Moving Upstream

[Editor's note: while our focus at GEO is on grassroots projects, and the following paper is about top-down efforts, nonetheless it seemed worth sharing as a possible source of information for future projects that could originate from the worker co-op, CLT, and ROC sides of these partnerships. It is also worth noting that while healthcare "anchor institutions" can be lucrative sources of funding for co-ops and CLTs, these same institutions often come under fire for helping to create the problems of poverty that programs like the ones presented here seek to address. For instance, one of the institutions surveyed in this paper, the Mayo Clinic, has recently been criticized for the sub-par health insurance they provide to their employees and for aggressively collecting bills from low-income patients. So while we should always be on the lookout for community partners to cooperate with, we should also take care that these funding relationships do not prevent grassroots organizations from demanding accountability from these powerful community institutions when they fail to adequately serve their communities and their workers.]

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