Chapter five. Canada’s Hidden Co-operatives: The Legacy of the Banker Ladies in Toronto and Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Black women contribute in important ways to Canada's legacy of co-operativism, mutual aid, and building up of civil society.After 10 years of doing this research in Canada, the ROSCA is a global phenomenon that is surprisingly unknown to most Canadians.They may wrongly assume it is only located in the Global South.Even if people have heard of ROSCA systems, they assume they only have value in the Global South and do not see their relevance here.The number of ROSCAs users in the Global North is likely to be in the millions.According to Jeffrey Ashe (2023) of Grassroots Finance Action, he estimates that 83 million people in the developed world participate in ROSCAs.Yet in many parts of the Global North, these ROSCA systems, which are known to be active, are either ignored or stigmatized as illegal -which they are not.This stigmatization may explain why they are overlooked as a vital part of Canada's social economy (and why its users hide them).For Canada's social economy to reflect its society, it must recognize the various informal co-operative forms that make up the third sector, and be driven by research and theory that is culturally diverse.The Banker Ladies "Blackify" economics by showing how co-operativism is a part of who they are.These women choose to form groups with other Black women, an action which shields them from feeling like outsiders in the country they call home. 1 It c h a p t e r f i v e Canada's Hidden Co-operatives: The Legacy of the Banker Ladies in Toronto and Montreal
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".