When forming the bHive cooperative, we asked a few brilliant people to be bHive Founding Mentors.
Darren Sharp
Darren Sharp has been an amazing supporter and mentor. He spoke at our pitch night, he took bHive to the NY Platform Cooperative Conference, he’s mentored us on our model, he’s introduced us to brilliant thinkers around the world and he invited us to be the focus of the Platform Cooperative workshop in Melbourne on 25 May 2017.
Darren is a sharing economy strategist and the founding Director of Social Surplus. He works with clients to design programs that amplify the strengths of people and communities through sharing. Darren is the Australian editor of Shareable and the Melbourne Coordinator of the Sharing Cities Network.
Book Darren to speak and run workshops on the sharing economy and sharing cities; he’s brilliant.
Here is Darren speaking at our first ever bHive event in 2016:
Antony McMullen
Antony McMullen has been helping us think through and work through our coop model rules. He’s a rules doyen! We’re still thinking about whether we follow his advice all the way and call our treasurer a ‘Bursar’.
Antony is passionate about co-operative policy, education and enterprise development for the common good; and is a qualified practitioner in social impact, as well as community development and management. Previous roles include student union president, community legal centre chairperson, union delegate, social policy officer, communications officer and community services agency director.
He is the inaugural Chancellor of the 888 Antipodean Order of Froth Blowers (AOFB) Co-operative (think craft brewing for social good) and is the founder of the first cooperative co-working space in Melbourne (to be officially launched and registered as a co-operative in late 2017).
Antony currently works as a Co-operative Development Coordinator at Common Equity Housing. He is working on establishing a Victorian network of co-operatives with support from the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. Additionally, he supports a broad range of groups on the process, strategy and governance aspects of starting a co-operative (recently engaging with rural co-op start-ups through the Southern Cross University ‘Farming Together’ program).
Antony is married with three children, who sometimes play Co-opoly with him.
You can find him on twitter, LinkedIn or by email.