Our Co-op Project
Hey Big Tree enthusiasts,
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After a few years of chatting, listening, imagining, gathering, planning, and admin-ing, we’ve made it! Thanks for maintaining your interest and sharing ideas around how our cooperative will work, it’s a big dream to have and it takes a community to realise it. Those who haven’t had much involvement, now is the time to get excited! You are now officially invited to become a member of The Big Tree Cooperative. See the link below for details on what becoming a member means.
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We're very excited to announce that we're all set to issue deposit invoices, and accept members! It's been a huge journey to get here, thanks for your patience, input, encouragement, and involvement so far..
The Big Tree Cooperative
About
A Bit of Background
We're a group of friends setting up a land share cooperative to purchase some land in country Vic, for sustainable living, recreation, conservation, events, first nations connection, and hobby food farming. We'll be 30 - 40 shareholders in total contributing $15k each, and an annual fee of $1250 each per year which means we'll have around $40k per year for improvements. We're planning to establish around 8 sites or 'villages' with temporary infrastructure, and central permitted shared infrastructure. We're really enjoying the process and looking forward to realising the dream!
So far we've ...
Expressions of Interest
... come together with initial expression of interest, shared vision, and shared videos of who we are and what we think of the idea.
Established a vision for the co-op
... we've had 2 face-to-face gatherings and many online sessions to define the parameters on the where, what, when, and how.
Registered the Cooperative
... we registered Victoria's 6th ever land share cooperative with the State Government/ ASIC, with a board of directors, rules, and constitution.
Opened a bank account
Opened a Bank Australia account based on a values alignment & support for our coop, the account signatories are board members.
We had a workshop in Feb
This is pretty much what we said:
We're setting up a weekender co-op within 2.5 hours of Melbourne, on a block of minimum 50 acres with water (dam, river, spring).
Why? For fun, celebration, community, activity, relaxation, indigenous connection, events. to build, be creative, to manage land, local community engagement, for conservation, regeneration, and to share skills.
In 5 years we will be part of an active, busy, fun community of ongoing celebration, with shared and individual spaces, indigenous space for first nations, evolving projects and activities, clear roles, a code of conduct, local outreach programs, accountability, and decision making transparency. We'll be swimming, building, composting, growing trees, making some $$, restoring, regenerating, hanging out, listening to tunes, and loving life.
We had a conversation with Phil from Commonground
Unfortunately we were unable to meet in person, but we did manage to chat with Phil about his experience establishing and developing common-ground over the past 40 years. Grab a cuppa and click on the image beside to watch the video.
We also held our Formation meeting in August:
Find here a link to the Minutes from the meeting. Now that we have our elected board, and signed set of adopted rules, we can submit our final application for registration. Congratulations everyone for getting this far!
