I watched some of the films of the other local co-ops…It was storytelling: how they got started, what were the rough edges, how did they get through it, why was being a co-op the best decision for them. And it is kind of cool hearing that because they are all relatable situations.
Vincent Green, Co-Owner, Taharka Brothers worker co-op, Baltimore
In the past decade, worker cooperatives—that is, businesses co-owned and co-governed by worker-owners, each of whom hold an equal ownership share of their firms—have gone from being a somewhat esoteric niche strategy to a common community economic development tool.
As Courtney Berner of the Center for Cooperatives wrote in NPQ earlier this year, between 2016 and 2019, 47 percent of new co-ops formed in the US were worker co-ops. If one considers a longer period stretching from 2011 to 2019, nearly one in three newly formed co-ops in which the ownership type is known (253 of 771) were worker co-ops, an extraordinary development given that historically fewer than one in 100 co-ops nationally have been worker owned. And while the current decade is still young, the pace of worker co-op development—especially in BIPOC communities—has only accelerated.
The need for educational infrastructure to support this growth is evident. Indeed, a half-dozen years ago, Melissa Hoover, Executive Director of DAWI, and Hilary Abell—co-founder of Project Equity, an employee ownership technical assistance nonprofit—identified education as a key...
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