Letter from the Editor: Or, Why I’m Writing This
What’s the point of making a Sparklegram? Or,
more importantly, why should we all read a newsletter put
together by the organization? Or me, for that matter?
THE
SPARKLEGRAM
Feb. 2014 Edition
*A.K.A. The Post-Hiatus Issue
I guess the short answer is that it’s fun to make. But,
that answer is a little lacking.
I’m a white, MAAB, genderqueer, working class,
first generation college grad with mental health disorders
who lives at Phoenix. I love being part of something that
has the potential to change the world. Sometimes, though,
it doesn’t always feel like it does.
After living at Phoenix for nearly two years, I see a
strong desire for community. People derive their own
benefits from living there, but I ultimately find that they
give a lot of themselves to everyone that lives here. It
seems to me that people want to make the lives of those
around them better. Forming connections gives us power,
as I’m sure a lot of you would agree, seeing as you’re
living in an intentionally created cooperative housing
organization.
Although, when was the last time that you were
stoked to do something “MCC-related”? I know that I
don’t feel it very often, and I’m the office intern. While
those around me express their desire for community,
there’s a distance between the houses and our organization
as a whole. What is MCC really, if it’s not a bigger
community, with more money and resources that an
individual house could ever save up?
Sure, a group of 200 plus people is a little hard to
picture sometimes - especially if you’re not a fan of being
in the middle of a large group of people like I am. But,
there’s something valuable in the work that we do
everyday, whether it’s having badass discussions about the
criminal (in)justice system in your kitchen over homemade lentil loaf, or taking land away from big real estate
companies and opening it back up into the community.
So, hopefully the Sparklegram brings us all together
a little more, particularly if it’s a regular community-wide
publication. Hopefully, more people will pick up the
Sparklegram and contribute to its well-being that it has
been in the last two years. Hopefully, it will give us a
space to express ourselves outside of normative forums,
share things that are important to us, talk about pressing
issues in our community, become more informed, and
change the world for the better.
At the very least, it’ll be fun to make.
TK – Office Intern, Phoenician, Impromptu Sparklegram Editor
Hey Wait, A Cooperative? What’s That?
A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united
voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural
needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically
controlled enterprise.
The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers decided to form
(some folks think the first) cooperative in 1844. They came up with
some guidelines for cooperatives, what they called the
- 7 PRINCIPLES OF COOPERATION 1. Voluntary, Open Membership -Open to all, without gender,
social, racial, political, religious discrimination, etc.
2. Democratic Member Control -One member, one vote.
3. Member Economic Participation - Members contribute
equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of the
cooperative. The economic benefits of a cooperative
operation are returned to the members, reinvested in the coop, or used to provide member services.
4. Autonomy And Independence -Cooperatives are
autonomous, self-help organizations controlled by their
members.
5. Education, Training And Information - Cooperatives provide
education and training for members so they can contribute
effectively to the development of their cooperatives. They
inform the general public about the nature and benefits of
cooperation.
6. Cooperation Among Cooperatives -Cooperatives serve their
members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative
movement by working together through local, regional,
national and international structures.
7. Concern For The Community - While focusing on member
needs, cooperatives work for the sustainable development of
their communities through policies accepted by their
members.
So, how do we as houses and as MCC fit into this? Well, I
guess that’s a hypothetical question, since I’m prompting y’all to
answer that for yourselves. I’m just a writer, not a professor.
A Jaunt through MCC Demographics, 2012-13
As the office intern, I get paid to do a lot of fun stuff.
Moving boxes around, typing a bunch of things, filing
stuff - it’s pretty great. A short while ago, I took a look
at the 2012 Member Surveys. Remember those? The
forms that you filled out with your contract asking you
about who you are and stuff? They (finally) didn’t just
get put into a filing cabinet to be lost to the annals of
time.
After some painstaking statistical analysis, I came up
with some conclusions (and some pretty colorful pie
charts, which is always great).
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Only 1 person identified as having a physical or mental
disability or mental illness (compared to 202 that
responded that they didn’t have one)
A large majority of people have never married and have
never cared for children.
2/3 of MCC is either full-time or part-time students
2/3 of MCC is between the ages of 18 and 24, and
around another 1/4 is between the ages of 25 and 29.
Around 3/5 of MCC lived in Madison before moving
into cooperative houses.
Slightly more people identified as Female than Male.
Likewise, slightly more people identified as
Female/Feminine than Male/Masculine.
75% of people in MCC identified as heterosexual, 8.3%
as Bi, 6.9% as Lesbian/Gay, 4.2% as Pan, and a few of
other identities that folks wrote in themselves.
Around 2/3 of MCC checked only the
“White/Caucasian” box under race, and the next largest
groups were Asian/Pacific Islander (at 6.5%), latin@ (at
5.7%), and mixed race with one box checked as white
(5.7%). What does this mean for us as an organization?
How does this fit with our mission to be against racial
oppression and marginalization?
There’s plenty more statistics where those came from.
