Lorena Contreras, Dilcia Contreras and Anita Maldonado are the new worker owners. A long time ago before the project began, they were the first to be interested in being part of it. In the middle of July came the alliance with Beloved Community Incubator (BCI) and we already counted on them to be part of the future cleaning cooperative in Arlington Virginia.

The training began at the end of August. Bianca Vasquez and I Heylin Rodriguez agreed to meet every week so that she would be my mentor during this process. Bianca explained to me how to start the training after our meetings I used to prepare the information and the different activities for the worker-owners. Next, I will explain how we went step by step with the process;

• Interacting to get to know each other better was the first thing in the training. We did activities to know the qualities of each one, they told their work stories, their favorite hobbies, and their favorite food. All this to build trust and that they were not afraid to speak in front of each other.

 

• Explaining what a cooperative consists of, was what came next. They had an idea because in their country there are also cooperatives but they work and operate differently. For this, they were shown videos, I explained how it operated, what benefits you could get by being part of one and we also showed them examples of cooperatives in the different states of this country.

 

• How to make decisions by vote was something that took a little bit of time and dedication. Explain that in a cooperative everyone has one vote and that everyone's vote counts. Also, no decision is made by one person only. They all have to be present when taking other than that it will not count because they all have the same rights.

 

• The mission and values ​​for their cooperative came next. This was one of the first decisions they made because they had to decide what values ​​they wanted to include in their cooperative and what things they wanted to write down in their mission.

The Mission 

"Provide professional work and provide quality cleaning to make our clients feel satisfied. That in the future our cooperative generates work for other women and we can provide help to new cooperatives with our experiences."

Values for their Coop

• Honesty
• Respect
• Puntuality
• Responsibility
• Collaboration
• Democracy

Do not miss the upcoming blog next week!