Co-op Lab is a Private Members Association (PMA) of men, women and their children who choose to offer and exchange goods, services, skills, time and knowledge free from corporate interference.

Rather than operating in the public domain with its ‘legal’ rules and restrictions, PMAs operate on a membership basis in the private domain. In effect all members agree to stand under the Natural Law ‘to cause no harm’.

In practical terms, the Co-op Lab process enables people to join and develop local Hub Guilds based on their interests, talents and aspirations. With each Hub Guild standing as its own PMA, Co-op Lab forms a network where expertise is focused to supply local demand for quality goods, services and projects.

How would you know if there are people locally who could teach you to build a boat, knit, or write a business plan; while needing goods and services that you can offer in exchange?

Joining hub guilds based on shared interests creates an evolving network of local resources where offers and needs can be matched. While revealing untold opportunities to exchange and barter goods, services, skills, time and knowledge.

Members can pool bills to gain collective purchasing power and renegotiate best prices for goods and services; or develop community assets and social value by pooling resources in local projects; or redirect local public funds so hub guild members can employ their skills providing public services.

We don’t need money to agree to walk someone’s a dog twice a day, or fix a boiler, in exchange for lessons in boat-building, sailing or cooking. 

All we lack are opportunities to find each other, build trusted relationships, and create a whole new world of collective self-reliance.

It begins when we each accept three simple facts about we-the-people:

◦ We have always had all skills, time and knowledge

◦ We have always designed and built all assets and equipment

◦ We have always created all demand, supply and spending power

We have our own digital Co-op Lab platform to present goods, services, offers, needs, projects, ideas and opportunities as suppliers, producers, practitioners, tutors, students, investors and/or consumers.

We accept challenges as opportunities, form a local management hub and develop as a ‘work-in-progress’

A local ‘community audit’

The offers, needs and projects presented through the Co-op Lab platform create a ‘living library’ of people, networks, businesses and organisations able and willing to supply goods and services.

A ‘meeting of minds’

A founding group of honourable people who trust each others motivation form a local ‘Central Hub’ to find skilled experts willing and able to form local hub guilds

A ‘word-of-mouth’ process

Pass it on to those who you know and trust in ‘a consensus of the willing’. In other words, introduce Co-op Lab to anyone wiling to apply common sense and pool resources in a ‘Market-Space’ based on real values and standards.

Go to Next Steps below to select your Hub Guilds, Offers, Needs and Projects based on your personal interests, talents and skills.

It is best to accept that this is a completely new approach to understanding ourselves, our possibilities and each other. As this has not been done before, we need to understand it as a work-in-progress. We will need to accept difficulties and errors as the ‘learning curve’ to enjoy challenges as opportunities. The deeper our commitment and compassion, the better we will perform. Strive to maintain focus on the primary objectives:

◦ Providing quality knowledge and expertise by exchanging skills, time and knowledge.

◦ Developing our talents based on our own interests to guarantee demand, supply and quality of the goods, services and projects we produce.

◦ Ensuring our balanced growth substitutes our own resources for coercion and control by ‘public authorities’ and profit-seeking corporations.

◦ Redirecting ‘public expenditure’ into our own local projects where we thrive on hands-on, life-long learning.

◦ Standing as the ‘living infrastructure’ in our own ‘Market-Space’ as a unique ‘gilt-edged’ investment in ourselves.

◦ Enabling our projects to become worthy of investment as we guarantee demand and supply for our own services and products.

◦ Introducing complementary, debt-free means of barter and exchange.

◦ Applying real common sense based on our values and aspirations, individually and collectively.

◦ Releasing ourselves from the ‘legal fraud’ of a corporate status imposed on us by birth certification.

◦ Standing together as living men, women and children to protect and nurture ourselves within a thriving social-cultural-economic-political network.