Editor’s Note

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkWe Have Good News to Share

We’re at the six-month mark with Ownership Matters, time to offer our wonderful subscribers an update we think will be of interest.

First, a few stats. Given that we are a bit specialized in our subject matter, we have a first goal of 1,000 subscribers and we are well underway toward getting there. Our readers are a great mix of social entrepreneurs, co-op folks, business advisors, financial folks, and movement people.

We are also eager to expand the number of editorial voices here and we’ve done that. As you’ll see from our new masthead, we have added three people to our staff with this issue:

• Júlia Martins Rodrigues as a new Contributing Editor;
• Daniel Fireside, also as a new Contributing Editor; and
• Zoe Crim, our new Editorial Assistant

For the New Year, watch for an announcement about a new series of monthly events for you, our readers. These online conversations will be a chance to engage with our editors as they interview someone doing great work around employee ownership and talking about how they do it.

We also want to use them to interact with you — to get your feedback on the newsletter and your ideas for future articles and coverage.

Happy holidays . . . and more to come!  

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkSome Forgotten U.S. Labor and Cooperative History

A Conversation with Catholic Charities USA’s Brian Corbin

Brian Corbin is Executive Vice President, Member Services, with Catholic Charities USA, and served as the Director of Catholic Charities, Social Action and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in the Diocese of Youngstown, Ohio from 1987 to 2014. He is also an adjunct professor with the DeVille School of Business at Walsh University, has done graduate work on political economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves as a board director of the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board Program (EFSP).

Commentary

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkTeach a Man to Fish . . . in Cooperation

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

Zurich, Switzerland: It is eight minutes to eleven o’clock, as I stand in front of a square where the morning sun still shines on the striped tents of the large marketplace behind Oerlikon Railway Station, the bright orange logo of COOP Group right next to it.

This weekly market, a long-standing tradition in Zurich, has top-quality goods for sale directly from producers, mostly regional organic farmers, which draw a crowd of health-minded consumers. A stand belonging to a family of fishermen stood out to me there. Wild Alaskan salmon is sold in Switzerland through the efforts of a small group who travel yearly to North America to source their harvest. A devoted crowd of customers was waiting in front of their tent to add their names to the waiting list. The desire for immaculate food — or something of the sort — without plastic or GMO fish feed, combined with a sense of closeness to the people providing their food, probably contribute to the impressive size of that list.

Neighboring the farmer’s market, over 150 years of Swiss cooperative enterprise is on display at one of the thousands of retail outlets of the COOP Group, which began as a small consumer cooperative and became an international retail and wholesale cooperative business with the largest selection of organic-grade fish and seafood. The strong presence of cooperative markets extends across the country, from large cities such as Zurich to small centers such as Frutigen, with an abundance of locally produced goods.

Unique structures built around a common core. Both markets share the same economic environment, identifying and evaluating potential alternatives in order to confront modern society's social, technical, and environmental challenges. Both sum up — in a small local initiative and in an international enterprise — the perspective of different models of entrepreneurship focused on creating a sustainable economy. They embody new perspectives on doing business when that can no longer mean solely making a profit.

The scene I saw in Zurich is a small but significant sample of a more robust movement that has been quietly growing around the world over centuries. Cooperation has left its traces throughout history and was a sine qua non for the advancement of humanity, rooted in ancient social experiences. The building blocks of cooperativism are the continuous collection of cross-cultural and cross-generation cases of collaboration. This timeless social standard of survival quietly evolved throughout the ages and gave witness to the unravelling and reinventing of various political, cultural, and social forces. Cultures of cooperation strengthened and expanded through a non-linear but steady path up to the present day, with plenty of examples among existing cooperatives of solid socio-economic performance.

