Consumption
Business ownership models
Absentee, investor-owned businesses exist to extract wealth from communities for distant investors, undermining local economies, environments and polities. Many alternatives to this extractive business model exist, based in local ownership which keeps businesses rooted in and accountable to the communities in which they operate.
Business ownership models Actions
Start a worker-owned cooperative.
Start a worker-owned cooperative.
Worker-owned cooperatives are businesses that are owned and democratically run by those who work in them. Many worker-owned cooperatives provide for basic food and other needs of local communities, and keep wealth circulating locally rather than leaking out to distant investors and corporate owners.
Take action
- In the US, learn how to start a worker-owned cooperative with the Think Outside the Boss guide from the Sustainable Economies Law Center.
- Get technical assistance from a network of peer advisors for your worker-owned cooperative from the Co-op Clinic of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
- For a wealth of information and guidance on starting and running a worker-owned cooperative, see the Worker Cooperatives Toolbox by Community Wealth (US).
- In the UK, consult this comprehensive guide, How to set up a Workers' Coop, by Radical Routes.
Get inspired
- Using examples from several countries, the article Pandemic Crash Shows Worker Co-ops Are More Resilient Than Traditional Business, by Brian Van Slyke, shows how the structure of worker coops helps them remain stable throughout hard times like the COVID lockdowns and the 2008 financial crash.
- The Grain Shed in Spokane, Washington, US, is a worker-owned cooperative bakery and brewery, using 100% locally and organically grown, craft malted and fermented heirloom grain varieties and aspiring to help seed neighborhood-sized brewery-bakeries also using local grains throughout the city.
- Tara Books, a publisher based in Chennai, India, has been a worker-owned cooperative of artists, writers and designers since its founding in 2004.
Transition to a worker-owned cooperative.
Transition to a worker-owned cooperative.
An effective way to both save existing small businesses and boost economic democracy is to transition or convert them into worker-owned cooperatives.
Take action
- Get started with this concise guide - How to convert a business into a worker-owned cooperative - from Shareable.
- Check out this resource library for transitioning your business to a worker-owned cooperative from the Democracy at Work Institute.
- Dive deeper with Becoming Employee-Owned: A Small-Business Toolkit from the Workers to Owners Collaborative (US).
Start a food cooperative.
Start a food cooperative.
Unlike a conventional supermarket or privately-owned grocery, a consumer food cooperative is owned by those who shop there. Food cooperatives exist first and foremost to benefit the community and provide for genuine needs, not to generate profits for absentee investors or a wealthy owner class. Research shows that in comparison with conventional supermarkets, food cooperatives are better at supporting local farms and producers, spend much more of their revenue on local wages and benefits, and are more resilient.
Take action
- Get started with the guide How to Start a Food Co-op from the Cooperative Grocers' Information Network.
- The Food Co-ops Toolkit from SustainWeb UK offers guidance on creating a full-service grocery store.
- The How to Start a Food Coop manual from Democracy Collaborative is another excellent resource.
- Start a food coop based in your school, university, or workplace. SustainWeb UK offers guidelines specific to starting a food coop in a school, at work, at a university or college.
- Find a food co-op near you in the UK, US, and Australia & New Zealand.
- Start a small and successful agroecological consumer cooperative with the help of this workshop recording by SCOOP - The Sustainable Cooperative in Jersey.
Get inspired
- OrganicLea is a worker-owned food cooperative in the UK with a 12-acre growing site, a community café, a market stall and a vegetable box scheme, and runs courses in growing food and cooking.
- Rizoma Cooperative in Lisbon, Portugal is a multi-sector cooperative community grocery store that is working to help solve social and economic problems beyond just food consumption, aiming to eventually address agriculture, culture, services, and even housing.
- The Real Food Store is a community-owned grocery store in Exeter, UK, committed to forging strong relationships with sustainable local farmers and food enterprises, and to creating a robust local supply chain that reduces the distance between farm and table.
- Our Table is a regional co-op in Oregon, US, helping to create a resilient and interdependent local food culture. Read more in this YES! Magazine article, Local Food With a Big Twist: Super-Cooperative Takes Aim at the Corporate Food System.
