What is a Cooperative Zone?
In June of 2020, there were protests in the Capital Hill area of Seattle. The territory that was taken from local police was called both an autonomous zone and an occupational zone. Its was not clear that the citizens of the Capital Hill area were in agreement or not with the occupation or the declaration of autonomy. It was clear that they had no voice in these events.
The idea of a Cooperative Zone is to create a platform for citizens to work with the local governments that represent them rather than the more extreme choices of being occupied by an outside group or having that group declaring autonomy over your area.
These local governments are the city and counties and to a lesser extent the state. Influencing US Federal Government is beyond the scope of the Cooperative Zone movement.
A good starting point is to make each county a Cooperative Zone. Its also possible to combine more than one county into a Zone if the people in those counties are more similar than different.
Another element of the Cooperative Zone is to create unity among the zone. There are a lot of divisive issue created by our red/blue divide political system, however there are also things that are well agreed upon. A good target is ideas that have 80% support. This may seem extreme, but I think that there is broad agreement on many issues, especially if members are educated about the red/blue rhetoric.