• Join the Cooperative Now!
  
  
• Join our mailing list as a supporting non-member
  
  
• Bring important issues to our attention

Prospective individuals

• Anyone at the University of Montana, residing in the Missoula community, or otherwise interested in issues concerning the citizens of the Missoula area. top

About Us / Mission Statement

• The MISSOULA COOP began in Bernice's Bakery, July 12, 2003 with Ali Tabibnejad and Justin Whitaker.

• Mission Statement: To bring together the University of Montana and the Missoula community activists by providing an effective, central source of information and action concerning issues that are vital to our community and the world as a whole. Our organization will give voice to a wide variety of perspectives and will propose new ideas and activities based on these perspectives.
  
  
• "University of Montana and the Missoula community activists" are individuals in our area concerned with the state of the world around them and willing to work to change it.
  
  

• "An effective, central source" means that we shall be committed to making sure that individuals and groups associated with us are continuously active, informed and united in the causes they share. We mustn't become 'static,' sitting on our heals and waiting for issues to come to us.

• "Of information and action" means developing a continuous dialogue through meet and greet events, thought provoking lectures and general meetings as well as acting together to advance the issues and causes that are important to the cooperative as a whole.

• "Issues that are vital to our community and the world as a whole" means recognizing that issues that seem very far away can quickly become a major problem right here in the Missoula community. We will therefore focus not only on local issues, but those that are likely to effect us in the future.

• "Give voice to a wide variety of perspectives" means that we will not follow any "partisan" guidelines, but rather put forth action and support for any issues agreed-on by the cooperative.

• "Propose new ideas and activities based on these perspectives" means that we as a coop will express unique perspectives and propose coop-based activities.
  

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Coop Membership and Structure

The current make-up of the Coop is as a lose federation of socially active groups and individuals under a dual executive: Ali Tabibnejad and Justin Whitaker. When the Coop grows to an adequate size, probably after one year, a "Steering Committee" will be formed, composed of 3-7 individuals who have been active members of the coop and have shown a commitment to social action. We envision that this will likely be people who have already been active in the community through groups or alone, but those who have not are encouraged to get active if interested in joining the steering committee.

At that time, the coop structure will roughly be: Click Here

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Quotes of the Day

• "We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error."

  From Nietzsche's The Gay Science

• To renounce belief in one's ego, to deny one's own "reality" -- what a triumph!
  
  from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals top