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2010

2009

The Centre Celebrates 25 years of research and teaching excellence!

In honour of this significant event, the Centre staff, in collaboration with the Diefenbaker Canada Centre, prepared an exhibit of research called Building Community: Creating Social and Economic Well-Being.

Congratulations to Michael Chartier on his Thesis Award!

Michael Chartier is the recipient of this year’s University of Saskatchewan Thesis Award in the category of the Professional and Applied Social Sciences which recognizes excellence and original quality in graduate student research, for his thesis “Adult Education and the Social Economy: Rethinking the Communitarian Pedagogy of Watson Thomson”. Michael undertook the research to support his thesis with the support of a Linking, Learning, Leveraging scholarship.  See more details about his research here.

Michael’s work, which covers the work of radical educator Watson Thomson and the Saskatchewan Adult Education Division, sheds new light on this little known period in Saskatchewan’s political, educational, and economic history which saw the development of over 100 cooperative enterprises and 500 adult study groups throughout the mid-1940s.

Michael was also the winner of the 2008 F.J.H. Fredeen Memorial Scholarship.

Congratulations, Michael!  Well done!

Dr. Lou Hammond Ketilson on Co-operative Enterprises

On January 8, 2009, Dr. Lou Hammond Ketilson (The LLL project’s principal investigator) visited Victoria, British Columbia where she gave the following two presentations, hosted by the University of Victoria Faculty of Business and the BC Institute for Co-operative Studies:

• Getting the Message Out: Successful Models for Co-operative Enterprise Development

What resources are needed to support the growth of co-operative enterprises? How do you create synergy and cohesion among local co-ops? Many different models for supporting co-operative enterprise development have been used over the years, with varying degrees of success. The federation model, co-operative development councils and co-op development centres are three such models. This presentation introduces the various models and highlight the factors that have contributed to success.

You will find the MP3 of this lecture, the PowerPoint as a PDF and photos from the event at the BCICS website.

• Financing Aboriginal Enterprise: Is there a role for Co-operative Models?

Aboriginal Financial Institutions (AFIs) are a key source of business financing and support services for Aboriginal entrepreneurs. AFIs provide developmental loans to fill gaps resulting from private lenders’ failure to provide commercial loans to Aboriginal businesses. Evaluations of existing AFIs question the sustainability of these developmental lenders over the long term. At the same time, the emerging Aboriginal private sector continues to mature and business financing needs are becoming more diverse. Against this backdrop, the current roles and activities of AFIs may become less relevant to the market place. This presentation will examine the feasibility of using co-operative models of financing for supporting Aboriginal enterprise development.

You will find the MP3 of this lecture and the PowerPoint as a PDF at the BCICS website.

2008

Lou Hammond Ketilson – CASC Merit Award Recipient, 2008

Congratulations to Lou Hammond Ketilson, recipient of the 2008 (Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation) CASC/ASÉC Merit Award!  Those of us who know Lou and/or are acquainted with her work know that she is more than deserving of this honour.

Lou is the principal investigator of the Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan node (Linking, Learning, Leveraging) of the Canada-wide Social Economy Project and is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

It is worth noting that Lou is the first woman to receive this award.

See photos from the CASC Conference and from the award ceremony here. Learn more about CASC here.

2007

Centre welcomes Congress guests as the University of Saskatchewan hosts Congress 2007

From 28 May ­ 1 June 2007, three organizations will come together for the first time in a joint conference. The International Co-operative Alliance Committee on Co-operative Research (ICA), the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation (CASC), and the Association for Cooperative Educators (ACE) will together host one unified conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. This event will combine the approaches and audiences of the respective organizations and will be held in conjunction with the 2007 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Centre for the Study of Co-operatives is proud to be an active part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and is especially pleased to participate in the Social Economy Theme Day on Thursday, May 31st. See our Congress website at http://www.usaskstudies.coop/socialeconomy/Congress2007.

2006

2005

SSHRC Social Economy grant awarded to Lou Hammond Ketilson

In September 2005 the first annual installment of the $1.754 million grant was received by Dr. Lou Hammond Ketilson. Administered at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, this 5-year grant will be directed toward multi-partner research across the Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan region. Please see our http://www.usaskstudies.coop/socialeconomy/.

Consumer Cooperative Management Association

In June Dr. Brett Fairbairn spoke at the Consumer Cooperative Management Association conference Who’s on First: The Value of Values, held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here are the PowerPoint files from Dr. Fairbairn’s presentations at that meeting:

The Crowd Makes the Ballgame: Stakeholders and Cooperative Success – PowerPoint presentation, June 10, 2005

The Power Play: Linking to Members – PowerPoint presentation, June 11, 2005.

2004

A New Director

The centre is extremely pleased and fortunate to have secured Lou Hammond Ketilson as its director upon the unexpected early departure of Brett Fairbairn at the end of June 2004. A long-time centre associate, Lou had barely recovered from a five-year term as associate dean in the College of Commerce when she was approached about these new responsibilities. Due to her well-honed administrative skills, her familiarity with centre activities and protocols, and her deep knowledge of the co-op sector, the leadership transition has been seamless. Lou was acting director until the board appointed her as the new director in April 2005. Thanks for taking us on, Lou!

