to build a cooperative "home" that supports culture, transformative justice, and collective healing. Using home maintenance analogies—like mold, pest control, and foundational flood damage—we’ll explore how to assess and address conflict, structural harm, and deferred relational maintenance.
“Co-ops are practical, not perfect” and as an entity, they can often get caught up with an expectation to be a utopian alternative to capitalist structures. Through a discussion of learned experiences, this session aims at providing an honest lens into managing collective work and lateral power, creating systems that empower cooperative workers in ways that make every individual feel heard, while keeping the expectations of what it means to be in a cooperative realistic, restorative, and hopeful.
In times of instability, building intentional and inclusive community spaces becomes more critical than ever. Drawing from lived experiences in education, community organizing, and civic engagement, this session explores how cooperatives can use intersectionality, call-in practices, and safer space frameworks to create sustainable and just housing ecosystems. We will examine practical strategies for navigating conflict, centering marginalized voices, and fostering accountability while maintaining compassion.
Most co-ops strive to be places of care, community, and consensus, but even in co-ops, boundary crossings happen. How do we handle them in a way that prioritizes safety while treating everyone with fairness and respect? How can we create cultures where consent is so normal that major incidents are rare? We want to hear what happens in your co-ops, cross-pollinate ideas, and share our experience running non-punitive Consent Teams that provide communities with education, emotional support, and mediation.
In co-ops, we often pride ourselves on being inclusive and equitable—but what happens when harm shows up in the form of a joke, a question, or an everyday comment?
This session invites cooperative members to reckon with microaggressions as real structural cracks within our supposedly safe spaces. Drawing from personal experience navigating coded bias, racialized communication, and deflection within cooperative housing, the session will unpack how "small" slights carry big consequences—especially for marginalized members.
Together, we'll explore:
Session materials from “When Boundaries Get Crossed: A Transformative Justice Approach to Consent Violations” presented by Fuzzy Shostak and Emma Daley at NASCO Institute 2024. Most co-ops strive to be places of care, community, and consensus, but even in co-ops, boundary crossings happen. How do we handle them in a way that prioritizes safety while treating everyone with fairness and respect? How can we create cultures where consent is so normal that major incidents are rare?
Celia Chandler provides an overview of the LTB process for co-op evictions in Ontario.
As of 2021, "It’s been seven years since housing co-ops evictions moved to Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB). Celia Chandler works with many housing co-ops on member issues and will lead you through the nuts and bolts of evictions at this one-hour session. If you need to brush up on the co-op eviction process including navigating the LTB during COVID, this workshop is for you!"
This is an overview of Co-op Conflict Support. In this slide deck, you will find the limits of conflict resolution, review proactive processes and tools for navigating conflict, and additional resources.
Below, are the recordings for NASCO Institue 2020 sessions by room. Please share lessons learned with your cooperatives and communities.
If you did not register for NASCO Institute and you'd like to support free and low-cost cooperative education, please consider contributing a donation amount that feels appropriate for you and/or your cooperative. Your donation makes it possible to offer cooperative education materials and resources free of charge. DONATE HERE.
These activities and worksheets are from a workshop titled "Introduction to Accountability Models" presented by Evelyn Smith at NASCO Institute 2017.
