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History
As Cooperative Coffees continues to grow and the volume of coffee we need to source increases, workloads also increase. By late 2005 the need for a solution to our hiring challenges in Canada had become quite apparent. Up until that point, Monika Firl had worked initially as an independent consultant, then under special contract through CC member Cafe Rico. However, these options did not offer opportunities for creating a legal presence in Canada, nor to increasing our local team.
In researching best options, we discovered the opportunity to found a Solidarity Cooperative in Quebec under which we could incorporate not only our staff and roasters - both in Canada and the USA - but also to invite support organizations and producer partners to become legal members of our governance body.
Not only did forming a coop keep us in step and spirit with our original structure, but it also turned out to be less expensive to establish and linked us to a broad support network to help get us set up and functional based in Quebec!
October 2006
Founding Assembly in conjunction with the CoopCoffees AGM held at Larry’s Beans in Raleigh, NC.
Elected our first BoD: Helen Voogd - President; Larry Larson - Vice President; Linda Burnside - Secretary; Bill Harris - Treasurer; and named Monika Firl as Manager.
The immediate result is that we now have a legal structure to pay salaries and to grow staff as we see necessary and appropriate. But we are also seeing additional and benefits materialize in “becoming legal” in Quebec.
CoopSol is becoming recognized in Montreal as an informed voice in Fair Trade, and has been invited to present Black Gold in Montreal (June 2007), and to present on FT panels and to participate in FT planning meetings (Equiterre, Quebec Social Forum, Social Justice Center).
Quebec is home to several progressive funds to support cooperative development, In the future, we will explore opportunities to support community and economic development together with our farmer partners.
May 2008
At the SCAA in may 2008, CoopSol held a meeting in which we invited long-standing Cooperative Coffees producer partners to join CoopSol as equal user members. Read more about this new development in the history of CoopSol on the Producer Voice page.
June 2008
And then came a different kind of travel...in Montreal: the Canadian Coop Coffees (Coop Sol) team finally was able to move out of Monika Firl’s lovely apartment and into an actual "office space." It was small, but it was definitely a step in the right direction!
We shared the space with a local human rights organization, the Committee for Human Rights in Latin America. The move along with the simultaneous hiring of two new employees kept things busy and interesting.
July 2009
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After years of small-but-steady steps forward (and the useful power of positive thinking), we moved beyond the “closet-sized” office and into our current office “compound” – or, as we like to call it, “Le Labo Equitable” (The Fair Trade Lab)! We share the office with Fibrethik, a Fair Trade organic cotton importer, and Direct Terroir, a Fair Trade wine importer. The space serves as the Coop Sol offices as well as the cupping lab for our in-house Coop Coffees quality control. Phone: 1-514-907-9853 ext 3 Address: |
