When 250 workers were laid off by what was then called Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, they arranged a sit-in to protest violations against their union agreements. The second time it happened, they decided to purchase the now-bankrupt company and operate it themselves. The new company is a worker-owned co-operative called New Era Windows, which opens for business today.

Interested?

• How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves
  When their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative.

Photo courtesy of Think Panama.

NHK Broadcasting, Japan’s equivalent of the BBC, contacted me last month, wanting a statement on the American public’s reaction to the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations.

A super-sized NAFTA, the TransPacific Partnership is a free-trade agreement whereby countries give foreign corporations rights and privileges to encourage investment and global business. The TPP was a major issue during Japan’s recent national elections, when thousands took to
the streets in protest. It was hard for the Japanese journalist to believe me when I explained that there is little awareness of the TPP here in the United States, because our media has hardly covered the subject.

The corporate powers granted in the TPP can override domestic laws on environmental health and safety, and labor and citizens’ rights. Not only that, but multinationals can claim that those domestic laws hamper free trade and sue member countries for millions of dollars. The TPP is
in many ways an attempt to revive the stalled expansion of the World Trade Organization.

At present, the TPP talks include 12 Pacific Rim countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and, most recently, Japan. Thailand and the Philippines have expressed interest, and other countries would be allowed to join the TPP at any time.

Although trade deals have potentially huge effects on the economy, environment, and food sovereignty of communities throughout these 12 countries, the TPP negotiations are being held in secret between unelected government officials and representatives from more than 600 of the world’s most powerful corporations. The United States has plenty of interests clamoring for the trade advantages of the TPP, while developing countries like Vietnam see the TPP as an opportunity for economic development.

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But the AFL-CIO, one of the few non-corporate and nongovernmental entities that have access to the text of the agreements, does not support the TPP in its current form because of implications for labor and human rights.

The talks are scheduled to finish by October of this year. Meanwhile, negotiators are lobbying Congress to grant “Fast Track” authority for the TPP. That would mean Congress couldn’t revise the agreements and could only vote “yes” or “no” to the United States joining the TPP.

Leaked documents show how extensive the reach of the TPP would be. It is shaping up as a corporate takeover of public policy that would impact safe food, sustainable jobs, clean water and air, access to life-saving medicines, education, even our very democracy. After 20 years under NAFTA we know the likely impacts for people and the environment.

Can a "Dracula Strategy" Bring the TPP Into the Sunlight?
A highly secretive trade agreement aims to penalize countries that protect workers, consumers, and the environment. Luckily, the growing opposition goes beyond the usual trade justice suspects.

In March, Citizens Trade Campaign organized a letter to Congress signed by 400 U.S. organizations outlining expectations for public involvement and calling for an end to Fast Track. It was signed by, among others, the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders, Public Citizen, the National Family Farm Coalition, and state trade justice groups including my organization, the Washington Fair Trade Coalition. Polls show the majority of Americans believe that offshoring jobs and NAFTA-style free trade deals have hurt the U.S. economy, so it’s likely that Americans would be opposed to the TPP too—if they knew more about it.

The next round of TPP talks will be held May 15–24 in Lima, Peru. An International Day of Action Against the TPP is set for May 11, International Fair Trade Day. TPPx-Border, a network of groups in the United States, Canada, and Mexico resisting the TPP, is organizing actions throughout the month of May and beyond, including webinars with Peruvian activists, a TPP action camp, and local community events. Visit TPPxBorder.org to find out how the TPP will impact you—and then take to the streets!

Kristen Beifus wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Kristen is Executive Director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, which is dedicated to creating an equitable global trading system.

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• How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves
  When their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative.
• Hot and Crusty Bakery Workers Seal the Deal on Unionization
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• Walmart Strikes Fire Up Low-Wage Workers, Despite Setbacks
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Shown here: Janvieve Williams Comrie and Omar Freilla are surrounded by Co-op Academy graduates. Co-ops represented from left to right: Caracol Interpreters, Ginger Moon, Green Worker Cooperatives, HTINK, and Concrete Green. Photo by Stephen O'Byrne.

1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy
, The Bronx, N.Y.

Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial advice, and help designing logos and websites.
Run by the South Bronx-based Green Worker Cooperative, the academy guides up to four teams per session through the startup process and has graduated four organizations now thriving in New York City. These include Caracol Interpreters, which is raising the bar on interpreter wages, and Concrete Green, which focuses on environmentally sound landscaping. Six more co-ops are in the pipeline.

“I’m amazed at how little knowledge and information is out there for the average person about how co-ops function and how to start one,” says Janvieve Williams Comrie, whose mother-owned cooperative Ginger Moon also came out of the program.

“That’s one thing the Co-op Academy really provides, the hands-on know-how.” Even money for tuition ($1,500 per team) gets the treatment. Freilla is adamant that teams fundraise to cover that cost—even if they can foot the bill themselves. “By fundraising for the registration fee, you are promoting the vision for your cooperative, gaining supporters, and creating a buzz before the program even starts,” he says. “That is just the kind of support that will propel your business forward, and while you’re doing it you’ll be getting an early opportunity to see just how well you and your teammates work together.”

Photo by Paul Dunn.

2. Red Clouds Collective
, Portland, Ore.

They shared an active, outdoorsy lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest. They shared a talent for creative work. It seemed logical for the group of friends to leave their corporate jobs to form Red Clouds Collective, a Portland manufacturer of handcrafted canvas and leather gear. The worker-owner cooperative pools the talents of a variety of artists and allows them to make a living as craftsmen beyond what any of them could do individually. A percentage pay system benefits the original designer, the assembler, and the collective. After one year, business is great. What’s popular? theGOODbook™, a leather wallet/iphone case/sketchbook all in one. From left, Owen Johnson, Seth Neefus, Jason Thomas Brown, and Casey Neefus in their garage-turned-factory.

Photo by Paul Dunn.

3. Seward Community Cafe
, Minneapolis

It’s one thing to run a successful cooperative business, and quite another to lend a hand to the competition. But that’s exactly what the Seward Cafe in Minneapolis did, loaning $10,000 to Hard Times Cafe when the nearby worker-run restaurant was struggling through an extended closure due to repairs. “They’re like our little sister,” says Nils Collins, a worker at Seward, which is the oldest collectively run restaurant in the country. “We can’t function in an environment where everything is corporate-owned. It’s a lot more effective to have mutual support and solidarity.” The two businesses often help each other with tax-form preparation and even food delivery. “We call it a friendly rivalry,” said Hard Times’ bookkeeper Rozina Doss. “A worker-run business has its own set of difficulties, so our relationship is just a recognition that other people have the same commitment that we do to changing the way work is done.”

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4. Patient/Physician Co-ops
, Houston

Don McCormick, a former health insurance executive, opened a free, charity-funded clinic to better understand the problems in health care and stumbled onto something that surprised him: Uninsured people were willing to pay a nominal monthly fee—like $18—if it guaranteed access to medical care. Then McCormick learned that doctors actually earned more by billing patients directly—even at those nominal fees—than they did by going through Medicare, Medicaid, or HMOs. With that realization, McCormick founded the Houston-based Patient/Physician Cooperative in 2005, which now has 60 participating clinics. Members of PPC function as a group, which allows them to purchase health care at affordable prices. There are no co-payments or qualifications for those with pre-existing conditions, and the model has since spread to North Carolina and Portland, Ore. “This turned into a very practical solution,” McCormick says, “and it’s better than what anyone else is proposing.”

5. Community Food Forest
, Providence, R.I.

The new plantings at Roger Williams Park hover around three feet tall. But in a few years, they’ll sprout leafy greens and medicinal herbs. All will be available to harvest for free, along with wild mushrooms, tubers, and fiber. The edible forestry project, which broke ground in April 2012, is a partnership between the University of Rhode Island Master Gardeners and city officials at Roger Williams Park. The location is no accident. More than 83 percent of nearby residents live in a USDA-declared food desert, with little access to supermarkets selling fresh produce. But in years to come, the edible forest, which sits adjacent to a community garden, will provide nuts, mulch, fruit, and fuel. Similar projects are popping up in other urban areas. The Beacon Hill Food Forest in Seattle—funded in part with a $20,000 grant from the city’s Department of Urban Neighborhoods—is the largest edible forest on public land in the nation.

