Release: Wooden Shoe Collective Restructures

by jgeneric | 04.28.2009

Announcement: The Wooden Shoe collective has undergone major restructuring. We have a new outlook, and new energy for building a pretty amazing new space, and a nrevised mission and statement of values.

As a 32 year-old infoshop, Wooden Shoe Books has provided the local Philadelphia community with access to literature specializing in social justice, radical theory and culture, anarchism and other related ideologies. The Wooden Shoe has also served as a place to hear authors, musicians, and activists present their work around these issues.

As of March 2009 we would like to make a special announcement. After nearly six months of work, we have completed a major restructuring of the organization of our collective.

Many people might wonder why the Wooden Shoe collective found it necessary to restructure. For years collective members worked hard to find new solutions to the ever-present main problems: finding committed and accountable collective members, combating the yearly loss of funds, and finding ways to hold larger community events. Many different solutions were presented and tried, but none were successful. We needed to re-organize in order to survive financially, but also to make the collective stronger. With our new structure, we have a better system of open and honest communication, better training process, and much better accountability amongst our members. We cannot truly confront the many systems of oppression in larger society until we have confronted those very issues within our own collective.

We’re primarily an information sharing and educational space, yet in the end, the idea we really want to promote is that workers ought to control their own workplaces, neighbors should control their own neighborhoods, and all people should be able to live their lives free of oppression. The space we make should further these ideals. This is a moment in our history and we wanted to share it with our community.This project was largely inspired by Red Emma’s collective in Baltimore, MD. We are extremely grateful to them for assisting and consulting with us throughout the transformation process. The information and advice they shared proved to be incredibly invaluable. Although we adopted our new structure to retain the original Wooden Shoe flavor, we borrowed many concepts they use in their collective, and highly encourage others to look at their model for creating a strong collective.
We now have a new structure for our collective, a new outlook, and new energy for building a pretty amazing space. Our members have discussed and agreed to a revised mission and statement of values.

Mission Statement:
The Wooden Shoe is an all-volunteer collectively-run Infoshop located in Philadelphia, PA that seeks to embody the principles of anarchism and other movements for social justice. We strive to provide our local community with radical and non-traditional sources of written, digital, and spoken information. We wish to be an empowering resource for activism, organizing, art, self-education, dialogue, community-building, and the anti-capitalist struggle.

Statement of Values:
We seek to be an example of the society we envision and what we are working towards as radicals. We are a non-profit space that works to offer ethical choices in what people buy, eat, drink, and learn. We are a non-hierarchical collective that hopes to empower members through worker self-management and a consensus decision-making process. As a collective, we are committed to discussing and challenging all systems of oppression including but not limited to: racism, sexism, classism, eterosexism, ableism, and ageism within our own collective and in larger society. We seek to recognize and identify various points of privilege we may have as members of a collective that is made up of people with unique identities, backgrounds, and histories. We hope to build a space that is part of a larger social movement that combines our resources with other cooperative and collective organizations locally and around the world for the purpose of mutual aid and the creation of a cooperative society.

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Release: Wooden Shoe Collective Restructures

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