The Whole Story
What we do and how we got here.
Last updated
What we do and how we got here.
Last updated
Let's Play is a community of academics, organizers working in the cooperative sector, and co-op members seeking to transform the learning culture in our movements. This community's mission is to support co-op educators who want to practice critical, experiential approaches to co-op education.
We believe:
Every person doing educational work in the cooperative movement can learn these practices.
Every person can connect to their innate strength and wisdom through critical consciousness.
Conventional education is a critical choke point limiting the spread of cooperative ideas.
The first step is to seed a community of like-minded educators and cooperative developers. Following the Impact Network approach, we hope to avoid reinventing wheels and colonizing new problem spaces. We have everything we need already!
With our attention fixed on this problem space, we could organize a library of resources, shape train-the-trainer curricula, and identify organizations and spaces that are a good fit for ongoing experiments with critical pedagogy and experiential education.
Join our community of practice by starting here.
The project was initiated by Stephen Shelato, an MSW student at the University of South Carolina. During his first semester, he listened to the Decolonize Social Work podcast and learned about the cooperative movement for the first time. He was immediately enthralled, but noticed that his peers did not have the same reaction to the information presented in the podcast. He soon left his job as a counselor and began training to become a co-op developer.
Stephen's life experiences made him more receptive to cooperative values and practices. He had watched many adult learners achieve self-determination by working together as a group. He had watched his financial coaching clients quickly grasp complex financial topics. But the other social work students in his classes had not. Some had life experiences that made them distrust decentralized teams, while others had very few workplace experiences to draw on.
Stephen applied for a $5,000 Cooperative Education Fund grant and pitched an interactive classroom. After many spirited conversations with David Funderburk, religious education director and experiential education guru, they developed an approach modeled on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Their goal was to craft an authentic simulation of a cooperative workplace.
Stephen uploaded a trial lesson plan to a free GitBook account and organized a focus group of MSW students in February 2023. Their feedback shaped the first published version of Let's Play Co-op. Cooperative educators and developers continue to shape the workshop. It is a "living document" following an iterative process and we hope it will continue to improve. It remains open source and the GitBook platform allows it to be easily duplicated and adapted by educators with limited technical skill.
In the process, Stephen and David stumbled upon a formula for experiential learning that may prove valuable in other learning environments. Conferences, retreats, and academic classrooms can easily adapt the Let's Play website for their context. Learners only need a chair and a smartphone. Instructors only need to reserve a space for the workshop and modify the drag & drop website to suit their needs.
Other important lessons arose from conversations and research following the experiment:
We could all embrace our inner social workers. Sure, we can make an effort to recruit in social work spaces like graduate programs and social service agencies. But we can also recognize that we each have an inner social worker that needs to be fed. Your inner social worker comes out when you engage in active listening, when you emphasize coaching and minimize direction, and when you view a person holistically, inextricably bound to their environment.
Emergent learning environments are a good fit for intersectional movements: We cannot succeed as a siloed movement. We are embedded in dozens of different ally movements. Stephen wasn’t initially inspired by the co-op model alone; his personal path led him through Sociocracy, consensus decision-making, labor history, alternative currencies, localism, the “next” economy, the solidarity economy, CDFIs and community land trusts. Experiential techniques that embrace intersection include: discussion, small groups, teambuilding, scenarios and role play.
Center emotion, rather than keeping it on the margins. From Co-op 101 to in-depth board training, all cooperative learning touches on our human emotions in the context of collaboration. In a field dominated by financial and legal minds, we are often preoccupied with technical concepts. By centering emotion we can keep existential questions in the room, encouraging participants to connect on a deeper level to a cooperative vision of the future. By centering emotion we can cut to the heart of a matter. Case in point: consent decision making processes which are less about memorizing protocol and more about trusting the process and the people you work with.
Grief. Cooperative models can be inspiring and prefigurative. They can also disrupt a learner's previous hopes for system change. Don’t go around grief, go through it. Name it, normalize it, model healthy behaviors around embracing grief. Get used to saying, “Yes, the hopeful vision you loved might be diminished or dead altogether after this event. A new vision of the future may be very different and hard to imagine in detail at first. It’s good to feel overwhelmed at first. Your passion for a better economy and a better world up to this point was still a good thing.” Make time in learning settings for grief. Pause. Let people breathe.
Work is education and education is work. We don’t need to stop our "doing" to engage in learning. We almost never need to squeeze learning into 60-minute or 90-minute workshops. Those models have limited utility. Consider Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning (which is remarkably similar to the scientific method): A member-owner or board member will inevitably have meaningful experiences throughout their tenure - but without intention setting, reflection and setting new intentions after they have gained a new skill, their progress may become shallow or stagnant. If an organization can achieve a culture shift that embraces the workplace as an intentional learning environment, it can live into our cooperative principles and inject abundance into our scarcity-minded culture.
Academia has many intervention points. Throughout his interviews with college instructors, Stephen was told that faculty are eager to do their part. One example is guest-presenting; visiting your local university for a one-off workshop during regularly scheduled class time. Educators are eager for their students to see real-world cooperative projects happening in their local communities. Another intervention point is degree credentialing. Social workers have different licensing requirements in each state, but every MSW program is approved by the same national association. Those requirements already specify that MSW graduates must be familiar with labor organizing and it mentions the labor union model by name. If cooperatives and unions have a shared history going back over 150 years in the United States, why does the credentialing requirement not mention co-ops as well? By lobbying to insert one word into one regulation, we could ensure that all social work graduate students across the country are exposed to cooperative ideas.
