No, I grew up in Northern Virginia. I've been here for a little over seven years, seven and a half years.

I was on a bike tour in the summer of 2013, looking at co-ops. That was the year that Detroit filed for bankruptcy, and we biked through Detroit and I remember it was a very kind of surreal experience. The downtown was quiet. It really inspired me to learn about the history of Detroit, and I was so infatuated with the city I moved here, three months later.

Yeah, and while the downtown is really expensive to live in, there’s also lots of wonderful free public spaces.

But yes, there are also the driving forces of neoliberalism, projects that repeatedly fall short of their intentions, even from back in the 1980s. The M-1 rail line, for example, now called the QLine. It was meant to be a connector from the downtown to the suburbs. But it’s only three miles long, just a little people-mover trolley that runs slower than any other form of transportation. So it’s severely underused, just a total failure.

Then there’s the Little Caesars arena, where the Pistons play now. It was supposed to create new neighborhood districts but it’s just empty surface parking lots. These projects that claim to be big game changers for Detroit — they usually fall short.

On the other hand, there are some really creative projects happening. And this is where worker co-ops and more worker ownership comes in.

For a long time, the city of Detroit did not have a centralized department looking at good neighborhood development. So in that absence, we had the rise of a lot of strong neighborhood groups, including community development corporations (CDCs), each focusing on a specific corridor.

These are the folks that we at the DCWF are working with. The idea is to incorporate co-op business development with place-based needs, especially in these areas which used to be really lively for Black-owned businesses. Places like the Avenue of Fashion, back before malls existed.

So what we’re saying is: let’s make sure that the older businesses which have somehow made it through to this point can keep going while we introduce co-op ownership to the new businesses as well.

Definitely small. I think C2BE (the Center for Community-Based Enterprise) is our best-known co-op group. They also do ESOP work and I think sometimes work outside of Michigan. And there are a couple of smaller groups, including Grace In Action, a community organization working on a model similar to the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn. In terms of co-op activists, you could probably get us all around one big table — 10 people, maybe 15.

But until DCWF showed up, there wasn’t a good option for financing — so that’s been a game changer.

We became a non-profit in 2017. We were more or less incubated by Seed Commons. We met with Brendan Martin and the team and they told us, if you can get something going in Detroit, we can help you. At first, there really weren’t many co-ops here looking for funding so we realized we needed to move toward educating. After several years of work, now we have our annual co-op incubator program.

It’s a completely free, 13-week, place-based intensive worker cooperative business development program. It’s designed to guide participants from the ideation phase of their business to a soft launch.

We had already had the experience of running a 15-week pilot academy in August 2019 for our partner group Grace In Action. So we wanted to create our own in-house program for people with a serious interest in starting up something.

This time, we wanted to have some startups up and going right out of the gate. We partnered with the North End Christian Community Development Corporation and the Detroit Justice Center. They did the work to identify the types of businesses people wanted in that area. And they helped bring together people with the right skills.

We got 25 applicants for this first cohort in April, ending up with a group of 15, mostly folks from the North End.

It was interesting. The cohort naturally broke into three groups: a garden center, a beauty supply shop, a café. We got a fantastic group of people who were super serious about this and also had business experience.

And by the time the incubator ended, all of them had a business entity! They became Stuffed Detroit Café, Everything Beautiful Beauty Supply, and the Black Bottom Garden Center.

It was one of our best events ever — we raised about four grand and split it among the three groups. One of them is not actually a co-op, simply because her team didn’t work out. But that’s fine — it’s a new Black woman-owned business in Detroit. So now they’re all up and running.

Well none of these three need loans quite yet, but as an example, we just made a loan to Spoons Consultancy, a Black women-run and staffed creative consulting firm that specializes in biz dev strategy, brand launches, and social campaigns. We have a loan investment goal for Detroit and part of the point of the incubator is to get more groups loan-ready.

But these startup teams are very, very savvy—and they don’t feel like they need loans yet. You do as much as you can and then you reach the point where you need some capital.

It’s ambitious — $5 million by 2025. If we get some larger projects, then I think that’s totally attainable. So far, we’ve financed a little over $90,000, so fairly small, in the micro space. But we’re working on projects that need real estate or business conversions, so that’s when we start to go higher.

Yes, and running through mid-December. This academy will be focused on the East Side, as part of our strategy to go neighborhood by neighborhood.

We are working on a new co-op conversion program called Worker Owned Detroit. And this year we have the budget to hire someone, which is really a game changer for us, given there’s so much we want to do. So now we’ve got one person working on education and the incubator and another on conversions, while my role as executive director is to support them and manage our current loans.

Detroit, as you know, is very spread out. That’s one factor. And in many of our neighborhoods, there’s also a cultural memory of their identities, what used to be there, the skills in the neighborhood. I think we connect with that. Detroit is made up of mostly Black neighborhoods but you also have a really strong Latino population in southwest Detroit which is quite different from the rest of the city. You have the Hamtramck area which is incredibly diverse. I think co-ops are very appealing to these areas with local businesses that are still reflective of their neighborhood culture and their needs.

We have a really strong history of communities working together, collaborating. It’s like everybody here wants to start a community house or a community center.

And it’s great to know that we actually have lots of co-op activity and small co-ops that are just not quite mature enough to show up in the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives’s census. But they’re out there.

We’re just trying to “visibilize” what’s been invisible for a long time. And that’s very exciting.