What do you know about shared ownership?

[Saint Anthony]

Googling “retreat center transfer to cooperative ownership” produces some interesting results. Share what you discover about new legal forms of ownership. You might start with some of these search results:

http://www.american.coop/content/breitenbush-worker-owned-hot-springs-retreat-center

Co-op Law <http://www.co-oplaw.org> is a collaborative legal resource library created by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) <http://www.theselc.org/>  and the Green-Collar Communities Clinic (GC3).  The Wiki was created to provide a forum for sharing, organizing, and making sense of information related to the legalities of cooperatives .
               
The Ohio Employee Ownership Center <http://66.147.242.161/~oeockent/>, a non-profit outreach center of Kent State University, supports the development of business across Ohio and around the world by its efforts that are proven to save jobs, create wealth, and grow the economy. The OEOC’s work rests on a simple philosophy: broader ownership of productive assets is a good thing for employees, communities, and our country.
The OEOC provides technical assistance, training, & outreach to the business community in 4 major areas:
    To business owners looking to exit their business;
    To owners interested in selling their business to their employees;
    To employee groups, local governments, and community groups seeking to avoid business shutdowns and job loss in their communities; and
    To existing employee-owned companies, designed to help them be better employee-owned companies.
http://home.howstuffworks.com/real-estate/housing-cooperatives.htm

https://sites.google.com/a/lucystonecoop.org/lsc/about

http://www.pilgrimheights.org/assets/files/Documents/Final_Transition_Agreement.pdf
At the 2007 Annual Meeting in Fort Dodge, IA, the Iowa Conference of the United Church of Christ (“Conference”) at the recommendation of its Board of Directors (“BoD”), in order to divest itself of the financial responsibility for and management of Pilgrim Heights Camp and Retreat Center (“Pilgrim Heights”), approved the sale/transfer of Pilgrim Heights. This was to be done either by sale on the open market, or to a separately established non-profit entity established by those within the Conference who might wish to see it continue as a camp facility for the Conference, as well as for the regional religious and secular communities. In the event of the latter, the BoD would be willing to favor the purchase by that corporation. It was the BoD’s understanding that Pilgrim Heights would be operated independently, and that while the Conference might make use of the Pilgrim Heights facilities, Pilgrim Heights would need to reach into the wider ecumenical as well as secular communities for it to maintain viability.

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-09-24/cooperation-law-sharing-economy
or http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/cooperation-law-for-a-sharing-economy
She also owns a 5 percent share of a hot springs retreat center outside of town, which she acquired through sweat equity.
Now, if only Lynne knew how to report all this to the IRS, and how to explain it to her car insurance company, the Health Department, mortgage lenders, the Secretary of State, the Department of Real Estate, the city planning and building departments, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and all of the other regulatory and bureaucratic entities that have a say over what she can and can’t do.
And if only Lynne could feel fully assured that her rights to partial ownership in the cohousing community, retreat center, car, shared goods, and consumer cooperative would be honored by her co-sharers, or, in the event of an unresolveable dispute, honored by a court of law. If only she could find affordable ways to manage the risk of her activities, since her activities don’t fit into traditional insurance application check-boxes. If only there weren’t so many legal headaches involved in living well and creating more localized, sustainable economies ...
The evolving nature of our transactions has created the need for a new area of law practice. We are entering an age of innovative transactions, collaborative transactions, crowd transactions, micro-transactions, sharing transactions—transactions that the legal field hasn’t caught up with, like: Bartering. Sharing. Cooperatives. Buying clubs. Community currencies. Time banks. Microlending. Crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding. Open source. Community supported agriculture. Fair trade. Consensus decision-making. Cohousing. Intentional Communities. Community Gardens. Copyleft.
Documents should be living tools for a sharing organization. A thoughtfully composed governing document will:

• help the group come to a well-thought-out plan;
• serve as a handy reference for participants and encourage consistency in operations;
• enable new people to join and get up to speed with the program;
• promote group harmony by ensuring that everyone is on the same page; and
• support other, similar programs, by making it easy for others to model a new program using the first one’s governing document.

In other words, a document should do as much to promote good relationships and thoughtful planning as it will to create a legally binding agreement.

