Evergreen is premised on harnessing procurement flows from anchor institutions, but this approach relies on the enlightened leadership of the anchors – most of which are private institutions and not subject to any public procurement policy, were it to be instated. Fortunately anchor leaders in Cleveland support the plan to direct procurement flows towards community economic development: as well as their contract with Evergreen, they participate in a Community Benefits Agreement recently spearheaded by the City to promote local and diverse hiring in Cleveland construction projects . Civic and anchor leaders are committed to community wealth building, but nurturing this support has been an ongoing process for representatives from the Cleveland Foundation and the Democracy Collaborative. In spite of these alliances,capturing procurement flows has been a significant challenge for Evergreen. For example, until recently, Evergreen Laundry did not have a single contract with an anchor in Greater University Circle.The anchor institutions are generally locked into long-term million dollar contracts with their laundry services. Evergreen plans to forward bids when contracts end, as was done with University Hospitals, but in the meantime has focused its efforts on nursing homes and hotels. “We still have a long way to go in terms of really capturing anchor supply chains,” said Howard during our interview . The City of Cleveland has been supportive of Evergreen but has not yet directed procurement flows its way. The City’s charter requires competitive bidding for its contracts, with economic performance as the primary determinant for a successful bid. Recent efforts, however, have sought to heighten purchasing flexibility to support broader policy goals. For example, a 2010 ordinance gives a slight bidding advantage to local firms and to companies certified for their use of green business practices, such as reducing waste and energy consumption .
Bidding advantages also exist for firms certified as a small business or as a female-owned or minority-owned enterprise. Rules to facilitate competitive bidding are meant to forestall cronyism,vertical rack but they can also be a barrier to social impact procurement efforts. Policy innovations that enable public bodies to responsibly direct purchasing power towards community wealth building would accelerate co-operative growth. Experiments by the City of Cleveland are promising in this regard, and may become important policy supports for Evergreen’s growth.Evergreen has benefitted from ad-hoc and private versions of co-op recognition, financing, infrastructure support, and preferential procurement. More regularized public support in all six policy areas would have made Evergreen’s founding less dependent on contingencies and heroism and would smooth the way for replications in other regions. Co-operative policy in the US is underdeveloped, especially compared to the co-op dense regions. The US Department of Agriculture does offer grants to rural cooperatives for technical assistance and product development . A similar program focused on urban co-operatives would have been a helpful funding source for Evergreen. The Cleveland Model was enabled by robust foundation support and champions in local government. There is evidence suggesting that in this period of contested neoliberalism similar alliances might be possible elsewhere. In 2014, local governments in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin approved initiatives aimed at financing the development of worker co-ops .These local measures offer co-operative recognition, financing, and technical assistance. At the state level, California has passed a bill that establishes a legal form for worker co-operatives . The bill offers official recognition by explaining the purpose and benefits of worker co-operatives, and allows worker co-operatives to create voluntary indivisible reserve accounts . According to Sushil Jacob of the Tuttle Law Group, who helped craft the legislation, the long-term goal is to get tax credits for monies invested in indivisible reserve funds, as is done in Italy . Finally, the legislation allows worker co-operatives to raise capital from “community investors,” a new legal category of investor; worker cooperatives can raise up to $1,000 per investor, without registering these investments with the state securities regulator . Federally, the National Co-operative Business Association is spearheading an effort to pass legislation that would create a program within the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide capital and technical assistance to cooperatives. This program would be a much-expanded version of the USDA’s rural cooperative development program; it would help with financing, not just technical support, and urban co-operatives would be eligible.
The bill has been introduced twice but has not yet made it out of the House of Representatives . This would be a breakthrough piece of legislation; it would greatly facilitate co-operative growth in the United States. Mondragon, and the robust co-op sectors in Quebec and Emilia Romagna, have all benefitted from supportive policy. But a crucial point that became apparent during our literature review is that strong co-op sectors in these regions all preceded the policy breakthroughs that enabled further sectoral growth. Adeler writes: “In the Spanish, Italian, and Quebec examples, co-operative development was pursued by federations of cooperatives, and co-operative groups or alliances, initially with little or no state support, yet proved highly successful in producing an enabling environment for co-operative development” . Policy change played an important role in facilitating sectoral growth, but a robust sector was needed to win and keep these legislative victories in the first place. This finding is aligned with the social movement approach to co-operative development. According to Diamantopoulos , “Co-operative development may benefit from supportive public policy and sound management but it necessarily depends on concerted movement action to transform the field, periodically realigning movement frames and resources to effectively focus on new opportunities and drive new campaigns.” The political muscle needed to pass co-op-supporting legislation first requires a more robust national sector. Local policy change can precede vibrant co-op movements, but movement building will be needed to win the state and national legislation required to scale-up the co-operative economy. The Next System Project is hopeful in this regard. While still a young initiative, it is beginning to assemble the popular power required to push legislative and systemic changes that can facilitate the scaling up of the worker-cooperative alternative that Evergreen represents.Populations of a species are frequently distributed across climatic gradients, where natural selection can lead to adaptation to local conditions. The environmental conditions that cause local adaptation have been well documented through reciprocal transplants and studies of clines. These experiments show that divergent patterns of selection cause shifts in the mean values of many traits leading to a multivariate response. Such a response to selection improves fitness and promotes successful adaptation to local conditions. Despite a large body of research, it remains a challenge to determine the specific genetic loci that respond to selection and confer local adaptation. Long-term breeding programmes and quantitative genetic studies have demonstrated variation in nearly all traits, and thus a simple lack of additive genetic variation is not expected to constrain adaptation. Instead, a limited amount of genetic variation along vectors of selection has been shown to limit adaptive evolution. Theoretically, independence of all loci and phenotypes will improve the potential for adaptation by optimizing evolvability and the response to selection.