Photo courtesy of Quimper Mercantile.

6. Community-Owned Mercantile, Port Townsend, Wash.

“We live here, work here, invest here. We just want to buy some socks here,” reads the motto of Quimper Mercantile in Port Townsend, Wash. After the town’s general store closed in 2011, residents of this out-of-the-way town found themselves with few nearby options for buying basic goods, and they weren’t interested in inviting Wal-Mart to move in. Their solution? A dozen activists and business owners raised $50,000, formed a corporation, and began selling shares to friends and neighbors. To date, 1,008 folks have invested—a hundred-dollar share at a time—$570,000, and Quimper Mercantile opened for business in October 2012. When the bankroll reaches $950,000 investors can start trading their shares. “We’re a for-profit venture, not a co-op,” says Peter Quinn, CEO. “So it’s essentially buying stock in a startup, with all the usual possibilities and risks.” At this fledgling stage, participation is motivated less by profit-seeking than community-building. “A much more altruistic purpose,” Quinn says.

Photo by Ben Guss.

7. Buying land as a cooperative, 
Duvall, Wash.

Mobile homes provide a source of long-term, low-income housing but, vulnerable to rate increases or eviction, it’s hardly stable. Last year, in Duvall, Wash., 24 mobile-home dwellers joined to create a cooperative and purchase their trailer park. Final price: $1.18 million. That sounds pretty steep, but Ben Guss, a facilitator with the Northwest Cooperative Development Center, linked the residents to funding through ROC USA Capital, which has made loans to 125 such communities across the country. For the Duvall project, ROC partnered with the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, and now for $475 a month—just $15 more than they were paying before—each member of the newly-named Duvall Riverside Village Co-op is an owner. “It’s great to change from having Damocles’ Sword in the air that you know can fall,” said Stewart Davidson, who lives there and serves as board president. “When I pass, my wife can live here and not be worried about having a knock on the door with someone saying, ‘Here’s your notice, you’re out.’”

Claudie Rowe wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Claudia has been an award-winning social issues journalist for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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• The Economy: Under New Ownership
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• 6 Ways to Fuel the Cooperative Takeover
  From now on, the global mantra for filling market gaps is going to be, “There’s a co-op for that.” But co-ops need customers, money, and training. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation?

This morning, journalist Laura Flanders posted an interview with the artist and hacker Paolo Cirio, whose work is especially appropriate on tax day.

Cirio, a former fellow at a New York-based art and technology center called Eyebeam, is fascinated by the economics of tax havens. More than 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies use offshore tax havens, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.That allows a long list of companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, and Cargill to pay less than 10 percent of their income in taxes. And it's not just U.S. taxpayers that are getting ripped off: a report released in 2012 found that developing countries lost $5.83 trillion to secret and illegal transfers of money that are facilitated by the tax haven system. Tax evasion by the rich contributed the financial crisis in Greece as well, with a recent report finding that more than 10 percent of the country's GDP went unreported in 2009.

Cirio addressed this problem through an art project called Loophole for All, in which he hacked into the websites of companies that offer incorporation in the Cayman Islands, a popular tax haven. After releasing the list of companies that had incorporated there, Cirio dreamed up a way to democratize the loophole previously available only to the powerful. For the price of 99 cents, Cirio's website will provide you with a certificate that makes it easy to steal the identity of a Cayman Islands company and pay taxes like a bankster.

Cirio says that the project is primarily intended as a form of protest and not as a scam. But is it legal? Not exactly.

Then again, “to steal the identity of a Caymans company is illegal only in the Cayman Islands,” Cirio explains, "and Caymans court orders have very little credibility abroad.”

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  The debt resisters of Occupy Wall Street mobilize arts, education, and media for a “People’s Bailout.”
• Remembering Aaron Swartz, “Alpha Geek” and Defender of Online Freedom
  Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26, after years of legal trouble over academic articles he downloaded and intended to share. He leaves behind a legacy of thinking about the power of the internet to shape our political lives.

The good people at Toolbox for Education and Social Change believe that co-ops rock and are proud to tell you why. This colorful poster is an engaging teaching tool for your classroom. Spanish language version available, too! Pay what you want prices.

To order your 10 Reasons Co-ops Rock poster, click here

Visit Toolbox for Education and Social Change's official website for more educational tools

The Toolbox for Education and Social Change (TESA) is a worker-owned cooperative that creates imaginative and experiential resources that transform the way people think, learn, teach, work, and act. Its focus is on social movements, immigrant rights, and democracy.

• Curriculum & Resources: Cooperative Teach-In
  The Cooperative Teach-in is a nationwide initiative that engages campuses with the cooperative movement through events, programs, and projects.
• 2012: The Year of the Cooperative
  How an old business model is finding new relevance all over the world.
• From Housing to Healthcare, 7 Co-ops that are Changing Our Economy
  How manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, and others are doing business the cooperative way.

The above resources accompany the April 2013 YES! Education Connection Newsletter

READ NEWSLETTER: Why cooperatives rock :: TEDTalk for the bullied and beautiful

Workers in the restaurant industry are among the most likely to be paid minimum wage. Photo by Kymberly Janisch.

One of the most compelling proposals to come out of this year's State of the Union Address was President Obama's call to boost the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour—up from the current minimum of $7.25 per hour—and to tie future increases to the cost of living. To create public awareness about the need for the raise, officials from the U.S. Department of Labor have been touring the country to meet with working people who are trying to live on the current minimum.

Mary Beth Maxwell, acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. Photo by Jobs with Justice.

Prominent in this effort has been Mary Beth Maxwell, the acting deputy administrator of the department's Wage and Hour Division. Having previously served as the founding director of American Rights at Work and as a top organizer for Jobs With Justice, Maxwell was one of the more well-known social movement leaders to join the administration. In recent years, her department has hired hundreds more investigators than were previously being deployed. As a result, Maxwell explains, "just this past year, we got $280 million in back wages for workers, the highest in the history of the Wage and Hour division."

I recently spoke with Maxwell about the drive to raise the minimum wage, what she has learned from her tour among low-wage workers, and why the timing is right.

Amy Dean: As you’ve been criss-crossing the country and engaging in conversations with people working at the minimum wage, have you noticed trends among those facing wage stagnation?

Mary Beth Maxwell: It’s been an incredibly humbling and inspiring experience to be part of these roundtables. I’ve been to Pittsburgh and San Antonio and Houston and Minneapolis and Gary, Ind. In each city, we’ve gathered a diverse group of workers that are working at or near the minimum wage. They’re white; they’re African American; they’re Latino. They’re women and they’re men. Many of them are working parents.

“Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work.”

One of the myths in our country is that minimum wage workers are just teenagers in the suburbs earning extra pocket money. That’s not who I’ve been seeing at these minimum wage roundtables. I’ve been seeing and hearing stories of people who are working very, very hard. They are proud of the work they do, and they are frustrated. Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work, with their wages. They don’t want to have to go for programs or supplements. They say, “I work hard, and I should be able to support my kids with what I earn.” It’s a matter of pride and dignity for people.

It's also been powerful for me when we have asked the question, "If we get this raise to $9 an hour, what would you do with that extra $70 in your paycheck each week?" One woman in San Antonio said, "I would buy fresh vegetables for my boys, so that it’s not just rice and beans and potatoes every night." Another woman said, "I would go to the dentist, because I haven’t been taking care of myself." Many people said they would buy medicine for themselves that they haven't been taking. It's the basics that people need.

