Youth Reinventing Co-operatives - Volume II

Options: You can write one or more case studies or essays in the following categories:

1. Case studies of a specific co-operative operated for and by young people;
2. Case studies of a co-operative that has special programmes for involving young people as members or in the governance of the co-op; and
3. Essays on a specific theme related to co-operatives or co-operative thought.
4. New to this volume, we are asking for submissions of co-operative development resources that your organization found useful in developing or learning about the co-operative model. Our goal is to make this volume increasingly useful to youth seeking to develop new co-operatives.
   • Was there a step-by-step guide your co-op used to get up and running?
   • Does your group have a great way of running successful meetings that you want to share?
   • Is your co-operative using an innovative co-operative governance structure that you think others should know about?
     
     If you or your co-operative have found some wonderful co-operative development resources you think others should know about, please submit these too!

If you have other ideas that don’t quite fit into these categories, please discuss them with us.

NOTE: We are also looking for multimedia resources. If you have a great film, DVD, or audio recording you think others should know about, please send us information about it (youthco@uvic.ca) and we will see about including it. If we receive enough multimedia resources, we will include a DVD of these with the next volume.

Length: All essays should be between 750 and 1200 words.

Deadline: All submissions must be received by February 28th, 2008 … but we would much appreciate earlier submissions if that is possible…we are working towards a tight deadline. We want to have the book ready for the International Building Co-operative Futures Youth Conference in May, 2008.

Photos: Good, reproducible photos that reflect the content of the essays are particularly welcome. Photos should be and submitted electronically if possible. If you are scanning photos, please do so at at least 300 dpi. Please save and submit scanned photos in .tiff compression if at all possible. If absolutely necessary, you can submit in .jpeg but please do so at a high quality compression rate.

Guidance on case studies: Please click one of the links below to see the case study template for some ideas about the kind of information you might want to ascertain. This template, though, is only a suggest of what to include in your essay. We encourage you to write it in your own way. Perhaps it would be best if you thought of the template as a list of desirable information rather than a format for preparing your submission, whether it be about a youth co-op or a co-op with an interesting youth programme.
Case Study Template (PDF) - 12k
Case Study Template (Word) - 38k

Templates are to be used as a guide, however we welcome submissions in your own words and format. 

Guidance on essays: Our hope is that this book will capture some of the attitudes of young people towards co-ops and so we invite essays on co-operative themes. Following are some of the ideas we have thought of for themes. If you have another theme you would like to write about, please do so, contacting us beforehand if you wish.

1. What are the benefits of co-operating together?
2. How have co-operatives improved my community?
3. How could co-operatives help me in the future?
4. How could co-operatives become more important in the future?
5. Why am I going to become seriously involved in co-operatives?
6. How has a co-operative, a co-operator, or co-operation inspired me?
7. Why is it important for youth to participate in co-operatives?

Contacting us: Please contact us through our e-mail address for this project: youthco@uvic.ca