- SCOOP - The Sustainable Cooperative on the island of Jersey is a consumer-led coop that includes a farm shop, an innovative production kitchen and an inclusive cultural and educational program.
- Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad is a network of family farms and small cooperatives working with carefully selected customers across Europe, based on the principles of mutual respect, solidarity and sustainability.
Farm cooperatively.
Farm cooperatively.
Just as with worker-owned cooperatives in other sectors, banding together with others in a co-op arrangement also has much promise for farmers compared to trying to go it alone or having a conventional hierarchical ownership setup.
Take action
- Check out The Greenhorns' Cooperative Farming Guidebook for various approaches, methods and resources for farming together with others, cooperatively.
Get inspired
- Diggers' Mirth Collective Farm in Vermont, US, is a five person collectively worker-owned and operated farm growing a variety of organic vegetables and selling to local grocery stores, restaurants, and other food-distributors.
- Berry Farmers Break Free From Big Agriculture, by Lynsi Burton in YES! Magaizine, tells the story of Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, an organic cooperative started by a group of farmworkers in the Pacific Northwest of the US that guarantees fair wages and healthy working conditions while preserving indigenous heritage.
Voices from the field
- On Local Futures' podcast, Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance explains the multiple social, economic and environmental benefits of local business ownership and community-scaled financial institutions in Why Local Ownership Matters.
- An Introduction to Worker Cooperatives for Farmers and Start Ups, a recording of a webinar by the Democracy at Work Institute explores examples of how the worker cooperative model is being used to share land and other resources to enable farmers to overcome barriers to entry and share land and labor, and explains the basics of worker cooperative start-ups.
- Making Local Food Work: OrganicLea, a video by Sustain, UK profiles the work of OrganicLea, a worker-owned food cooperative with a 12-acre growing site, a community café, a market stall and a vegetable box scheme, as wells as food growing and cooking courses.
- This workshop recording - part of Local Futures' World Localization Day 2021 partner events - explores the methodologies used to set up a small and successful agroecological food business on the island of Jersey by the co-founders of the Sustainable Cooperative (SCOOP).
- Local Futures' podcast episode, More than Just Vegetables covers the inspiring story of the Copenhagen Food Coop, a member-owned alternative to mainstream grocery stores which allows people to not only have regular access to fresh local food, but also to make decisions about what foods the coop purchases and how the coop is run.
Policy
The Sustainable Economies Law Center's Worker Coop City Policies provides "some helpful resources for jump starting local policy campaigns to promote and remove barriers to worker-owned businesses."
Resources
- This Cooperatives Overview from the Democracy Collaborative, US, shares information on types of coops, their benefits to communities, support organizations, models, best practices, and related articles.
- Why Independent Matters, a study by the Institute for Local Self Reliance, is "a roundup of the important findings that are putting numbers to the harms of bigness and the benefits of local ownership, and that policymakers can use to craft better laws, business owners can use to rally support, and people can use to organize their communities."
- The article Pandemic Crash Shows Worker Co-ops Are More Resilient Than Traditional Business by Truthout predicts an upcoming boom in worker cooperatives as a way of building resilience through uncertain economic times.
- Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants, a book by Jon Steinman, shows how "co-ops spur the creation of local food-based economies and enhance low-income food access."
- The article Co-op Grocery: A Social Justice Movement by New Venture Advisors, shares data on how food co-ops boost sales of locally-made products and often support a vast network of small-scale local growers.
- Community Food Co-ops Are Thriving During the Pandemic, by Lela Nargi in Civil Eats, demonstrates how, "compared to supermarkets with empty shelves and long lines, co-ops' long-term focus on building resilient foodsheds is paying off."
- 20 Food Cooperatives Building Resilient Communities, by Food Tank, shows that "Food co-ops do 2.5 times more business with local farms and producers than conventional grocers and spend 19 percent of their revenue on local wages and benefits."
- The Co-op Farming Model Might Help Save America’s Small Farms explores how, "Amid a nationwide rise in worker-owned businesses of all types, small farms across the country are foregoing traditional farm ownership and reaping the benefits of cooperative farming."