One woman in Houston said to me, "I would go to the grocery store and buy a pack of hamburger, and spaghetti noodles, and sauce, so I could cook them all that night for my kids and not have to choose which of those things I would buy to feed them." People do not have enough money to cover the basics, even people who are working full-time or working multiple jobs.

“The minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.”

Amy: Politics is often about timing. Why is it important to increase the minimum wage now?

Mary Beth: We all know that, in these hard economic times, a lot of people are really hurting. It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time at minimum wage and make only $14,500 a year. If you have a couple of kids, that means you’re living in poverty. So I think the moment is exactly right for us to say it’s time to do something about that. It’s part of the basic bargain in America—that no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to have a decent job and support yourself and your family. Right now, the minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.

Amy: Over the past two decades, campaigns have blossomed across the country advocating different ways to increase local minimum wages or to establish living wage laws. To what extent do those efforts support change at the federal level?

Mary Beth: I think the work at the state, county, and municipal levels has been incredibly important. Since 2009, the last time that the federal minimum wage was raised, 19 states and the District of Columbia have gone on their own and raised their minimum wages. That speaks to the broad public support for this. Over 70 percent of Americans support the notion of raising the federal minimum wage. I think all of the work that has gone into those campaigns in states and cities and counties has meant not only concrete victories for working people—putting more money in their pockets—but also building a stronger movement around the need to raise wages and reward work.

“It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time and make only $14,500 a year.”

Amy: We know from experience that employers who oppose minimum wage or living wage increases always argue that jobs will move away, or that they will have to lay people off if the raises pass. How are you inoculating against those arguments this time around?

Mary Beth: As you correctly say, they’re really the same arguments that get trotted out every time we have a debate about raising the minimum wage. The good news is that the economic research has, over and over again, disputed their claims. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t have a negative impact on job growth.

The other piece, I think, is that this is good for our economy. When you put money in the pockets of working people, they spend it. They spend it on groceries, on gas, on shoes for their kids to go to school. And consumer spending has always been an engine of growth in the American economy. So it’s more than the idea that this doesn’t hurt job growth; it is good for the economic recovery to raise the minimum wage.

Amy Dean is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, an organizational development consulting firm that works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. Dean has worked for nearly two decades at the cross section of labor and community based organizations linking policy and research with action and advocacy. You can follow Amy on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached via www.amybdean.com .

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Community members in Far Rockaway gather for one of the early meetings about cooperatives. Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.

Three and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.

Worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval.

“The kids missed a month and a half of school,” explained Luis Casco, a member of the church’s congregation who pulled strings to help move Occupy into Far Rockaway. The after-school program was, in part, his brainchild. “We figured we’d start helping the kids and we could win over their parents. Then we could actually start bigger projects,” he said.

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organized by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, an organization that specializes in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval. In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors. In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years. Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner, and the federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

“Collective approach pays big dividends,” read a headline about Mondragon in The Financial Times last year, while The New York Times noted the “use of workers’ share capital and loans” has enabled the federation to remain stable through vacillations in global markets, including the ongoing financial crisis.

Starting from scratch

While Mondragon shows what is possible down the line, Far Rockaway residents are at the very beginning of the process. At one of the crowded early meetings of the cooperative initiative, children and adults buzzed about with disposable plates of food in their hands, fraternizing as extra folding chairs were arranged. Several parents whose children attended the after-school program arrived, bringing their friends and neighbors along. Most were Spanish-speaking immigrants who, having spent their lives working for someone else, were eager to learn more about cooperatives.

Many in Far Rockaway lost their jobs when Hurricane Sandy rendered commutes impossible for flooded local businesses. For those without U.S. work papers, finding new employment has been difficult.

“It’s really hard to find a new job when you don’t have papers,” Casco explained. “Their homes were destroyed, they don’t have the resources to go to welfare and FEMA ain’t helping them.” Others, such as Olga Lezama, managed to keep their jobs after the storm, but the prospect of holding on to the profits of their labor has piqued their interest. Lezama currently works as an upholsterer for a high-end furniture company. By her calculations, her boss makes approximately $500 every hour off the furniture that she and her co-workers upholster, while she earns roughly $100 a day.

“It hurts my feelings and my pockets,” she said. “My job and my efforts and my everything goes to them.”

Luis Casco, a resident of Far Rockaway, has been one of the main organizers of community initiatives after Hurricane Sandy. Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.

By her side was her husband, Carlos Lezama, a carpenter who specializes in cabinets. The pair hope to work with others in the community to form a home-design cooperative, a service in high demand after the storm, which ruined the ground floors of most of the region’s low-lying bungalows.

“We go to stores and buy cheap furniture, cabinets and stuff, and we’re wasting our money,” Lezama said. “In two months, the cabinet is no good. So we have go buy it again. Our people deserve good stuff.”

Workers in control

Occupy Sandy has allocated $60,000 of the $900,000 it raised in the initial flood of generosity following the storm toward the formation of cooperatives, an initiative they hope will spread across storm-affected areas if it proves successful in Far Rockaway. The Working World, an organization that provides zero-debt micro-finance loans to new cooperatives, has offered to provide monetary support, but for now the organization is mostly lending advice and training.

At one of the early meetings, Brandon Martin, the Working World’s founder, showed the crowd a slideshow of other projects the organization has helped launch. Images of a beekeepers’ cooperative in the countryside of Nicaragua and a shoe factory in Buenos Aires glowed on the wall behind Martin as he outlined the benefits of workers sharing resources and making decisions democratically.

Are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition?

“A cooperative is workers controlling capital, instead of capital controlling workers,” said Martin. “It’s about reorganizing the economy around who’s really in control.”

The Working World finances itself by collecting a small percentage of the profits that member collectives generate, money that the organization reinvests in establishing new enterprises. Martin explained that the idea originated in ancient Sumeria, where the word for "interest" was the same as the word for "calf."

“If the cow I lent you has babies,” explained Martin, “I loaned you my cow, so I can have some of the babies. That would be the interest.”

But if the cow was sterile, the Sumerians didn’t collect interest. The same works for Working World’s loans today. The organization only collects once a cooperative generates a steady profit, a model that avoids forcing people into debt if their business fails.

Interest grows

The Sumerians, for their part, eventually altered their lending practices such that they collected interest regardless of the outcome. The legacy of that shift is still with us today; few in Far Rockaway can call their surroundings their own. Walk through the neighborhood in the middle of a business day and you’ll see iron gratings pulled down over storefronts and plywood covering the windows of large shopping complexes. Those stores that are open often bear the insignias of chain outlets that carry money out of the neighborhood and into the coffers of large corporations. Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself—a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

6 Ways to Fuel the Cooperative Takeover
Co-ops need customers, money, and training. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation?

There is obvious enthusiasm in the neighborhood for worker-run enterprises. But are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition and exploitation? And does the focus on cooperatives represent a shift in direction for Occupy, one that veers away from a direct fight for systemic transformation?

At the following cooperative meeting a week later, the crowd had grown. People discussed plans for a scrap metal business and a cleaning-workers’ collective. One man pulled a citizens’ band radio out of his winter coat, explaining that drivers in the taxi cooperative he hoped to form could use it to communicate. He’d been doing research; nine other drivers were needed to secure an operating license from the city.

“We can’t fight the city,” one Occupy Sandy organizer confided. “But we can build co-ops.”

Building an alternative

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift. Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organize democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

“When the workers get together and decide how to distribute the income in such an enterprise, would they give the CEO $25 million in stock bonuses while everybody else can barely get by?” Wolff asks rhetorically.

He stresses the difference between the productive and distributive side of economies, explaining that worker-run cooperatives are the often-overlooked prerequisite for achieving an egalitarian distribution of wealth and resources. “There is the question of what exactly an alternative to capitalism is,” he explains. “I’ve stressed worker-self-directed enterprises as a different way of organizing production.”

On the other hand are markets, which distribute the fruits of production. Wolff believes that the mistake of many 20th-century socialists was to imagine that the elimination of markets would create social egalitarianism, even though production had not yet been reorganized into a democratic model.

