School Of Stores is beginning to develop its first course: Co-op & Crowdfund.
The course is planned as an approximately three-month course, probably with one class per week. The curriculum is still being developed, and rather than waiting until every class is finished before showing it, I’m inviting visitors to watch the course take shape in real time.
The first classes are already beginning to establish the direction.
We’ll start with cooperative business models, Co-op Grocery Stores, rewards crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding, and the SANFA rubric. We’ll introduce the Core Textbook, Polyopolis & Superorganism, while also exploring some of the experiences, books, movies, television, places, and ideas that helped lead to the course.
From there, the curriculum will move into neighborhoods and shared resources: greenbelts, signage and wayfinding, lawnmower sharing, telescope rooms, neighborhood or home planetariums, transportation, autonomous vehicles, flying cars, nutrition, and other questions about what people might organize, own, improve, or fund together.
Another class will connect the course to Anaheim Dreams, Home Aquarium Stores, the Untitled Ocean Documentary, and All-Purpose Environmentalism—including a deceptively simple question for students to consider: Is a home aquarium an amenity, a luxury, a necessity, or something else?
Those are only the opening classes. Over the coming months, I expect the course page to continue changing as lessons are expanded, research is added, exercises are developed, and the larger three-month curriculum becomes clearer.
At this stage, I am not planning livestream or videoconference classes for School Of Stores courses. That could certainly become possible in the future, but for now the focus is on developing the curriculum itself and making the evolving course materials available through the website.
So if you’re interested in cooperative ownership, crowdfunding, neighborhoods, stores, education, shared resources, or simply watching a course get built from the ground up, I invite you to follow along.
Visit Co-op & Crowdfund and watch the course develop in real time.