Moving Beyond Crises: Converting Workplaces and Community Spaces to Co-operatives in Canada and Beyond Featuring Marcelo Vieta and Fiona Duguid
Most of Canada’s 1.2 million small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by the pandemic. This has compounded the already-existing business succession crisis due to the so-called “silver tsunami” and the large numbers of retirement-aged business owners without succession plans. One underutilized option in Canada for saving these businesses, their jobs, and the communities they serve is to sell SMEs to employees or community members and convert them to co-operatives. Since 2018, The Conversion to Co-operatives Project (www.coopconvert.ca), working together with Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada (www.canada.coop), has set out to better understand business conversion to cooperatives (BCCs) by: mapping how many currently exist in Canada, where, and in what sectors; documenting their conversion stories; comparing them to international best practices; assisting the country’s co-op movement build BCC capacity; and contributing to policy change. Marcelo Vieta and Fiona Duguid’s talk will highlight key findings from The Co-opConvert Project, drawing attention to the advantages and challenges of BCCs for business succession and sustainable community and cooperative development.
About our speakers
Marcelo Vieta
Marcelo Vieta is an Associate Professor in Adult Education and Community Development, and Director of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy & Work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. He is the co-author of the book Cooperatives at Work (Emerald, 2023) and author of Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Brill and Haymarket, 2020) and the lead researcher of The Co-opConvert Project
Fiona Duguid
Fiona Duguid holds a PhD from University of Toronto in Adult Education and Community Development and is the research co-lead of the The Co-opConvert Project. Fiona is currently an Assistant Professor in the Shannon School of Business, MBA program at Cape Breton University, and Adjunct Professor in the Saint Mary’s University Co-operative Business Management program.
Event Information
Date: Wednesday, May 3, 2023
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm (Saskatchewan time or Central Standard Time)
This event is being hosted through Zoom. Please register online and a link and password will be sent to the confirmation email provided.
Questions?
Email coop.studies@usask.ca