Given the pull between the productive and distributive side of economies, cooperatives must form networks to survive. Collaboration between networked enterprises allows these businesses to curb market pressures and, if the network manages to spread, to gain political power.

As Brandon Martin emphasizes, also, workers in new cooperatives must labor long hours to meet production quotas, just like with any other business, since their enterprise still has to compete for a market share. “Can one cooperative change that?” asks Martin. “No. But a cooperative economy might.”

Olga Lazema, however, isn’t thinking about the theoretical potential for cooperatives to challenge capitalism. She’s imagining the positive possibilities for her own neighborhood.

“A lot of people, their houses went like nothing,” she said, referring to Sandy’s destruction. “They have nothing. We could go there, build a small kitchen or whatever they need. Why not?”

Peter Rugh wrote this article for WagingNonviolence, where it originally appeared. Peter is a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York.

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United for Hire worker Jorge Funes paints the exterior of Greenfield Gardens in Springfield, Mass., one of the housing complexes owned by Alliance to Develop Power. Photo courtesy of ADP.

When Cecilia Pastor greeted us at the door of an empty unit at Spring Meadow Apartments in Springfield, Mass., she was surrounded by the harsh smell of paint and the cleaners she had used to scour the space to make it presentable for a new tenant. A petite 30-year-old woman, she was working for United for Hire, a worker-controlled landscaping, snow removal, and cleaning firm operated by the innovative nonprofit Alliance to Develop Power (ADP).
“One thing I have learned and really like in United for Hire is we work in a community economy, and the money circulates,” she said. “And we have good salaries where we can support our families.”

A powerful idea

“Building a community economy.” That ethic, heard from ADP members and workers alike, defines the Springfield-based nonprofit. Deputy Director Keya Hicks, who was an active member before joining the staff, explains the power of the idea, loosely taken from the work of the late feminist scholar Julie Graham: “These are folks who live right in the community. They want their lawns to be mowed. They want their snow to be removed. They work for United for Hire; they pay rent from those checks to keep the property running, so the wealth circulates in the community.”

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For a relatively poor city like Springfield and the surrounding area in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, this is a powerful idea. For the 21-year-old ADP, it means that enriching the social ties and cooperative ethic among its members and within the community is just as important as economic development or political organizing (a recent campaign stopped a transit fare hike). It is that larger vision of building a web of solidarity that distinguishes ADP and United for Hire from other community development organizations that also aim to stabilize the local economy, create affordable housing, and nurture advocacy.

Hicks joined ADP while living at one of the four independent complexes of Section 8 housing that are the social and economic anchor for ADP’s work. ADP created these “cooperatives,” as it calls them, by buying out existing housing developments from private owners and creating freestanding 501(c)(3) nonprofits for each, as required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the time. The tenants control their housing through a democratically elected board.

While legally independent of ADP, the four developments are represented on ADP’s board, and their tenants are a core part of ADP’s membership base. The management company that operates the housing largely hires ADP members to run them—including using United for Hire to maintain the grounds and apartments.

A new ownership model

“It’s quite simple how we got to the community ownership model,” where housing or the workplace are cooperatively run but not necessarily cooperatively owned, said ADP Executive Director Tim Fisk. “United for Hire started as a worker-owned co-op by tenants [of the four buildings] who said, ‘Why should we pay outsiders for landscaping?’” But many of the original founders drifted away, and the four who remained struggled without regular paychecks, doing seasonal work. In 2008, ADP bought out the remaining workers and turned the worker co-op into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that it controls. Its nine workers now earn at least $15 an hour and are hired from among ADP’s activist base. Even though they are not owners, the workers—like those in a co-op—set policy and discuss work problems and politics at monthly meetings.
When people get confused about what a nonprofit is doing mowing lawns, “I just say this is a community-owned business,” says ADP Deputy Director William Cano.

Since early 2012, Craig Buchanan has served as United for Hire’s manager. He not only creates the crew’s schedules and organizes the monthly staff meetings, he uses his ties in the construction industry to prospect for new clients beyond the four housing cooperatives so that United for Hire can grow.

Shared benefits

In shifting United for Hire out of the worker-cooperative model, the community also faced a larger question: Why should the earnings be directed only to the worker owners? “Now … the surplus is distributed to all ADP members through the programming that we do,” said Fisk. That includes its advocacy for better economic conditions for the whole community, not only its workers.

ADP projects gross sales of $850,000, 40 percent of which goes to the workers in wages, with $200,000 supporting ADP. It has a total of 43 workers in its network. That includes those organizing for immigration reform or those staffing the ADP Worker Center/Casa Obrera, which fights for fair pay and offers ESL classes and affordable financial services to its 800 dues-paying members. It includes the 10-hour-a-week job that tenant Orlando Soto took on over the summer—he drove a truck that carried vegetables from a local farm to the Spring Meadow Complex making fresh produce accessible to very-low-income people. ADP bought shares in the farm’s harvest at the beginning of the growing season, and ran a farmers market onsite where residents and neighbors from the surrounding community could use cash or food stamps. Surplus produce was distributed through ADP’s food bank.

Searching for the cooperative ethic

In a city that is almost 39 percent Latino, about 23 percent black, and just over a third white, yet fairly segregated, the racial diversity and comity among the members and workers is striking. ADP encourages members to show solidarity and fight battles that might not immediately be their own—for instance, for accessible mass transit or fair immigration policy. New workers are recruited from community members who have stepped up in these struggles—they are more likely to have a cooperative ethic.

“What have you done in the community economy?” Fisk asks. “That’s more important than if you have experience banging nails. We can teach that. But the strength of ADP is in our shared values.”

Pastor became active in ADP through her husband’s involvement in the worker center. “He was receiving some worker rights training because he was being abused at his workplace at a construction company,” said Pastor. “I started getting involved in the community, ADP, and then got hired.”

Chris Fanous, 33, a native of Springfield, joined United for Hire after being active in the transit fight. “I was working in an auto parts store but I got laid off,” he said, taking a short break from fall cleanup on the grounds of Spring Meadows. “I ran into Craig in the [ADP] office and got scooped up.”

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It makes perfect sense to them that part of what they earn for United for Hire funds ADP advocacy in other areas. They were—and are—part of that advocacy and understand the power created by solidarity. They are earning more than a living wage from a steady paycheck: They are helping drive political transformation.

Now ADP is exploring how to get healthy food into the poorer areas of the Pioneer Valley. While still in the idea stage, ADP has to be careful not to promise too much. Cano explained that “in the base building stage, [people say] ‘I will participate if you can create a job for me.’ We were honest—this project will create jobs but we don’t want you to come in just for a job.”

Hicks explained the heart of the problem. Jobs are important. But if they are the main goal, “it also takes away from a concept of the true transformation of our communities.”

That means that along with jobs will come a cooperatively run venture that nurtures grassroots leadership and empowers members to contribute to their own well-being and that of their neighbors.

Abby Scher wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a sociologist and journalist who writes frequently about economic justice. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Cooperatives began to spread across rural America after President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. The public-private partnerships brought electric power to any community willing to organize cooperatively. Many of those co-ops still exist today.

At right, Berea, Ky., homeowner Charles Cotton (center) was able to make energy efficiency improvements with the help of his electric cooperative, Jackson Energy, which has been around since the 1930s. Left is MACED Executive Director Justin Maxson and right is Program Coordinator Bill Blair.

Photo by Adam Padgett. Photo at left, Library of Congress.

Charles Cotton never gave much thought to the fact that he owns a piece of Jackson Energy Cooperative, the utility that delivers power to his home in Berea, Ky. His grandparents used to go every year to the co-op’s annual meeting and cook-out, where member-owners elect representatives and vote on cooperative business, but Cotton himself has never gone. He uses Jackson Energy simply because it’s the only utility serving his region.

