Cooperative Culture Handbook Book Club Series
June 22 @ 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT
Cooperative Culture Handbook Book Club Series with Yana Ludwig
26 Week Series
Sundays from May 11 – November 2, 2025
- Pacific: 10am-11:00am
- Mountain: 11am-12:00pm
- Central: 12-1:00pm
- Eastern: 1- 2:00pm
Join The Cooperative Culture Handbook’s co-author, Yana Ludwig, for a weekly book club and study group. The Cooperative Culture Handbook provides 26 Culture Keys for cooperative living. Each week, Yana will open conversations that focus on an individual Culture Key, moving consecutively through the book. Participants will have opportunities to connect with others striving to gain a better understanding of cooperative culture while having Yana as a support and resource as questions arise.
The book club and study group follows a drop-in, informal format and will not be recorded. Come for all 26 topics, or come for the ones you are most interested in discussing! Participants are encouraged to read the upcoming week’s Culture Key before each session and to come prepared with thoughts and questions.
Yana will facilitate each session but the space will be open for relaxed conversation among all participants!
Materials
In order to fully participate, we strongly recommend purchasing the Cooperative Culture Handbook, and reading the introduction before the first session. Please make sure to review the Culture Key for the upcoming week as well. This will allow for the highest quality collective conversation.
About
The Cooperative Culture Handbook: A Social Change Manual to Dismantle Toxic Culture and Build Connection
The Cooperative Culture Handbook offers a framework and practical toolkit for groups to solve problems, build community, and change culture towards greater empathy and authenticity. It is designed as a resource for leaders, facilitators and changemakers to develop core practices in discernment, curiosity, communication and engagement. In this inspirational guide, North American culture is broken down into 26 easy-to-understand Culture Keys, and 52 transformative group and individual exercises.
Culture Keys and Dates
May 11 – Key #1: Skillful Hearing
May 18 – Key #2: Individual and Collective Responsibility
May 26 – Key #3: Speak the Authentic
June 1 – Key #4: Common Ground Within Differences .
June 8 – Key #5: Good Enough for Now
June 15 – Key #6: Understanding and Effective Action
June 22 – Key #7: Emergent Stories
June 29 – Key #8: We
July 6 – Key #9: Mutual Aid
July 13 – Key #10: Security is Social
July 20 – Key #11: Differences Are Good
July 27 – Key #12: Consensus With Healthy Boundaries .
August 3 – Key #13: Hierarchy Lite
August 10 – Key #14: Share Emotions Well
August 17 – Key #15: Share Resources Well
August 24 – Key #16: Conscious Power
August 31 – Key #17: Beyond Narcissism
September 7 – Key #18: Relationship
September 14 – Key #19: Interdependence
September 21 – Key #20: Empathize With Circumstances
September 28 – Key #21: Skills Used to Empower
October 5 – Key #22: Beneficial Creativity
October 12 – Key #23: Good Intent and Good Impact
October 19 – Key #24: Becoming Whole
October 26 – Key #25: Ask With Vulnerability
November 2 – Key #26: Find the Aligned Way
Location
You’ll get a Zoom link after you register in your confirmation email. Please check the spam/junk folder of the inbox you used to register for an email from events@ic.org.
Registration
Please read carefully before registering!
Considerations:
This is a new event format for the FIC and we are exploring ways to make it accessible and straightforward. There are a variety of levels at which participants can engage with this series, therefore we have decided to use an honor system pay scale for registration.
Individual registration provides full access to all 26 sessions. We ask that you register at a level that both represents your financial ability to contribute, and the number of sessions you anticipate attending. We have provided sliding scale options to register for the full series that reflects a fair energy exchange, along with a “pay what you can” option for those that wish to consider their financial ability along with anticipated “drop in” attendance.
The fair energy exchange of our resources for your participation is at a rate of $15 per session. Sliding scale cost per session ranges from $5 to $20.
We ask that each participant register individually with their own IC.org account or email address. This significantly reduces our administrative time and labor. Thank you!
Yana Ludwig
Yana served on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Intentional Community for over a decade. She lived in community for 26 years and has been both a founder and a joiner: all of her work is grounded in deep community experience. Her writing includes The Cooperative Culture Handbook (co-authored with Karen Gimnig) focuses on articulating a vision and practical pathway for intentional culture building; and many articles in Communities magazine. Her new book, Building Belonging: Your Guide to Starting a Residential Intentional Community, was released in May 2023.
Yana is the former Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and North Coast Food Web. Taking the lessons of community into the nonprofit and worker co-op sectors is one of her passions. Yana is a dynamic, compassionate and thoughtful speaker, writer and teacher, committed to creating a more just and resilient world.
Learn more about Yana here.
