CO-CYCLING ACROSS AMERICA

REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF THE CO-CYCLE PROJECT

Empowered Participation / Honors Community & Place / Views Wealth Holistically


An excerpt from the documentary film, "To the Moon"


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In the summers of 2012 and 2013  a group of college students and recent grads bicycled across America.  They visited cooperatives, honed their own cooperative skills, reimagined the country they were about to inherit, and, along the way, discovered themselves.  Here is their story.


In the 2012 UN-declared "International Year of Cooperatives," a collective of college students created a project called Co-Cycle. They were twelve friends who wanted to experience the nation that they were to inherit. They wanted to spend the summer traveling across the United States and they wanted to do it by bicycle. What were they looking for? Cooperatives.

In rural, urban, conservative, and progressive communities, the Co-Cycle riders visited food coops, credit unions, worker-owned factories, electric coops, producer farming coops … the list goes on. They biked through cities, suburbs, and towns, through grazing fields, cornfields, and oil fields, over mountains, rivers, and streams. They visited over 60 cooperative businesses and learned about the coops’ structures, struggles, and strengths. As a working collective ourselves, they applied that knowledge to face their own challenges in organizing and living democratically. Many of the riders have said that the biking was the easiest part and that working through the emotional struggles with the clarity, love, and dignity required to function as a cooperative was the greater challenge.

Two of the founding members, Megan Meo and Katie Coupe, were inspired to form Co-Cycle while on a long bike ride in Western Massachusetts. They happened upon a sweet little food coop and had a wonderful time learning about the community there and the workings of the coop. They decided it was so wonderful, in fact, that they wanted to bike across the whole country doing just that: learning about democratic business models and about the people and places that uphold them. Co-Cycle became an endorsed project of the United Nations’ International Year of Cooperatives. Co-Cycle worked with the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA) and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) to turn the students’ vision into a reality.

As more friends signed on, the collective gained momentum and organizing power. Over the next ten months, the students fundraised, created our brand, developed marketing materials, organized co-op visits and events, and planned out the basic route. When they arrived in San Francisco at the beginning of the summer, it was the first time that many of them had met, but together they set off on this incredible journey—not yet quite understanding just how together in living, working, organizing, and learning they would be over the next three months.

On June 1st, 2012, the twelve cyclists left San Francisco to begin a 4,100 mile journey to Amherst, MA. They were accompanied by a three-person film crew led by NYU student Emma Thatcher and close friend of one of the organizers. The cyclists’ journey, along with their two-person support crew in a Subaru, was documented by this student and was released as a full-length documentary, To the Moon, released in 2014.  [You can view clips from "To the Moon," the first above, and also here.]

Deeply inspired by the cooperatives they visited, the people they'd met, and the country they'd seen with new eyes, five of the students decided to keep Co-Cycle living on for at least one more year. After putting out a plug for applications, they invited seven more riders to join the collective and complete another cross-country tour visiting cooperatives in 2013. The seven riders were all women and current college students or recent college graduates. They biked from Seattle, WA, to Boston, MA, and visited many of the same towns, people, and cooperatives as the summer before, but every experience was new. Although they followed a similar route, in joining the collective, these women created their own Co-Cycle.

Many members of the Co-Cycle collective have since gone on to do work for more regenerative communities and a more democratic economy.  They all hold the values and inspiration gained from our summer deep within their persons. They will guide them along their life journeys.
—Hendrix Berry (Hendrix was a Co-Cyclist on the 2013 tour)


Read the reflections of four Co-Cyclists here and about some of the cooperatives they visited here.  

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