But last November, Cotton’s membership paid off in a way he hadn’t expected: The cooperative gave him an energy upgrade, installing a plastic moisture barrier underneath his house and replacing his old furnace with an efficient heat pump. Cotton’s home now feels warmer and his electric bills have dropped significantly, but he never paid a dime up front.

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Jackson Energy’s status as a cooperative led directly to Cotton’s retrofit. It is one of four rural electric cooperatives participating in a pilot program called How$martKY, run by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED). The program will let Cotton slowly pay back the cost of the retrofit: His bill is smaller than before, but he’s actually paying a bit more than the cost of the electricity he uses. The extra charge is how he repays the cost of the retrofit. It’s a scheme called on-bill financing—a way for people of all financial backgrounds to reap the benefits of energy efficiency without a big up-front cost.

Since on-bill programs like How$martKY are still experimental, MACED made a point of kicking off its pilot program by working with cooperatives. Investor-owned utilities are legally required to prioritize shareholder profits, and often can’t take on risky or unproven ventures. But electric cooperatives are required to maximize value for their members. That makes a cooperative potentially more willing to try out a program with an as-yet-unproven effect on the utility’s bottom line, but with the immediate potential to help member-owners and wean the region off fossil fuels. “Because they’re customer-owned, because they’re intent on customer satisfaction, it made sense to start with them,” says Justin Maxson, president of MACED.

The program is a small step forward in a region of the country underserved by renewables, but one with the potential to grow. “What we love is that it has a shot to make energy efficiency much more scalable,” says Maxson. “That’s especially important in Appalachia, where we’re so over-dependent on coal as our primary source of energy.”

Most of the nation’s electric cooperatives were founded on the idea that small steps can beget big change. Many such cooperatives date back to the 1930s (Jackson Energy started in 1938), when the electricity divide in the United States was stark: Approximately 90 percent of urban homes had power, and 90 percent of rural homes did not. For-profit utilities had little interest in building transmission lines in sparsely populated areas, so the federal government offered loans and encouraged farmers and ranchers to set up their own electric cooperatives. By the mid- ’40s, some 50 percent of rural Americans had electricity; by the mid-’50s, the vast majority did.

Now cooperatives form the largest electric utility network in the nation, serve some 42 million people in 47 states, generate $45 billion in annual revenue, and employ nearly 130,000 people. Approximately 78 percent of U.S. counties are served by electric cooperatives. Clean-energy advocates hope that network can be harnessed to bring big changes once again to America’s energy landscape.

A transformative influence?

The Rural Electrification Administration brought electric power to rural communities, many of whom built community refrigerators for meats and farm produce. Photo from early 1940s.

Co-op electricity, like that of the nation as a whole, comes from a mix of sources that varies by region—and because of cooperatives’ strong presence in coal-producing regions, their reliance on coal-fired power is higher than the national average. Still, 90 percent of electric cooperatives have at least some renewable power in their portfolios, and 96 percent offer some sort of energy efficiency program. As of 2007, co-ops got 3 percent more of their energy from renewable sources than did the nation’s utility sector as a whole.

Cooperatives around the country are pushing to do better. In 2008, a number of them banded together to form the National Renewables Cooperative Organization, an umbrella group that supports local co-ops in making the switch to renewable energy. The organization found that renewables make sense for cooperatives for more than environmental reasons. Diverse power sources can insulate members from volatile prices, and renewable energy projects can create jobs in the communities where members live.

In Tennessee, a cooperative is offering members direct stakes in a new solar farm. A Montana cooperative helped a city in its coverage area rebuild a failing hydroelectric plant. In Minnesota, an electric co-op is researching ways to combine hydro and wind power to achieve a more stable power supply. An Indiana co-op is operating 14 landfill gas-to-energy plants. A cooperative in Hawai‘i, which was set up 11 years ago when the petroleum-powered, for-profit utility went up for sale, is planning to provide 50 percent of its power from renewable sources within the next 10 years.

Co-ops find many reasons to pursue energy efficiency—as in South Carolina, where the energy demands of a quickly growing population threatened to overload the grid. Reluctant to take on the cost of building new nuclear or natural gas plants, a group of cooperatives created an on-bill financing pilot program similar to How$martKY. Since South Carolina has the nation’s highest percentage of manufactured homes (which, on average, use far more energy per square foot than traditional homes), efficiency is an easy target. Eventually, the co-ops hope to retrofit more than 200,000 homes, saving customers $280 million a year.

Photo from Library of Congress.

Electric co-ops are also pushing forward with “smart grid” upgrades—advanced technologies that increase efficiency, reliability, and the integration of new power sources. A consortium of cooperatives won a $68 million stimulus grant to test how in-home displays of energy consumption change consumer behavior and improve efficiency. Other co-ops have pursued similar projects on their own. In 2012, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that cooperatives lead the industry when it comes to the adoption of advanced metering systems. These let customers know how much energy they’re using, so they can scale back, and how strained the grid is, so they can save money by waiting until off-peak hours to use energy-intensive appliances.

Innovations adopted by cooperatives can quickly ripple out into the broader industry. Unlike for-profit utilities, which tend to be proprietary with their information, cooperatives make a point of collaborating. “While the co-ops are very much independent of each other in terms of the ultimate decision that gets made in the boardroom, there’s a lot of collaborative work that goes on,” says Martin Lowery, a vice president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which provides support services to about 1,000 electric cooperatives across the nation.

It’s a potentially powerful mix of local accountability and national connectivity. For example, Alaska’s Kotzebue Electric Association, located north of the Arctic Circle, is developing both wind and solar thermal generation projects in an effort to move away from expensive diesel fuel. As a result, cooperatives around the nation can learn from Kotzebue’s findings on battery storage in extreme conditions.

Beyond utilities

Some cooperatives have green energy written into their missions. Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative, for example, describes itself as “committed to reinventing how Kaua‘i is powered.” But many other co-ops would not go so far. Their goal is to provide reliable, low-cost energy to their members—whatever the source. Just like their investor-owned counterparts, many electric cooperatives have opposed environmental regulations, including the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. The choices of electric co-ops depend on their members: Renewables and energy efficiency are only a priority if members want them.

Still, the fact that so much of the nation runs on electricity that’s cooperatively managed represents a significant opportunity—particularly since many rural areas have lagged behind in efficiency and renewable power. Cooperatives have “a diverse infrastructure that’s hard to paint with one brush,” says Maxson. “But [they have] the potential to be a powerful point of leverage in supporting energy efficiency and economic opportunity in rural communities.”

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Lowery also believes cooperatives can spur deeper conversations among members about their values and their communities. That, after all, is the real difference between cooperative utilities and those owned by stockholders. Value to stockholders is narrowly defined: It means “profit.” But the members of electric cooperatives have the possibility of defining value in their own terms.
As members learn to recognize and utilize that power, Lowery envisions a much stronger push toward more sustainable energy. But he doesn’t stop there. His long-term goal is for members to use their cooperatives to solve problems that go beyond energy.

“It’s about being a facilitator, a catalyst for a dialogue about what’s going to be needed for a healthy and sustainable community in the future. That could mean responding to the needs of aging populations in rural America, the need for healthcare and broadband services, water quality and availability, educational opportunities for kids,” said Lowery.

“Electricity is a means to an end. We’re not utilities. We never were utilities. We’re there to meet the needs of communities and thereby improve their quality of life.”

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Brooke is a contributing editor of YES! and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, Aeon, among others. She lives on Puget Sound.

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Tunis welcomed the World Social Forum with an opening march through the city center on March 26. Photo by Mirko Cecchi.

The springtime weather was hot and breezy as 50,000 people converged in the Tunisian capital of Tunis last week to discuss topics like debt, the Arab Spring, and drones. These were among the seemingly infinite variety of issues debated at the thirteenth annual World Social Forum.

The forum began in Brazil in 2001, and is held in a non-Western country every other year. The forum has emerged as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where elite business and political leaders meet each year to discuss global issues from a largely corporate perspective.