Our Twentieth Anniversary!

Concurrent with the renewal of its contract and the appointment of Lou as acting director, the centre also celebrated its twentieth anniversary last fall. Since its inception in 1984, we have grown from a small unit with a grand vision to a model of university outreach and engagement that consistently fulfils the dreams of its original mandate: to offer university courses on co-op theory, principles, structures, and legislation; to undertake original research into co-operatives; to publish co-op research by both centre staff and other scholars; and to maintain a resource centre of co-operative materials that support the centre’s teaching and research functions.

As part of the celebrations, we co-sponsored an exhibition of truly stunning photography by former wheat pool fieldman Everett Baker titled “Picturing a Utopian Reality: A Photographic Insight into the Co-operative Movement in Saskatchewan, 1941–1964,” which was on display 1–31 October 2004 in the Theatre Room at the Diefenbaker Centre. On 14 October, Brett gave a public lecture titled “Everett Baker and the Culture of Co-operation in Saskatchewan” as a complement to the exhibition.

SSHRC Project Update

We are pleased to announce that Karla Radloff, our first SSHRC scholarship recipient, successfully defended her MA thesis on government policy and co-operatives in the Canadian North at the end of August 04. And we have three new scholarship winners under the grant—Jason Heit, Kim Brown, and Monica Juarez Adeler.

Student researchers wrapped up a variety of summer projects during the fall. Jason Heit reviewed and analysed co-op and credit union web sites for cluster four; Angela Wagner compiled community profiles across all clusters; Juanita Bacsu worked on cluster one, helping Cris to create a master survey instrument; and Kim Brown prepared a literature review on issues around board diversity in co-operative organizations.

Data collection and other research activities are ongoing in all clusters, with participants making use of preliminary findings in presentations at conferences and workshops across the country—in July at the International Association for the Economics of Participation meetings in Halifax; at the Rural Sociological Society meetings in Sacramento in August; at the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers conference in Fredericton in October; and at an Aboriginal Women’s Community Economic Development conference in Costa Rica inFebruary.

Allison Muri, with us briefly as project administrator, prepared a wonderfully informative project newsletter, which went out in early July. She also set up a secure weblog site on the Internet, where researchers can post findings, comment on the work of others posted there, and share ideas about the project.

Other Research Update

Work is ongoing with Carol and Cris’s study to establish a National Co-operative Data Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. SSHRC student Angela Wagner has completed a major review of business statistics, which will serve as a complement and comparison to a research paper she completed earlier that examined the current state of co-operative data collection. Angie’s work this past summer resulted in a lengthy document that is awaiting Nora’s attention for editing and production. Merely the first stage in this large project, this document will provide a wealth of information regarding sources for business and industry statistics.

Cris and Lou’s research into diversity on co-op boards and governance bodies resulted in a successful application for U-Step funding for a summer student to help them with the project. Kim Brown, another SSHRC scholarship winner, spent four months on a literature search and review of board diversity in organizational governance structures.

The Seminar Series

The 2004–05 seminar series opened 30 September with a presentation titled “Crown Corporations and Co-operatives as Coping Mechanisms in Regional Economic Development” by Murray Rice from the Department of Geography. A fascinating subject, it generated discussion that lasted almost as long as the presentation. The centre’s three interdisciplinary graduate students, Rob Dobrohoczki, Jason Heit, and Monica Juarez Adeler, teamed up for a panel discussion titled “E-Commerce and Community: Dispatches from the Research Front” in mid-December. And Brett Fairbairn gave the first seminar of 2005, reflecting on “A Century of Saskatchewan Co-operatives” in mid-February. 31 March 2005, Tirso Gonzales from the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas, University of California, Davis, will give a presentation titled “Globalization, Indigenous Peoples, and Development.” Responsibility for the seminar series has passed from Roger’s capable hands into those of the centre’s interdisciplinary graduate students. Watch for announcements of future presentations on our home page.

Visitors

In late June 04 Brett, Lou, Roger, and Nora met with Rob Greer and Tara Popescue of Western Economic Diversification to discuss the social economy in Saskatchewan, how co-ops fit, and what pointers we could give them about how to define and assess the social economy in this context.

In early August Michael hosted Jenny Grigg, visiting on a Churchill Fellowship from Australia, which is supporting her study of co-operatives in rural communities, exploring why some communities have a strong culture of co-ops as a business structure in their local economy, and what programs and structures are in place to support them. She was travelling across Canada studying co-operative organizations and research centres and has promised us a copy of her final report to the Churchill Fellowship committee.

Also in August, Roger and Lou (with Centre Scholar Rob Norris) hosted a Dutch visitor to the centre. Joop Corijn, consulate general of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, spent a brief visit learning about the nature of the work we do at the centre and the relationship between the university, the centre, and the co-operative sector.