Rockaway Residents Train to Incubate Worker Owner Businesses

I am honored and excited to announce that two Rockaway residents, Rebekkah Thompson (myself) and Sonia Daley, were awarded a grant to train over a 2-3 year period as planners and incubators of worker owner businesses or worker cooperatives.

We see this as the great hope for a revival of Rockaway's local economy.  Currently, we are limited to minimum wage jobs, traveling long distances, which can be costly and difficult if you have children in school, and virtually no career or entrepreneurship opportunities.

We are now completing week 5 of a 9 week initial training located at The Center for Family Life (our grantor) in Brooklyn, New York (Sunset Park community).

The Center for Family Life made a favorable name for itself when it launched a worker cooperative incubation project in a largely Hispanic immigrant community, Sunset Park.  The project was created in response to the difficulties immigrant residents were experiencing trying to make a living and support their families with low and unfair wages due to limited English skills, limited education and citizenship issues. The outcome of this project was a successful cleaning company, Si Se Puede, using only environmentally friendly cleaning products.  The company was initiated by just a small group of women, which has now climbed to more than 30 members.

With the success of this model over a five year period, The Center for Family Life has been sought after to train other groups in different parts of the U.S. and internationally, so we are incredibly grateful to have been awarded this opportunity to impact our community's stressed economy and transform our quality of living for generations to come.

We are deeply grateful to The Center for Family Life for taking a chance on resident leaders by including us in the application process even though we are not staffed by a nonprofit CBO (Community Based Organization).  We are the only non-staffed, voluntary group accepted into the program.

Although, having a partnership with a CBO was required in order to be accepted into the program.  It is necessary that we, as the planners and incubators, have a back office for meetings with worker owner candidates.  This office is where all the critical planning and work will take place.  

Thanks to the generosity and confidence of Pastor Dennis Loncke of Arverne Pilgrim Church in Rockaway (Arverne Community), we have that back office.  We see this as an opportunity to support one another as we both take steps to develop and initiate projects and programming to empower our community.

Pastor Loncke has, recently, reopened his church after Hurricane Sandy's destruction, and plans to re-develop is once successful after school community center.  

As he gave so selflessly to us in the spirit of true community solidarity, we are eager for opportunities to share our skills and expertise to help advance his goals and missions to serve within the Rockaway community.  

 We will keep you posted on our process!