In small pockets around the country, lawyers are beginning this work. Recently, Oakland-based attorney Jenny Kassan and I co-founded the Sustainable Economies Law Center <http://www.sustainableeconomieslawcenter.org/> , an organization that creates a space for this new field to develop, generates tools and resources for the public, and provides learning opportunities for law students.

   
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/a-different-kind-of-ownership-society

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/just-the-facts-what-s-so-good-about-co-ops

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/the-cooperative-way
Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. They come in many forms, and are more common than you might imagine.                        

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/the-economy-under-new-ownership

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/columns/an-interpretation-of-life
The View from Emilia Romagna, Italy by Frances Moore Lappé posted Jun 13, 2006
The region, whose hub city is Bologna, is home to eight thousand coops, producing everything from ceramics to fashion to specialty cheese. Their industriousness is woven into networks based on what they like to call “reciprocity.” Coops return three percent of profits to a national fund for cooperative development. The movement also supports centers providing help in finance, marketing, research and technical expertise. The presumption is that by aiding each other, all gain. And they have. Per-person income is 50 percent higher in Emilia Romagna than the national average; 70 percent of people own homes (higher than the U.S. average). The roots of the coop movement are deep – and varied.

http://www.frontdoor.com/real-estate/how-to-buy-a-co-op
Want homeownership without the responsibility of mowing the lawn or fixing the roof? Owning a cooperative, or co-op for short, may be for you. According to The National Cooperative Business Association, there are more than 1 million units of cooperative housing scattered throughout the United States, with large numbers located in major urban areas like New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. But buying and owning a co-op is much different than buying a condominium or single-family home, so it’s important to understand the differences before deciding if this type of living is for you.
           

[Marge Lindell]

These are intriguing!  The Pilgrim Heights agreement seems to be very similar to the situation at St. Anthony's and could be very useful as a starting point.  I can easily see an intentional community forming and residing at St. Anthony's.

[Servant Team]

We appreciate any research and advice you can offer on options to consider. Thanks for being an online participant.

[Servant Team]

Margaret Bau presented to the Steering Committee August 1 an introduction to cooperatives. She has great expertise in this area at the USAD Rural Development State Office in Stevens Point. She shared that cooperatives are all about sustainability, and how some examples of cooperatives might apply in our case. Wisconsin is especially noted for its robust and flexible laws making possible a wide range of options. University of Wisconsin in Madison has the chief resource center on cooperatives for the English speaking world. To refresh your understanding of cooperatives you might check these and other resources at: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/BCP_Coop_StartingACoop.html :

Publications

cir10.pdf What Are Cooperatives

sr58.pdf Vital Steps: A Cooperative Feasibility Study Guide

cir7.pdf How to Start a Cooperative

cir39.pdf Sample Policies for Cooperatives

c40legdc.pdf Sample Legal Documents for Cooperatives

Powerpoints

chpt1.ppt What Are Cooperatives

chpt2.ppt Members Make Cooperatives Work

chpt3.ppt The Cooperative Director

chpt4.ppt What the Cooperative Manager Does

chpt5.ppt What Cooperative Employees Do

http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/LP_CoopPrograms.html

[Saint Anthony]

Yes Julia, we have researched some of these and have the statistics, etc.  It's very interesting.

Blessings

Barb

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Julia <miria...@gmail.com> wrote:

I hope that similar properties to St A's around the midwest that have sold in the last several years might be researched as to their selling cost, which is often much less then they were listed and valued at. St Bede's monastery in Eau Claire sat on the market for years and I believe was finally bought by the University for a fraction of the original list. We have a small retreat center in Menomonie that was owned by the Episcopal church, Bundy Hall that was just purchased by the Vipassana Association for also less than half, after years of attempted sales. One of the difficulties here was the zoning of the area, that excluded a business taking it over. Zoning, difficulty of resale, condition, ease of transition can be considered in an offer.

 

There is a beautiful historical 1890s theatre in Menomonie that was given to the town, which has always been managed by trustees to assure that it could not be used for another purpose.

 

Julia

 

On Sunday, May 26, 2013 11:19:45 PM UTC-5, Servant Team wrote:

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