Another participant, Caroline Woolard, is a US-based artist, educator, author and the director of research and programs at Open Collective, a technology platform that supports 15,000 groups to raise and spend US$35m a year in full transparency. Woolard is also a founding co-organizer of Art.coop which exists to grow the Solidarity Economy movement by centring systems change work led by artists.
For her, without cultures of co-operation, the co-operative movement will fail “because most of us have no practice of direct democracy at school, at home, online, or at work. We have to learn how to do this together, and often this happens through cultural practice.”
She describes how a scan of the arts and culture landscape in 2021 “reveals a growing demand for education and training about co-operative forms of enterprise”.
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