Since the advent of modern cooperatives in the late 1700s, recurring economic crises, including the current COVID-19 meltdown, have called forth an upsurge of cooperation and solidarity as vigorous tools to fight back against capitalism’s precarity, subvert the excessive focus on individual progress, and recover community wellness and economic sustainability. Even though a revolutionary break in our times has been largely dismissed, the winds of change are whispering of an organic shift towards a values-driven system worldwide. One of the most dramatic examples of the latter is the “great resignation” in the U.S., with a historic number of workers quitting their jobs amongst multiple uncoordinated post-pandemic strikes, calling for better work conditions and benefits.

Commentary

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkAre the Green Bay Packers Some Kind of Co‑op?

Thoughts on the Company’s Latest Issue of Shares

Elias Crim

“Have you seen this?”, my friend Greg Brodsky over at Start.coop asked me in a recent email. He was referring to the online stock sale the Green Bay Packers hosted on Nov. 16.

Greg was shaking his head at the teams’ campaign to raise $90 million — for new video boards and “concourse improvements” at Lambeau Field. (The NFL rules require that any funds raised from stock sales — and only one NFL team can offer those must be used for stadium projects which are “beneficial to fans.”)

“They’re making people think they’re buying into some kind of a co‑op!” he added in amused disbelief. After looking at the prospectus, I had to agree. (If you check out the traditional seven cooperative principles, it’s pretty clear the Packer organization does not qualify.)

This is the sixth, ahem, stock sale in the Packers’ 102-year history. The first three sales — 1923, 1935, 1950 — were about “survival of the organization,” according to Packers prez Mark Murphy. Given the economics of the times, you could also call them legit crowdfunding campaigns — even appealing to literal crowds in the stands to help the team stay in business.

The latter three sales, Murphy acknowledges, “were really about Lambeau Field.” I would argue the latter three are also about the rise of sports marketing and extractive retail real estate. Which means Lambeau Field is not only a sacred shrine (like Wrigley Field in Chicago) but will soon become another Disney-like cash register for the operators and owners of the concessions there — but not for the holders of microscopic equity stakes.

Books

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkLetting Go of the Top-Down Approach to Philanthropy

Participation: it’s a word that captures much of the dynamic around both economic democracy and shared ownership.

As the authors of Letting Go make clear, it requires that those with the power (in this case, the focus is on professionals in philanthropy and impact investing) think a new, often unthinkable thought: to do the most good, you’ll have to give up control.

Partly inspired by the example of the Boston Ujima Project, Ben Wrobel (Village Capital) and Meg Massey explain that the key term here is participatory funding (or PF) — the idea that the best way for donors and funders to impact the lives of a community or a neighborhood is to turn over financial decision-making power to the people who live there.

The authors believe we need to do two things at the same time: reform philanthropy and rebuild democracy. One of the tools which is somewhat interchangeable between these two goals is that of participatory budgeting, a civic mechanism invented in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the 1980s and utilized today in more than 7,000 municipalities today (including New York City and Chicago).

Some key points:

• Philanthropy plays such a large role in public affairs because public institutions around the world today are failing to meet basic needs.
• The style of philanthropy most commonly found today is “market-based,” whereby foundations are run on principles of commercial business. (A popular variation: “moneyball philanthropy” (borrowing from the book about winning baseball teams) that claims donations should go to the organizations with the best-looking empirical data.
• The vast majority of impact funds (in an impact investing market soon approaching $1 trillion) have operating models that closely mimic those of traditional investment firms, which are notoriously insular, secretive, and unaccountable to anyone besides shareholders.
• The slogan of the disability rights movement — ”nothing about us without us” — has become a rallying cry for greater participation everywhere.
• PF shifts decision-making power to people with lived experience of the problem at hand . . . . The funder gives a voice to people who don’t usually get a say in the decision, voluntarily letting go of power in the process.
• The inside argument for PF: shifting decision-making power will result in better decisions, tapping into lived experience and perspectives beyond the ivory tower. (In other words, an argument for efficacy.)
• The outside argument for PF: the moral and ethical obligations that come with a commitment to justice dictate this kind of approach. (In other words, an argument for equity.)