Plus, in a few months, we’ll be able to look at this year’s
surveys, getting a glimpse at how these things are changing
over time.

A majority of people have insurance and are fine with
the coverage that they have, but around 22% of people
aren’t satisfied with their insurance and/or wish that they
had insurance
By looking at who we are as an organization, we can
figure out how the work we’re doing is impacted by our
collective identities and how we can change what MCC
looks like.
A Review of Google Voice: To Call or Not to Call?
Google Voice links together your phone number, email,
text, as well as all numbers that you may access, like your
home phone, work, etc. You can make calls for free over
the internet, or use it on your phone just like you would
normally. International calls are also pretty cheap. It’s
through Google, which is a big corporation, but it could be
a good tool for you to try out.
You can customize what happens when different people
call you - the call can go straight to voicemail for numbers
that you don’t know, phone doesn't ring if someone calls
over Google Voice, doesn’t ring at a certain time of the
day, or whatever you want. You can also have people call
Google Voice instead of giving out your personal phone
number, letting you block selected phone numbers if you
need to.
Why should we give membershippers a phone number
instead of just an email or even a street address? Simply
put, the more options the membershipper has to contact
you, the more access they have to the house. Not
everybody has ready access to personal computers or email
on a regular basis.
Not everyone can visit the house in person, whether
they’re too far away to travel, don’t have time to devote to
that travel, or any other reason. Using Google voice can
help you as a house (particularly whoever coordinates
communication with membershippers) because it’s a
helpful tool to keep things straight. You have the choice of
allowing membershippers call you whenever or wherever,
and have any of their voicemails be transcribed into an
email format that you can save indefinitely.
How to create a
Google Voice Account
 Go to the Google Voice homepage and sign into
Google (or create a Google account if you don’t
already have one)
 Set up account - choose to create a new phone
number or use one that you already have
 Follow the rest of the directions
 Verify your phone to ensure that Google Voice
connects
 Call away!
THE BOTTOM LINE
Google Voice can be a good tool for
membership coordinators to use - allowing
membershippers to contact the house via phone
as well as to centralize all of the
communications between them and the house.
Give it a try - it’s free!
How to Build Safe(r) Spaces
A few months ago, we at Phoenix adopted a safer
space policy in order to explicitly state where we stand in
regards to harassment and discriminatory behavior:
“Phoenix’s Safer Space policy exists to create an
environment where house members, guests, family,
and friends feel safe, to express themselves without
fear of discrimination and/or abuse. We strive to
make an environment free of harassing, threatening or
intimidating behavior and language. Our goal is to
hold people accountable for their discriminatory
language and actions, help them to recognize how
their behavior affects those around them, and ask
them to change their actions accordingly. As a last
resort, we reserve the right to remove individuals from
the space or from Phoenix Cooperative as a whole.
Harassment based on, but not
limited to: racism, sexism, ageism,
sizeism, classism, ableism, transphobia
and heterosexism, are among the things
unwelcome at Phoenix Cooperative.”
It’s not perfect, but at least it’s a place
for us to start. So, what do you all think? Have other houses
tried something like this, or have policies that deal with antioppression? To me, it would be even more powerful to
adopt a policy that is about explicitly fighting against
discrimination and exploitation at an organizational
level. Let’s continue the discussion in next month’s issue of
the Sparklegram!
February Facts and Dates!
 Black History Month - really, though, it shouldn’t just be
confined to one month
 National Wedding month - if you’re into those sort of things
 National Grapefruit month - if you’re into those sort of things
 National Children’s Dental Health month - if you’re into
those sort of things
 2 - Groundhog Day
 3 - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper die in a
plane crash, 1959
 5 - MCC BoD Meeting (6pm @ 610 Langdon St)
 8 - Boy Scout Day - if you’re into that sort of thing
 9 - Toothache Day
 9 - General Membership Meeting (1pm @ International)
 11 - White Shirt Day - celebrating the 1937 sit-down strike of
the United Auto Workers Union
 14 - National Organ Donor’s Day
 15 - Single’s Awareness Day
 19 - MCC BoD Meeting (6pm @ 610 Langdon St)
 20 - Love your Pet Day
 22 - International World Thinking Day - Created by the Girl
Scouts, with a focus on global women’s’ issues
 27 - Polar Bear Day - and the melting of polar ice, perhaps?
 28 - Public Sleeping Day
Have something you’d like to
contribute to the next Sparklegram?
Groundbreaking news that we should
cover? Fancy art? Games? Comics?
House updates? Send them to:
newsletter@madisoncommunity.coop
by the third week of the month. Any
and all contributions will find their
way into the Sparklegram – somehow!
Want to help write, edit,
publish, or distribute the next issue?
Send us an email too!
Social Justice and the Cooperative Model
by Emily Blessing
At the beginning of November, I was able to attend the
NASCO Institute in Ann Arbor for the first time. I think that I
learned more at this weekend conference than I have during
some semesters of college! This was certainly an overwhelming
and exhausting experience, but it was also very inspiring and
encouraging. I left with much to think about and many new
strategies to try.