In contrast, the World Social Forum is an open space for social movement participants, civil society, and individuals who are critical of imperialism and corporate-led global capitalism to network and exchange ideas on an international level.

Attendees have traditionally questioned the structural adjustment policies advocated by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in which countries are asked to balance their budgets by slashing spending, usually on items like the pay and pension of public employees. While the banks claim that these policies will lead to more prosperity, critics counter that they have more often led developing nations to accumulate crippling debts.

Flag-waving groups chanting “Free! Free! Palestine!” and tents filled with celebratory dancers dotted the campus of El Manar University, where the forum was held.

Getting in touch with the Arab Spring

Forum organizers chose Tunis as the host site this year in order to tap the energy of the grassroots mobilizations in the Middle East that overthrew dictatorial regimes in several counties and continue to struggle against them in others. Increasing the involvement of Arab activists has also been a goal of the forum for several years, according to a written statement released by organizers.

The Arab Spring was not “just something we read on Facebook,” Menon said.

Nearly everyone, from the local hosts to the foreign visitors, seemed to be thrilled with the selection of Tunisia as host. Arbia Oueslati, a young Tunisian woman representing ATADE, a local organization concerned with development and energy, saw the forum as a chance to counter negative perceptions of the country.

“It makes me so sad when embassies warn their citizens that it is not safe to travel here,” she said. “This will be proof that our country is safe, and also that we are a land of dialogue. People are worried about radical Islam coming to power in Tunisia, but I say it will never happen because Tunisians don’t accept extremists.”

Meena Menon, of Focus on the Global South—a group that promotes social change in Asia, Latin America and Africa—and a former member of the forum’s International Council, was excited that participants from other developing countries had the opportunity to interact with the Tunisian people. “Tunisia is the best thing that’s happened to the forum in my view,” she told a panel audience. Bringing foreign activists to Tunisia helped to show that the Arab Spring was not “just something we read on Facebook,” she said, but “something that was done by real living, breathing people—and people who aren’t even trained in mobilization.”

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The forum usually results in a huge manifestation of local civil society wherever it is held, and this year was no exception. The Organizing Committee estimated that around a quarter of the over 4,500 groups registered were Tunisian. Many of these groups are working to ensure that the goals of the Arab Spring revolution here remain in focus.

Many were upset that the current Tunisian and Egyptian governments continue to negotiate with neoliberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

Of these goals, democracy and fair elections were probably the most urgent. Prominent secular politician Chokri Belaid was killed by unidentified assassins in early February, provoking public outcry. His memory was honored widely at the forum, in forms that ranged from T-shirts and posters bearing his image to a moment of silence at the closing General Assembly to honor both Belaid and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

While failures of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments to accomplish the goals of the revolutions that brought them to power were a key concern, forum participants remained hopeful that the populations in these countries will continue to hold them accountable. In one workshop, Nadeem Mansour of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights spoke of the more than 4,000 protests over financial issues that took place last year in Egypt.

“Large-scale social resistance, although it has not yet crystallized into a new economic plan, forces any government that might come to power to rethink current economic policy,” he said.

Linking up personal and national debt

Many participants felt that a renewed focus on debt was a crucial piece of that process of rethinking. Sandra Nurse from New York City came to the forum as an individual, but was thinking about what she could bring back to her local chapter of Strike Debt, an Occupy-derived movement that works to “build popular resistance to all forms of debt.” She said she was particularly interested in how Strike Debt might be able to evolve from its current focus on individual debt and forge a connection with groups that work to address the social impact of national debt.

Nurse said that the group chose to focus on debt because it’s a personal experience and motivates people deeply. “But now our challenge is to really expand the analysis and connect personal debt to sovereign debt.”

National debt was also on the minds of several Middle Eastern participants. Many were upset that the current Tunisian and Egyptian governments continue to negotiate with neoliberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. “One of the main challenges we face now is foreign debt,” said one participant from Tunisia. “I cannot understand how a revolution can compromise on this issue. The current regimes should immediately stop paying the foreign debt.”

Concern over drones

The seeds of a new global anti-drone movement seemed to emerge in a workshop led by U.S. feminist anti-war group CODEPINK. Participants from multiple countries expressed concern about their governments’ interest in acquiring drones.

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Even in cases where drones are only being considered for border-maintenance surveillance purposes, workshop attendees said this would ultimately lead to increased violence and repression of immigrants.

“Afghanistan has really been the testing ground for NATO countries in terms of drone usage,” said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. “Now they have a taste for it, and everyone wants to have the latest technology. None of the militaries want to be left behind. So we see this as the beginning of a global arms race in drone warfare.”

Many of the workshop attendees stayed after the session was over to discuss organizing an international citizens’ movement to advocate for global regulation on drones. E-mails were exchanged that very night in an effort to start planning a global gathering in a European city for the fall. One of the early tasks of the group will be to identify potentially sympathetic governments to work with.

Benjamin said more information would be available soon at droneswatch.org

Signe Predmore wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Signe is a former editorial intern at YES! and is currently writing her Master’s thesis about the World Social Forum.

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Photo courtesy of Mercy Health.

Millions of Americans lack adequate health care, using emergency rooms as a costly alternative or getting no care at all. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called "Obamacare," opened the door for an affordable option. The December 31, 2012 deal between Congress and the administration that avoided the so-called "fiscal cliff" has, at least for the moment, closed that door for 26 states.

ACA loans for health care cooperatives

The ACA funds private, nonprofit health insurers called Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans—CO-OPs. It originally set aside $3.4 billion for low-interest loans—seed money for at least one health cooperative in each state, plus Washington, D.C.

"Start-up loans" cover such development costs as renting office space, developing provider networks or obtaining contracts with existing provider groups, hiring managers, educating members on how co-ops work, and building enrollment. ACA "solvency loans" are intended to help CO-OPs satisfy state monetary reserve requirements for health insurers.

According to the Center for Medicare Services, CO-OP loans could fund cooperatives that operate health care facilities or cooperative insurance that would cover treatment at participating medical organizations.

Interest in CO-OPs has been keen. The healthcare.gov website states that, as of December 21, 2012, 24 nonprofits offering coverage in 24 states have been awarded nearly $2 billion.

One of those is the Colorado Health Insurance Cooperative, which received a $69 million ACA grant. "Our state does have a long history of supporting agricultural co-ops to receive better deals and services," CEO Julie Hutchins says. In fact, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, founded in 1907, sponsors the new CO-OP.

"The CO-OP will be a unique option for the thousands of newly insured Coloradans that will flood the market in 2014," says Hutchins. "We also hope to be a resource for rural Coloradans to access better coverage as these areas of the state have been left with few options in recent years." She expects a minimum of 8,000 people to join the CO-OP in its first year.

Why create CO-OPs?

Health care CO-OPs are not your usual health insurance companies. The National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA) says, "Cooperatives are owned and democratically controlled by their members ... not by outside investors." Health care cooperatives use the money that a private insurer would take as profit to lower premiums, expand benefits, or improve the quality of care for their members.

In the medical cooperative model, members are active in the decision-making process, from setting policy to electing, and even sitting on, the board of directors. Group Health Cooperative (GHC), established in 1946 in Washington state, involves consumers in committees, advocacy caucuses, forums, and focus groups. Through GHC's member website, patients have better access to their doctors and their personal medical records. The organization's longevity is a strong indication that this model, with its emphasis on consumer engagement, is viable in the long run.

That conclusion is borne out by the success of other cooperatives as well. The National Alliance of State Health Cooperatives (NASHCO) points out that "Member ownership [in cooperatives] has worked to serve millions of working families with electrical, telephone, food, farm, and financial services."

