Spring Newsletter - April 2022
Guild News - May 2022
Welcome to our first monthly member newsletter! We are excited to update you on the Guild's productive Q1 and we look forward to sustaining the momentum with your support.
Member retreat marks a planning milestone
As members already know, the Guild is preparing to incorporate this year as an independent nonprofit organization after several years of SELC's support as our fiscal sponsor. Members who answered the call to participate in the Guild's organizational planning process held a kick-off retreat April 15. Under the guidance of facilitator John Schinnerer from Sociocracy Consulting Group, we made significant progress towards designing bylaws that reflect our commitment to a member-based sociocratic governance structure. Our volunteer drafting group will be wrapping up a discussion draft shortly.
Welcome to our new Members
We are pleased to have welcomed several new members during Q1, but in keeping with our privacy policies, we do not share information about our members with other members or the public until they authorize us to by adding that information to our Member Directory.
On that note, we are happy to introduce you to Joe Andriano, the newest member to join our Member Directory. Joe is a licensed Vermont attorney and professor with extensive legal background focusing on consumer cooperatives, employee ownership cooperatives, multistakeholder cooperatives, business formation, and cooperative governance issues. Joe is the former president, governance committee chair, and board member of the Potsdam Food Co-op in Potsdam, NY. To learn more about Joe, view his full profile by clicking on his listing in our Member Directory.
Webinars set new attendance records and offer new CLE opportunities.
Our Webinar Circle continues to build on the success of the monthly webinar series it launched in 2021. Attendance reached an all-time high for April's webinar on presented by Guild member Pacyinz Lyfoung and co-sponsored by the Just Transition Lawyering Institute. April also saw the Webinar Circle implementing a plan to qualify webinars for CLE credits in more states and to qualify recorded webinars for CLE credit.
These were our other excellent Q1 webinars further described here:
- Community Land Trusts and Housing Cooperatives (March 17)
- Platform Cooperatives: Emerging Trends, Concepts, and Best Practices (Feb. 17)
- Taking Worker Cooperative Transitions to Scale with Project Equity (Jan. 20)
Upcoming Webinars - Send us your ideas.
We are planning for a presentation on indigenous co-ops and we are looking ahead to a Limited Cooperative Association Deep Dive in June - stay tuned. If you would like to present, suggest a topic or presenter, or join the Webinar Circle of the Guild, let us know! sarah@cuttingedgecounsel.com or therese@cooplawgroup.com.
Did you miss a live webinar? All 2021-2022 webinar recording links are now online.
Members now have access to recordings of all past webinars via our new association website. Simply log in using your member password and follow the link to "Webinar Recordings" on the Member Resources menu tab. (You won't see this menu option if you aren't logged in.)
Our new association website needs contributors!
We launched a new association website in February that expands our options for member connections and communications. Our new site and our original Wordpress site can be linked for even greater functionality.
To date we've used our new site to launch a Member Directory, manage Webinar registrations, post Webinar recording links and organize our extensive contacts lists.
With your help there's much more we can do: blogs, forums, member resource libraries, public resource lists, - and improved content and graphics. We are launching a new circle (committee) to coordinate website improvements so if you've got time, skills and interest to contribute please contact Kathy Gregg (which you can do through her Member Directory listing profile!)
Be part of the solution. Join the Member Directory!
Our Member Directory is a very important resource for delivering on our organizational goals of supporting professional networking and development and improving public access to professionals.
Have you ever been asked (or wanted to know yourself) how to find a coop attorney or accountant working in a particular state, or with experience in a particular industry or with a particular coop sector or with knowledge of a particular legal subject? Our Member Directory is designed to answer all those questions and more. But it only works if members share information about themselves.
Join today by completing your profile and changing the privacy settings for fields you are willing to share from the default "No access" to "Members" or "Anybody."
Here are three options for getting it done. First log in to our website as a member, then:
- DIY - Click on the login icon (a second time), select 'View Profile' and follow the links for editing and saving changes to your profile and privacy settings. (For best Directory results, consult the directions in option 2.)
- Follow our directions - We explain all you need to do in nine easy steps in "How to edit your member profile and privacy settings and control your Member Directory listing," a pdf document you'll find on the "Member FAQs" page under the Member Resources menu tab.*
- Sign up for a 15-minute Zoom session. Most Thursdays and/or Fridays we'll offer a few short Zoom sessions during which members can create their Directory listing in real time. To check availability and sign up, go the Events page or click the Zoom training link on the "Member FAQs" page under the Member Resources menu tab.*
*Hint: if you don't see the Member Resources menu tab, you are not logged in.
How to Log In to our new site
As you've read above, our new website has members-only content and members-only functionalities that you can only access when you are logged in as a member. To log in, click on the little blue person icon in the upper right-hand corner of any page and enter your password (or click 'Forgot password' to request a new one). Your password was sent to you from "Coop Professionals Guild <Coopguild@wildapricot.org>" on March 13 if you were already a member then, otherwise it was emailed to you shortly after you first registered.
Have questions?
Please contact us at guildquestion@professionals.coop
Thanks for your participation in the Guild!
Your interim Steering Circle coordinators,Thomas Beckett and Therese Tuttle, and Membership Circle coordinator Kathy Gregg