For me, the most
inspiring part of the
conference
was
being
surrounded by people that
believe in the power and
potential of cooperative
living as a tool for social
change. In his keynote
speech at the conference, Malik Yakini, a founder of the
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, spoke
confidently of the cooperative model’s power to create equity
within the limited options of our capitalist society. While the
system currently in place for allocating resources - wage labor
governed by capitalism - tends to reinforce systems of
oppression, the cooperative model tends to redistribute social
equity. While our corporation-run society thrives on the
public’s reliance on corporations for access to resources, coops can serve as a vehicle for community ownership of the
means and production of goods, as well as the goods
themselves. This is important because social injustice limits
the accessibility of resources to members of marginalized
groups, and self-sufficiency is a barrier to the realization of
social justice. Thus, the cooperative model can serve as our
strongest tool in establishing self-sufficiency on individual and
community levels, both of which are important components in
the fight for social justice and self-determination.
Despite the potential for cooperatives to act as an
equalizing force, the inequalities of our society at large are
often reflected within the contemporary cooperative
movement. Malik pointed out the necessity of recognizing who
is present in and who is absent from a space, especially when
decisions are being made. For example, the difference between
the number of white people and people of color at the NASCO
Institute was striking and surprising. The same discrepancy
between representation of marginalized groups in the
community at large and within the cooperative community is
reflected within MCC. For cooperatives to be a tool of social
justice, the voices of those that suffer under the regime of
systemic oppression need to be heard and supported.
The concept of intersectionality reaffirms our need to
work together to dismantle systemic oppression. This idea,
introduced to me by members of the AORTA collective, holds
that systems of oppression are interconnected and mutually
reinforcing, and that we have all experienced being targets and
agents of oppressive systems. For example, a person that
experiences white privilege may be marginalized by their class
or gender status. A person that experiences male privilege may
be marginalized by their race, sexual orientation, or ability.
Essentially, this means that while oppression exists and is
perpetuated, we all will suffer until we achieve a collective
liberation.
The themes of social justice and self-sufficiency as
related to the cooperative model were brought together for me
in a workshop called “Radical Sharing.” Members of several
rural, income-sharing cooperatives shared their experiences of
this lifestyle. Income-sharing co-ops (in contrast to expensesharing co-ops like MCC) pool every member’s resources in
order to adequately meet the needs of each individual in a
community. The goal is to meet as many needs and provide as
many services as possible to members of the community by
utilizing the skills, labor, and income brought into the
community. In other words, the goal is self-sufficiency. Rather
than the security that most of us seek in accumulating
belongings to meet our needs, security in an income-sharing
community is based on human relationships. This requires
that individuals learn to let go of their compulsion to control
resources, and to accept the differences between each
member’s production and consumption of resources. I have
had a strong interest in farming co-ops for some time, and I
was really excited to learn about a model of cooperative living
that strives for an even higher level of self-sufficiency. Not only
does the income-sharing model greatly decrease members’
costs of living, but it has immense potential to equalize the
disparities of inherited wealth between members of privileged
and oppressed groups. In my mind, the practice of radical
sharing could directly result in radical social justice.
It was so exciting to be surrounded by people
passionate about cooperative living, social justice, and social
change. This hit home for me when, in an AORTA workshop,
we discussed the community agreement that we operate under
the assumption that oppression exists. I didn’t realize until
that moment how much energy I had been spending struggling
to show people this reality. More importantly, many
conversations throughout the weekend transformed my
thinking about this work, introducing me to a more
compassionate approach to inviting people to fight for equality
and equity. For example, we discussed how allowing ourselves
to be honest, open, and vulnerable about our own journeys
and mistakes can cultivate trust in the difficult and necessary
discussions that we must have about privilege with potential
allies. Rather than alienating people for their mistakes, this
approach seeks to build community around the goal of
collective liberation. Participating in the NASCO Institute
transformed how I perceive my relationships within the MCC
community, and opened my eyes to how much more we can
achieve as a community.
For more reflections on the NASCO Institute,
check out the recently distributed packet “Souvenirs
from NASCO Institute 2013” – in a common space
near you!
What’s the point of an independent newsletter if there aren’t
- GAMES This issue of the Sparklegram includes a nifty puzzle:
Hashi
Which is short for Hashiwokakero, meaning “build bridges!”
Rules:
 Each circle is an island; your challenge is to place
bridges between them so that all the islands are
connected. The number in each circle represents the
number of bridges (lines) that must touch that island,
thus, an island of size 2 must have two bridges
touching it. The rules for placing bridges are:
o They must be vertical or horizontal (no
diagonals or wiggly lines)
o They can’t cross other bridges
o You can’t have more than two bridges
between any two islands
o Each island must be connected somehow to
reach every other island (we don’t want to
leave anyone out!)
*Originally published in Hashi by Alastair Chisholm