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Infusing the Market with Real Choice

Michael Booth of the Denver Post reports that CO-OPs receiving ACA grants are "meant to compete with private insurers and bureaucratic nonprofits, adding a consumer-focused policy to the state health benefits exchanges." These insurance exchanges go live in January 2014. Functioning as online marketplaces, they will contain information (and phone assistance) on health care plans available to individuals, families, and businesses with 100 or fewer employees. The public can also discuss plans with informed insurance brokers. An estimated 19 million previously uninsured Americans will use these insurance exchanges in 2014 to buy health coverage, increasing to 30 million by 2022.

ACA CO-OP funding will continue in the 24 states where CO-OPs have already been approved in 2012. But, because of the "fiscal cliff" deal, funds have been cut for the additional 26 states still applying for capital loans. NASHCO has fast-tracked their lobbying efforts and is already advocating for the restoration of original ACA CO-OP funding levels.

Perhaps, as the new CO-OPs become operational, they will demonstrate the value of this form of health care and lead to reinstatement of funding for all states, if that has not been accomplished by the time the funded CO-OPs go live.

Nina Rogozen wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Nina is a freelance writer and editor based in the Seattle area. Her main, but not only, areas of professional expertise and passion are health care and education.

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• The Economy: Under New Ownership
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.

A WAGES-trained co-op.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, businesses, products, and services that benefit people, communities, and the planetÑinstead of a few megabanks and billionaires—have been in higher demand. The International Cooperative Alliance's recently published "Blueprint for a Cooperative Decade" lays out a long-term vision to make cooperatives not only the fastest-growing form of business but the acknowledged leader in environmental, social, and economic sustainability. From now on, the global mantra for filling market gaps and new demands, according to Eric DeLuca of the National Cooperative Business Association, is going to be, "There's a co-op for that."  But co-ops—like any kind of business—need customers, money, training, political support, and help from their communities. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation? Here are a few strategies.

1. Find Money

Where do you get the money to finance a new co-op? Traditional banks are loath to lend to co-ops, often because they are unfamiliar with them or do not trust that a cooperative business model can yield profits. But there are institutions that can help.

The National Cooperative Bank (NCB) has become a leading funder for new housing, business, and consumer cooperatives. Chartered by Congress in 1978 and privatized as a member-owned financial institution in 1982, it has provided more than $4 billion in loans and investments to co-ops all over the country—from a New York City housing co-op to an organic grocery in San Francisco to a solar project at Denver International Airport. Most recently, NCB has been working with PNC Bank in Pittsburgh to allocate $13 million in loans to local co-ops.

The nonprofit Heartland Capital Strategies Network—allied with NCB and other credit unions—is another rapidly growing source of funding for cooperatives, especially for the union co-op movement. The organization has committed billions of investment dollars to profitable projects in green construction, manufacturing, affordable housing, and transportation.

McKusker's Market photo courtesy of Franklin Community Co-op.

2. Convert to a Co-op

Some cooperatives get their start from traditional sole proprietorships or corporations. This can happen, for example, when a business owner wants to retire or move on and the employees buy the business.

Franklin Community Cooperative (FCC) in Greenfield, Mass., acquired McCusker's Market, in nearby Shelburne Falls, when the owner of the longstanding natural foods store was ready to retire. A third of FCC's members lived near McCusker's. The purchase allowed FCC to keep its commitment to serve downtown Greenfield while solving its space problem at its popular flagship store. All of McCusker's Market's staff were rehired and retrained, and sales went up 15 percent during the store's first year as a cooperative. Since the purchase, the cooperative has attracted many more members all over the region.

3. Hook Up With Big Partners

Bring co-op business to the mainstays of your community—hospitals, schools, government services—which are already committed to community-scale investment and the public good. It's a mutually beneficial relationship: The co-op keeps money circulating in the community; the institution provides stable demand for the co-ops services or products.

Ohio Cooperative Solar photo courtesy of the Cleveland Foundation.

"If you can get even a small bit of a university's goods and services devoted to your co-op," says Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz, "you can go to any bank, and they'll be happy to finance you, because you've got a market."

The Evergreen Cooperative Initiative, a group of local, sustainable, and worker-owned co-ops in Cleveland, is built on a strong partnership between the co-ops and local institutions—such as Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Western Reserve University—which have a combined annual buying power of more than $3 billion.

Ohio Cooperative Solar, another Evergreen business, is in the process of installing photovoltaics at these three institutions and has also placed nearly 700 solar panels on the city hall and library rooftops in nearby Euclid. Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (a green cleaning operation) washes bed linens for Judson Retirement and McGregor Homes, two large nursing homes in the area.

The film Shift Change gives an inspiring look at worker-owned enterprises, from the Mondragón co-ops in Spain to the Arizmendi bakeries in San Francisco to Isthmus Engineering in Madison, Wis.

4. Be Co-op Curious

You can learn more about the business of sharing—how co-ops work, why they're important, how to support them, and how to start and manage one—from organizations across the country working to promote cooperative enterprise.

The Bay Area group Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES) was founded in the 1990s to help immigrant women form cooperative housecleaning services. Now they are creating toolkits for anyone looking to start a green cleaning co-op. "With all the emphasis on co-ops coming on the heels of the Occupy movement, we're seeing an increased interest right now," says Elena Fairley, who is working with WAGES as an AmeriCorps VISTA member.

College and university programs are also training the next generation of cooperative entrepreneurs. The Cooperative Teach-In is a nationwide initiative that has connected colleges, universities, and programs like AmeriCorps VISTA with cooperatives across rural and urban America.

The Toolbox for Education and Social Action is a worker-owned producer of resources in support of the cooperative movement, including the game Co-opoly.

The Teach-In uses creative tools to help participants learn the importance of cooperative economics. For example, the "Democracy Rating Warm-up Exercise," an interactive survey, allows participants to "rate the level of democracy in the institutions they interact with on a daily basis," and group discussions explore how the cooperative model differs from typical business models. And a fun way to gear up for a cooperative future is to play a round of Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.

As interest in cooperative business has grown, some young entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to learn more. For example, Co-cycle is a group of 15 undergraduates who crossed the country last year on their bicycles, visiting more than 70 co-op organizations and building a network of like-minded communities. "A year ago I didn't know what a cooperative was," writes Co-cycle participant Riko Fluchel on the riders' blog. "Now, after the nine weeks of touring cooperatives across the continental United States, I know first-hand that cooperatives empower people's lives."

The Co-cycle journey is chronicled by a team of filmmakers from New York University in the forthcoming feature-length film To The Moon, which will introduce viewers to the ideas that guide cooperatives and Co-cycle—like teamwork and dedication to a new shared economy.

Arizmendi Bakery photo by Tony Nguyen.

5. Shop Co-op

By buying from co-ops or using cooperative services, you can create local jobs, keep wealth in your community, and shop according to your values.

• The most comprehensive directory of U.S. cooperatives is CooperateUSA.
• You can also find your local food co-op through the Cooperative Grocer Network.
• Looking for a co-op starting near you? The Food Co-op Initiative maintains a map of co-ops still in the organizational stage.
• The new Data Commons Cooperative is building a "Stone Soup" directory, find.coop, created by members.

6. Make Co-op Friendly Laws

Cooperatives are often at a financial and technical disadvantage in an economy dominated by quarterly profits and shareholder returns. The United Nations recently resolved "to encourage governments and regulatory bodies to establish policies, laws, and regulations conducive to cooperative formation and growth." In 2012, the United Nations celebrated the "International Year of Cooperatives," noting that co-ops "build a better world" and "empower people."

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At the federal level, supporters of cooperatives are pushing for the National Cooperative Development Act (H.R. 3677) (NCDA), which would create a national development center designed to bring federal resources to cooperative development. From loans and seed capital for start-ups to funding for technical assistance providers, passage of the NCDA would not only help level the playing field for co-ops but increase economic development and create much-needed jobs in underserved areas of the country.

