Berkeley Student Cooperative
student housing co-op in California
The Berkeley Student Cooperative (BSC) (formerly known as University Students' Cooperative Association or the USCA) is a student housing cooperative serving primarily UC Berkeley students, but open to any full-time post-secondary student. The BSC houses and/or feeds over 1,300 students in 17 houses and three apartment buildings. Food is provided to residents of the 17 houses, which also offer boarding meal plans to non-residents. As part of their rental agreement, residents of the houses are required to perform workshifts, typically five hours per week. The BSC is led by a board of directors which is primarily composed of and elected by student members.
History
In the beginning of 1933, to meet the need for affordable student housing during the Great Depression, Berkeley YMCA director Harry Lees Kingman inspired a group of students to start the first cooperative house in Berkeley, where student would do work-shifts in exchange for common food and lower rent. The house would be based on Rochdale Principles, which include: democratic control, common purchase of the cheapest available produce, open membership, market prices charged, political neutrality, limited interest on any invested capital, and return of savings to members in return for their investment. A rooming house became the first unit, with ten students becoming the first members and twelve more joining before the end of the semester.
In the fall of 1933, the students leased from Sigma Nu a Northside fraternity house, it became the original Barrington Hall housing 48 students. The following year, another fraternity house was leased, this time on Southside, it became Sheridan Hall housing 100 students.
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This entry incorporates text from “Berkeley Student Cooperative” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.