Activities & Examples

A collection of tools and pre-made resources for experiential and critical education about cooperatives.

Highlighted Examples

• Let's Play Co-op 101 - This demo illustrates what is possible in a 90-minute workshop designed to motivate rather than simply inform. This is the initial project that sparked the Let's Play community and the Play Anywhere method.

• The Industrial Commons' ACE Institute - This 3-day retreat is packed with tours and discussions for groups planning cooperative ecosystems. To enhance the experience, the program makes time for eliciting participant expertise and perspectives. Groups walk away with a blueprint and increased agency.

• Collective Courage Study Groups - Anyone who doubts the power of a simple book club should watch a few of the sessions featured on the Collective Courage webpage. The book becomes the curricula, and the learning plan is simple: just spend 90 minutes every couple weeks discussing part of the book.

• Integrated Capital Cards - A bilingual deck of 121 playing cards that help investors learn how they can help bridge the racial wealth gap. Developed by the Boston Impact Initiative, the deck "builds financial knowledge and power through play."

• The Great Game of Business - An on-the-job business literacy program where the workplace itself is viewed as an educational environment. Workers at all level understand the business' key performance indicators and participate in hands-on weekly "huddles" to plan the next week's performance goals.

• TESA Collective's Board Games - A round of Co-opoly effectively illustrates the practical challenges of cooperative startups. The TESA Collective took this play-centered experience one step further and created an Education Kit that facilitators can use for out-of-the-box group workshops.

• Sociocracy For All - Their online academy requires participants to design and run their own training. During the academy, participants dive head first into the topics of power and consent.

• LA Co-op Lab's Foldable Guides - When is a handout a lesson plan in itself? When it looks like this. With a minimal amount of framing and debrief outlining, a facilitator could easily turn each of these items into an intentional learning exercise.

• Round Sky's Cooperative Leadership Certification - The course facilitator runs the first online session, but the next 10 sessions are facilitated by the participants themselves. Tools such as Living Agendas, Accountability Trackers, Scope & Role Generators, and Loomio discussion boards are not only presented and discussed, but also used by all participants in their workplaces. (More information here)

• Nickel City Housing Co-op's Workshop on Co-op Principles - A 2-hour workshop plan that uses experiential education techniques.

Activities & Curricula

If you are stuck on a problem or in a hurry, the following examples may help you develop an educational intervention that fosters critical thinking, promotes democracy, and encourages civic engagement.

Openings & Icebreakers

"Connection before content" is a mantra heard often in experiential education settings. Whether your group is in-person, online, or hybrid, there are authentically engaging activities that fit any group.

• California Academy of Sciences: This page explains the benefits of using icebreakers with adult learners and divides activities into icebreakers (helping strangers connect) and energizers (helping participants become alert and engaged).

• Community agreements: This outline presents a straight-forward process for grafting an agreement on how members of a group will behave towards one another. It is noteworthy that the Unitarian Universalist tradition uses the practice of covenant crafting to create and update such agreements. A similar approach may be helpful for groups with theological motivations.

• Flipped Classrooms: What if the start of your workshop was not the start? Flipping the classroom often means assigning pre-work instead of using homework or exams. Should your participants meet one another before the first time they learn together? Maybe last-minute icebreakers feel forced and uncomfortable because they... always kind of are?

• Authentic Relating: For groups with a high degree of connection and trust, this collection focuses on playful, but intimate relationship-building.

Experiential Ed's Greatest Hits

Experiential education has a dedicated and vibrant network of professionals from around the world. While their focus is often on outdoor education, work with young people, therapeutic settings or academia, much of their knowledge can be applied to cooperative education.

• Experiential Educator Resource Library: This library of libraries has everything nonprofits, teachers, and families could need. It is curated by the national professional organization, the Association for Experiential Education.

• Activity Platforms: Apps like Playmeo can be useful for educators who create fresh curricula frequently. Playmeo is a popular proprietary collection of activity templates.

• Hybrid Pedagogy: A professional journal and research community focused on critical pedagogy in the digital age.

• Open Pedagogy: A collection of experiential and critical learning case studies from many different settings and disciplines.

Experiential Activities Used by Cooperative Organizations

• A 12-Week Study Group: Cooperation Humboldt's curriculum can be found here.

• SELC's Online Community for Nonprofits: Using a simple Facebook Group, SELC fosters a peer learning group for exploring the worker self-directed nonprofit model.

• Cooperative Summer Camps: A time-honored solution, summer camps for K-12 students are a robust experiential model.

• Climate Action Plans: Ajani created a discussion-based, strengths-based, policy action oriented workshop that offers groups concrete examples and key critical concepts they can apply to their own context. The workshop itself is empowering, which sets up an effective call to action. (i.e. Work with your co-op to create a climate action plan.)

Experiential Activities Used in Other Sectors

• Collaborative Impact Methods Kit - 500+ techniques and tools designed to unleash collective change. Centered on network mapping and coalition-building, these activities can be effective in mobilizing teams in many different contexts.

Closings & Debriefs

We don't need to over-complicate the tried and true pattern of "What happened? So what? Now what?" - but here are some activities and prompts that can help facilitators.

• Open-ended questions: Are your check-out prompts closed or open-ended? If a participant can answer with "yes" or "no" then consider rewording your prompt.

• Pairs & share-backs: Ask participants to find a partner. Give partners 5-10 minutes to respond to your debrief prompts. Finally, ask each partner to summarize to the whole group what they heard their partner say.

• Thumb balls & card decks: If you are conducting debriefs with groups often enough, consider purchasing a physical debriefing tool. These introduce an element of randomness which can help offset our urge to over-engineer learning environments. You can achieve the same outcome with dice or spinners found in popular board games.

• Metaphoric methods: Sometimes, tools like Ubuntu Cards can foster creative, outside-the-box thinking. They can also give more introverted participants a helpful cue for thinking on the spot.

Brainstorming (What if...)

These are untested ideas that may be just as relevant and helpful as the resources above. Please contribute to this list by contacting us!

What if we made a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for a cooperative startup scenario?

D&D is widespread for a good reason - it creates a familiar framework for role play that can be re-used again and again. It is founded on alternating rounds of discussion, storytelling, and action. Instead of focusing on violence and destruction, what if a campaign focused on creation and community building?

For example, "Your group finds themselves outside city hall. You have 30 minutes before the city council meets to decide on a tax incentive for business conversions to worker cooperatives. The mayor is outside with you. What does your group want to say to them?"

Or another example, "Your character has a Charisma stat of 15, a Network Strength of 10, and your Wealth stat is 5. What tactic from your inventory will help you convince this local business to sign a letter of support? The community has a Diversity stat of 12, a Collective Wealth stat of 30, and an Urgency stat of 4."

Would a happy-hour Wikipedia edit-a-thon help build connections between co-op developers in a particular time zone?

Wikipedia editing is used by many classrooms to help engage students while also improving the quality of information on Wikipedia. Unlearning economics and individualism would be easier if Wikipedia articles more frequently mentioned alternative and parallel movements.

What if we used the Gather virtual meeting platform to simulate a membership drive for a new food co-op?

(Screenshot of the Gather app)

What would a Theater of the Oppressed performance focused on cooperatives look like?

Attendees of an event like this become "spect-actors" who have a dual role as both spectator and actor.

What would a follow-up to Paper Wheat (an example of documentary theater) look like?

Road trip, anyone?

YOUR IDEA HERE

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