A different bill would raise the cap on small business loans from another type of co-op: credit unions. Fifteen years ago, the banking industry lobbied for and obtained this cap to throttle its competition. The Credit Union Small Business Jobs Bill (S. 2231) would more than double the limit to nearly 30 percent of assets. According to the Credit Union National Association, this would enable credit unions to loan an extra $13 billion of their $300 billion lending capacity to small businesses in the first year alone, helping to create as many as 140,000 jobs.

Sven Eberlein wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy. Sven is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

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Ken Vallee of Sole Food Street Farms, the largest urban farming operation in Vancouver. The nonprofit got its start with seed money from a credit union. Photo by Michael Ableman, Founder/Director Sole Food.

Ken Vallee welcomes customers to his booth at the Vancouver farmers market with a wide grin, gently urging them to come a little closer and check out the fresh kale and radishes. He is the proud “poster boy,” he says, of Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (Vancity) ads plastered on ATMs and bus shelters throughout the city.

After suffering a severe neck injury, Vallee had a hard time finding a job that would accommodate his need for shorter shifts and time off for doctors’ appointments. He now works for Sole Food Street Farms, the largest urban agriculture operation in Vancouver. It was launched in 2009 on a half-acre lot and has grown to include four more sites across the city thanks in part to loans and grants from Vancity.

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Now, the not-for-profit social enterprise produces tens of thousands of pounds of organic fruits and vegetables each year, while providing meaningful work for people like Vallee who, for various reasons, face barriers to employment.

Vancity’s model has always been grounded in the local economy. But in the past five years, under the leadership of President and CEO Tamara Vrooman (who served as British Columbia’s deputy finance minister before tak
ing her post at Vancity), it has taken a more targeted approach to community development. The credit union has always directed a portion of its earnings to charitable giving. But it has recently dedicated increasing funds to building up the burgeoning social economy. It now offers loans and financing specifically tailored to organizations like Sole Food that offer social and environmental—as well as economic—returns.

The first credit union in North America was established in 1901 in Quebec, by Alphonse Desjardin, a reporter who founded the Caisse Populaire after learning of a Montrealer who was ordered to pay nearly $5,000 interest on a $150 loan.

The fundamental difference between credit unions
 and banks is that credit unions are cooperatives, owned and controlled
 by members—their account holders. They exist to serve the needs of their membership, and because credit union members are eligible to vote—or run—for the board of directors, they have a direct role in shaping how the organization operates. Unlike banks and other financial institutions, credit unions are not-for-profits, exempt
 from certain taxes, and required to use excess earnings to benefit members.

The first credit union in North America was established in 1901 in Quebec, by Alphonse Desjardin, a reporter who founded the Caisse Populaire after learning of a Montrealer who was ordered to pay nearly $5,000 interest on a $150 loan. Immigrants from Quebec to New Hampshire brought the model to the States when they founded La Caisse Populaire, Ste-Marie (now St. Mary’s Bank) in 1908. Both 
of these early credit unions had strong ties to Catholic parishes—indeed,
 most early credit unions were formed around specific groups associated with a workplace, trade, or faith.

Vancity announced it had divested its Enbridge holdings, citing Enbridge’s handling of a 2010 oil leak in Michigan as the disqualifier for its socially responsible criteria.

One hundred years later, credit unions are experiencing a surge in popularity, as people resist paying exorbitant fees to the very megabanks that were at the center of the 2008 economic meltdown. According to the National Credit Union Administration, credit unions in the United States added nearly 2.1 million new members in 2012, bringing total membership to a record 93.9 million.

Vancity is the largest
 credit union in Canada, with close to half a million members and 57 branches in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, Victoria, and Squamish.

The cooperative was established in 1946 by 14 Vancouverites who wanted to build an inclusive, community-based credit union that any resident of the city could join.

Recently, Vancity has adopted a triple bottom line “people-planet-profit” approach to success. In 2010 it became the first North American credit union to reach carbon neutrality. In 2011 it became the largest organization in Canada to guarantee a living wage for employees. That same year, net earnings from operations reached an all-time high of $90.7 million.

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In the spring of 2012, the environmental group Forest Ethics publicized 
the fact that Vancity had included Enbridge stocks in mutual funds
 labeled as socially responsible, and pressured the credit union to divest amid growing public opposition to 
the company’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project. At the time, Vancity issued a statement indicat
ing that if the project went ahead, it would re-evalute the investment. Four months later, Vancity announced it had divested its Enbridge holdings, citing a scathing report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board on Enbridge’s handling of a 2010 oil leak in Michigan as the disqualifier for its socially responsible criteria.

Vancity’s mandate is to distribute
 30 percent of its net earnings from operations to its members, in the 
form of dividends, and to the community at large, through grants and charitable donations. Since 1994, those dividends, grants, and donations have added up to $221 million.

In 2011, the credit union dedicated a record amount—$213 million—to what it calls impact lending. These loans 
are focused on five key areas: affordable housing, aboriginal communities, energy and the environment, local food, and social purpose real estate.

Its Small Growers Loan, for example, offers loans of up to $75,000 to help small-farm businesses get off the ground. The Circle Lending Loan offers microfinancing along with support groups, networking, and marketing events for people starting home-based businesses. All of the loans are focused on social enterprises.

Peter Hall, an associate professor in the urban studies program at Simon Fraser University, defines social enterprise as business with a mission—such as local food or job training—that earns revenue from goods and services (as well as through grants and donations) to serve that mission.

In 2009, Hall conducted a survey of social enterprises in British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Ontario. He says that most of the social enterprises have stuck to traditional models like cooperatives. In British Columbia, he notes, a “new generation” of social enterprise has taken root. These are particularly focused on employment, business, and training, Hall says. “I think a lot of the credit for that needs to go to Vancity and ENP.”

ENP stands for Enterprising Non-Profits. The Vancity Community Foundation, which operates separately from the credit union, serves as the central hub for this program, which pools resources from nine different funders to provide grants for organizations in the very early stages of development.

Derek Gent, executive director of Vancity Community Foundation, calls the ENP program a “first intake point” for enterprising nonprofits. Most of the grants are small and go toward feasibility studies to determine if the organization should start up at all.

Gent believes that it’s a mistake to measure success purely by how many businesses start up. “We think when
 a group comes to the realization that they aren’t a good fit for the community, that’s a positive outcome as well,” he says.

6 Ways to Fuel
the Cooperative Takeover
From now on, the global mantra for filling market gaps is going to be, "There's a co-op for that." But co-ops need customers, money, and training. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation?

Gent admits that Vancity had a “naive sense” that if groups were given money at the outset to plan, they would borrow money conventionally later when they were established. “We found there needed to be additional steps along the way,” he says, in the form of nontraditional loans.

Vancity’s relationship with Sole Food is a perfect example of this trajectory. In 2009 and 2010, it received $104,000 through various Vancity Community Foundation grants to get on its feet. In 2012, when the farm proved its business model and reached a point where it was ready to expand, 
it was able to secure a $175,000 loan from Vancity that allowed it to open four new sites.

The loan came from Vancity’s Resilient Capital Program, launched in 2011. The program provides capital for social enterprises and social-purpose businesses that aren’t ready for traditional loans, but which the credit union deems worthwhile investments, adding to the social, environmental, and economic well-being of their communities. By the end of 2012, the program had raised more than $12.8 million through deposits from individuals, foundations, unions, not-for-profits, and other organizations.

“The endgame for this is to be able to allocate more of the investment dollars into this kind of activity, as opposed 
to charitable dollars,” explains Gent. “There are more things happening out there, particularly amongst younger entrepreneurs who want to drive impact. The whole environment is just getting way more supportive.”

Colleen Kimmett wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Colleen is a freelance journalist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, who writes about food policy and local economies. She is a regular contributor to TheTyee.ca and various other Canadian publications.

Interested?

• Why Unions Are Going Into the Co-op Business
  The steelworkers deal that could turn the rust belt green.
• How Workers Laid Off by a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves
  When their boss tried to fire them, the workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupied the factory. Now they own it as a cooperative.
• The Economy: Under New Ownership
  How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.