Loomio
Sun 18 Aug 2019 1:44AM

Community of Spiritual Cooperatives

AT Alix Tate Public Seen by 57

Hey Cooperative collaborators,
I'm working on a project to create the first ever Cooperatively owned spiritual community. It's called the Community of Spiritual Cooperatives (CSC). We have three basic principles besides traditional Coop principles; decentralized, Cooperative and non-dogmatic. The idea is basically to connect with the booming new age spiritual movement on the West coast USA, Bali, Thailand, Europe, etc.

The CSC will help people reconnect and work together as a community (replacing the lost space religion used to fill) with "spiritual" things like potlucks, volunteer work, yoga, tea ceremonies, meditation, and a bunch of other fun events which already happen around these new age areas (CSC could empower and connect these already existing events). Really, the ultimate goal is to inspire practical action by using this "Spiritual" community to inspire more Cooperatives such as energy, factory, farm, etc. From my experience, it's hard to get people to work together to create a cooperative, but if the people are already connected through this community which is more about exciting and fun activities and less of a financial commitment, it should be easier to create bigger cooperative projects with the already organized participants.

We have a lot of physical support already where we will be making spaces in festivals, holding local events in towns and ultimately connecting with many world wide backpackers who will help local groups create their own cooperative using our precedent. Local groups will be autonomous so the main thing connecting us is the name, 3 principles and a nice online platform / campaign. Where we need help most at this moment is online. We want to create a directory to organize ourselves, a referral application to spread the idea, and a social media platform which could potentially be created through an alliance with social coop. I'd love to hear what everyone thinks about this idea. I also have many more details I can share, for now I'll just attach our latest brochure. Thanks

G

Graham Sun 18 Aug 2019 12:23PM

Thanks for flagging up your project. In terms of getting help with tech you won't be alone - tech skills are in high demand - and right now I'm doing most of the limited development work that we're currently able to undertake within Platform 6 as we ever so gradually build out and iterate our MVP.