“Is an average of about 120 new co-op formations annually going to change the system and overthrow capital supremacy?”

“I firmly doubt co-ops will ever just quietly replace the capitalist economy, business by business, over time. Ain’t gonna happen.”

“OK, I guess I would agree with that.”

“I know of a global foundation that spent the last three years exploring shared ownership (including co-ops) in the U.S. They simply could not find enough developed infrastructure to deploy the $10 million-plus checks they were willing to write.

So you know what will change the status quo? It will be the oncoming, multiple crises of climate, pandemic and their economic fallout that’s gonna goose the system hard.”

“That makes sense to me, I mean, we know that historically, co-ops and crises have always gone together.”

“We need to ask ourselves: do we believe in our own model? Doesn’t it seem clear that with co-ops and other forms of shared governance and equity we have a strategic advantage over the dying economy?

Can we not argue for the solidarity economy generally as a solution to this country’s terrible racial wealth gaps?”

“At this newsletter, we’re aware that actually lots of capital outside our ecosystems is trying to come in.”

“Yes, and sometimes on compromising terms for the integrity of the model. You take philanthropy and impact investing. The easy thing for them to do is to just cherry-pick the system for individual projects rather than fund the components for scaling. We need to know when to walk away from philanthropy — i.e., when it stops working for our programs.”

Sure, happy to offer a few thoughts.

You know, what I’ve found over and over with books I’ve written is the way, once I’m done and looking back, then I start to realize what might have actually been the most important themes.

And one of those things that really came up for me is the nature of the generational divide. This deep sense of such a tremendous legacy in the cooperative movement, not just aspirationally but practically. Part of that was very personal for me, as I mention at the beginning of the book, learning about my own family history and how much my family’s life and progress was shaped by this movement.

Since then I’ve started working on building those connections. Writing the book, I was mostly focused on the new generation coming into the co-op movement. I had made some efforts to bridge that divide, and to put that older generation into contact with the new generation.

When the book came out, I organized a conference called the Colorado Shared Ownership Summit, trying to bring together big Colorado co-ops with smaller new ones. And it was really hard. I had to pull strings to get anyone from the credit union sector to come. And we had the president of the NCBA. And it was even the day that [co-op champion] Jared Polis was elected governor and did a video for us.

But still, it was very hard to get established co-ops to care about other new co-ops in their state. And that was really humbling. But I’m continuing that work, particularly with Start.coop, an accelerator for new co-ops that I co-founded with Greg Brodsky. Greg is a tremendous co-op innovator and the son of CCA Global founder Howard Brodsky, a towering leader in the global co-op movement, who was my main partner on the Summit in Colorado.

I really wanted to work with Greg with that legacy in mind, so that this could be a site where we can bring together the generations. Start.coop is an accelerator for new co-ops, structured so that we can bring in the older generation of cooperators as funders and mentors of the new generation. We’re very much in the midst of trying to make that a reality.

A second piece is the importance of policy. Most of the major cooperative sectors in the United States — electric co-ops, agriculture, and credit unions — all have specific, tailored federal policy structures that grant them access to appropriate financing. These have all been incredibly successful economic development programs, but still co-op financing remains contained in just a few narrow sectors and industries. This makes it very hard for the co-op movement to address emerging social challenges creatively.

Since writing the book, I’ve spent time with the legacy of Louis Kelso who was an innovator not so much in the co-op world but in the concept of an ESOP. In addition to the fact that he was from Colorado and got his degrees from my university, he managed to secure a fairly modest tweak to federal law in a way that opened the floodgates to enabling 14 million people to co-own their employers. In addition to that modest tweak, he had an ambitious vision of spreading shared ownership across the economy — an ambition that I think we desperately need.

For several years now, I’ve been arguing that the biggest shortcoming of cooperative policy has been that it’s been too siloed. We created policy for credit unions and for electric co-ops, but none of that helps with the problems that a lot of people are facing today because those policies are too restrictive.

We need to open the door for any kind of cooperative to operate on a reasonable footing in the economy. One thing that I’m very excited about right now is the bill that was just introduced by one of my senators, John Hickenlooper, the Capital for Cooperatives Act. It is the first major piece of legislation I can remember that actually opens the door at the federal level for financing for any kind of cooperative, at least any kind that the SBA can support. It could be an incredibly powerful step in the right direction.

Well it started with a conversation with Brett, who comes from the ESOP world. After starting his show, the EO podcast, he began to run into more people involved with other kinds of employee ownership — especially worker cooperatives, also employee ownership trusts — and he got super excited about that.

He realized he couldn’t handle all the conversations that he wanted himself, and since he lacked a co-op background, maybe he wasn’t the best person to lead those conversations. So eventually we met and we clicked. Next I was on his show, we stayed in touch, and then he recruited me to start up a co-op podcast.

The co-op model is one we’re all sold on but we want to bring it to people who don’t get it yet, so to speak. People who are one degree removed from co-ops — that could be their customers, their investors, policy makers, and so on. Likewise with people from credit unions, consumer co-ops or rural electric co-ops who have a kind of co-op connection but don’t understand worker co-ops.

Definitely! I’m a 20-plus year co-op veteran but I am learning new things in each of these podcast conversations. So maybe not every episode but pretty often there’ll be something new for experienced cooperators too.

Well, a lot of conversation lately is about conversions, keeping businesses afloat who might otherwise shut their door by converting them to worker-owned. People are talking about how worker co-ops address wages and income inequality. Then there’s co-ops as a source of strategic business innovation — the kind of thing the Obran cooperative in Baltimore is working on. (Joseph Cureton of Obran is one of our first guests.)

Then there’s also co-ops as a place to stretch your democratic muscles. What if your experience at work was not that of a cog in a wheel but a place where you get a taste of democracy and get to practice it, too, in addition to egalitarian pay scales and all that!