Buddy systems is an online platform cooperative.
Iva and Mario met in February 2018 at an event called Share the Knowledge, a potluck which took place in Iva’s living room once a month. Iva remembers really enjoying the guacamole that Mario brought and also his great ideas about cooperatives. Mario remembers really enjoying Iva’s home baked bread and learning about her skill-sharing and community organizing project Buddy Up!. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Before they met, Iva had been building Buddy Up! community boards all around Vancouver as a way of facilitating meaningful connections between neighbors and building community resilience through learning, doing, and creating together. At the same time, Mario had just taken a cooperative development training program called Cooperate Now to help him and his colleagues start two worker cooperatives: Eyemole Arts and Technology Coop and Brave Technology Coop. Naturally, Iva and Mario saw great overlap in their paths and began working together. Iva joined both coops and over the course of a year, the two became the best of buddies, both personally and professionally.
In March 2019, the Buddies decided it was time to formalize their complementary relationship and reimagine their collaborative potential through a consulting practice. They called it Buddy Systems.
Over the course of the past year, Iva and Mario have collaborated on a number of projects and events with neighbourhood organizations, academic groups, cooperatives, and professional communities. In November 2019, Iva entered into a six-month social business incubator program at the Groundswell Alternative Business School to develop Buddy Systems even further and explore radical new directions for their practice.
Buddy Systems is still early in it’s journey of growth and we are continually learning and growing to serve the communities and ideas we believe in.
About Cooperatives and .coop
The global Cooperative community has more than 1 billion members, representing 12% of the world’s employed population. All Cooperatives verify their identity when selecting a .coop web address. Your unique business identity is recognized online with a .coop domain name – your digital brand – a brand known for its economic advantages to its community, consumers, and members.
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