However, certain genetic correlations can disrupt the optimal genetic architecture by reducing the amount of genetic variation which is available to selection and causing correlated responses ofnon-adaptive traits. Although this maladaptive role for genetic correlations is not universal, genetic correlations may affect R by limiting the dimensionality of the genetic variance matrix or restricting genetic variation to vectors which are not aligned with selection. The combined effects of the pleiotropic loci,vertical farming hydroponic which cause genetic correlations, may have a profound impact on patterns of local adaptation. As pleiotropy can constrain multivariate adaptation and cause correlated evolution of adaptive and deleterious phenotypic values, these loci are typically considered ‘antagonistic’. Adaptation is especially constrained when pleiotropic gene action limits phenotypic correlations along a vector orthogonal to that of selection and reduces R. Antagonistic pleiotropy is well documented and has led to the belief that all pleiotropy is maladaptive. However, recent theoretical work has countered this viewpoint by demonstrating that intermediate levels of pleiotropy may actually improve the conditions for adaptation and evolution of complexity. To study the adaptive value of pleiotropic loci, it is necessary to assess the effects of genetic variation on the structure of many phenotypes which are subject to correlational selection in nature. Adaptation to drought in plants provides an ideal system to achieve this goal. In natural and agricultural systems, annual plants can be adapted to local drought conditions by either growing and reproducing before the onset of drought or by delaying reproduction, increasing water use efficiency and conserving resources. For example, accessions which exhibit early-flowering time and low WUE were selected for in consistently wet soil and late-season drought conditions, whereas direct selection on increased WUE favoured a dehydration avoidance strategy in environments with early season drought. Therefore, adaptation to different local soil moisture conditions and seasonal rainfall patterns contributes to the observed strong correlations between FT, growth rate and WUE within and among species. Several studies have suggested that pleiotropy may also affect this correlation. Here, we provide empirical evidence for an adaptive role of pleiotropy. Using genome-wide approaches, allelic variants and transgenic manipulation, we demonstrate that the ‘FT’ gene, FRIGIDA pleiotropically affects phenotypic variation in growth rate, WUE and FT. Derived, null FRI alleles produce a drought escape phenotype relative to the ancestral adaptive strategy. This phenomenon, which we term ‘adaptive pleiotropy’, enhances the likelihood of adaptation by increasing adaptive responses to selection.Population genetic models are at odds about the role of pleiotropy in maintaining variation within and among populations. Pleiotropic gene action may cause non-adaptive and adaptive phenotypes to covary, thus reducing the efficacy of correlational selection and permitting the persistence of multiple allelic states within populations. However, where the effects of pleiotropy are more aligned with the direction of selection, within-population variation can be purged by strong directional selection. Therefore, we predicted low levels of within-population variation at FRI, because multivariate selection would favour either a functional or non-functional allele . In addition, if variation at FRI can lead to local adaptation, then we predicted increased population structure between functional and non-functional FRI classes. A population genetic test for adaptive pleiotropy is complicated in our study as FRI may cause population structure through both adaptive pleiotropy and allochrony: FRI-NILs and tr-FRI lines flowered at least 28 and 32 days later than Col-0, respectively. All main-raceme Col-0 flowers had been pollinated and produced fruits before any FRI-NIL or tr-FRI lines produced open flowers. In the greenhouse environment, single mutations at FRI can produce a reproductive isolation index near 1.0. However, assortative mating owing to variation at FRI may be tempered in nature as the environment has a profound effect on phenology.To test for evidence of reproductive isolation between accessions and populations that differ at FRI, we first imputed FRI functionality of 1188 accessions, then compared the group of individuals with derived, weak alleles to the group of individuals with functional, ancestral-type FRI. We then calculated FST between FRI allele functional classes in PLINK. FST values averaged across 216 130 SNPs are significantly greater between the FRI functionality classes than is expected from genomewide sub-sampling . To control for geographical population structure, we divided the global sample into 11 geographical regions according to Horton et al.. Ten of 11 geographical regions showed elevated FST at FRI compared with a genome-wide sample of sites with the same allele frequencies as the FRI functional variants . These results show that elevated global FST when sorting by FRI is due to a lack of within-population variation in FRI. Less than 2 per cent of 574 local populations harboured functional variants at FRI. While extremely low within-population variation is present at FRI, functionally divergent alleles have gone to fixation in geographically proximate populations. Several authors have shown that an abundance of derived null FRI alleles are present in nature, far more than would be expected by chance. Here, we demonstrate that these mutations cause a phenotypic leap between drought adaptation strategies which may promote adaptation to novel ecological conditions. Combined, the strong signature of selection, high levels of population structure and lack of within-population variation observed at FRI suggests an adaptive role of this pleiotropy.Previous studies have found that the early flowering, low WUE phenotypes associated with drought escape are adaptive in sites without consistent low soil moisture.