Last fall, the Association of Cooperative Educators hosted three successful career fairs in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon, thanks to funding provided by the CHS Foundation. During the events, students explored careers in the rural co-op sector, with employers from the Ag Co-op sector. Students were rotated through stations with different employers, to ask questions and make connections.
This spring, ACE will be hosting three online educational events for students based in Iowa (March 30th), Illinois (April 1st) and Texas (April 7th), once again thanks to generous funding from the CHS Foundation. The format of these events will be a little bit different, as explained below:
The event will take place via Remo (a very neat conferencing platform that we will be piloting for future projects – click here to check it out). Students will be assigned to a virtual table with a co-op educator, developer or employer. The students will be given a possible scenario that they must work together to solve using co-operative techniques and principles. The co-op facilitator will serve their guide, offering potential suggestions, should the group require additional details or get stuck on an aspect of the scenario. The goal is use experiential learning as a tool to educate students about the co-op sector, and to network with industry professionals in the process. We hope this format will inspire students to explore future opportunities in co-op organizations, with a better understanding of the unique, and not-so-unique problems that co-operatives face everyday. This format imitates a carousel interview, a format that is becoming more and more prevalent when hiring future managers and leaders.
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED: If you are a co-op expert, educator, manager or developer, we need your assistance in facilitating these events. We will require roughly 5-6 facilitators per event. The event will last 1.5 hours and start at 3:30pm local time. The scenarios will be written by the ACE team and emailed to you in advance, so no preparation will be necessary (on your end). Since we cannot provide coffee and lunch as we normally would for our volunteers, we’re happy to provide you with an e-gift card as a “Thank You” for your help facilitating this exciting event! If you are interested, please email Julien at: info@ace.coop
If you are a co-op educator and know of students who would be interested in attending this event, please also reach out to Julien at the above email.
Lastly, if you’re involved with a co-op organization, and you know of a scenario that could be very interesting for students, please let us know!