Well, I would say the work is growing but that also brings some questions. Where we are right now is really thinking about scale and growth without loss of core values, or the DNA that I think has helped us be successful to date.

So we have incubated individual co‑ops, as well as our industrial cooperative network with the Carolina Textile District. And now we’re looking to expand cooperativism within our industrial ecosystem — to include shared cooperative ownership of land and housing, and then looking more at social cooperatives.

So I would say that is kind of where we are right now, in terms of new work we’re doing. And then in terms of growing the co‑ops we have, it’s about really centering and rooting those very deeply within and around the circular green economy — and partnering with larger brands.

So how do you partner with folks that already have a bit of a corner on the market but they want to green their product offerings? We can both green them and do them as worker cooperatives as well. So I would say that’s one direction we have.

And then I do think we’re looking at these questions of what our work will look like in ten years. And how do we build the structures right now to allow the work to be thriving in another ten years?

So everything is part of the Industrial Commons. There’s Capital for the Commons, which is our internal loan fund, which serves our own enterprises. And then we have Land for the Commons. So these are all separate LLCs.

But there is one that we were putting on hold where we said, Oh, let’s not do this, because we have too much on our plates. But the universe said otherwise. And so we have now like 40 acres of land and development for industrial, small-scale micro-manufacturing, and also for what we would call workforce housing. But we will be using cooperative models, and we’re trying to figure out what those are. We’re doing a lot of research on what that model will be.

Yes, we’re deciding which flavor of housing co‑ops, that’s a good way to put it. There are a lot of flavors of housing co‑ops.

I think it depends on how you define that. We picked up some things from creating our “learning journey” white paper last year, written by Margaret Lund. It looked at co‑op ecosystems in Quebec, Mondragon, and the Emilia Romagna region — including social co‑ops.

I think one thing we saw in the Italian model during the pandemic is the importance of the spaces they use. They’re not housing spaces, they’re not workspaces — they use spaces that serve a social need.

And in the case of our work, that’s really space for kids. So that’s how we’re organizing all our outreach. It’s through the art community, and it will double as childcare. Our art space is part of our membership vision, it’s not just part of an after school program. There’s decision making and governance involved.

I think that we’re kind of very loosely calling those social cooperatives. And I think that was one of the conversations we took up. But we’re really inspired by our friends up the mountain at Poder Emma that have a strong early childhood co‑op network, doing a lot of care for children in their homes and also employing women in their homes.

So it’s not housing, it’s not business, it’s something else. So we put those projects in our social co‑op capital bucket, but I’m sure there are other people out there doing it much better and at a much larger scale than we are.

And on the question of replicating ecosystems, I think there are certainly these shared learnings. Poder Emma is very strong in housing and the social cooperatives. I feel like our strength is really around business and industry cooperatives. So we’re really looking to learn a lot from them around how they’re organizing those spaces. We have a very structured exchange of learning. And we do a lot of training on the back end together.

No, they’re their own entity, part of something called Colaborativa la Milpa, a non-profit. And we just work together because we said to them, you need this training, and we need this other training. So we just had a lot of shared needs and we created a new project for collaboration called the Power of the Commons which brings us together in a rich shared environment.

Yes, that would be our hope. I think for startup capital, there’s an interesting kind of balance. If you can get free money, and there’s some free money out there, then you think, Let’s take the free money.

But then once these businesses start to create jobs where people are no longer in poverty, our cooperative enterprises no longer qualify for grant funds. Likewise, we need the enterprises to be self-sustaining and run as good businesses!

In a way, yes. Because all of our cooperatives have a service agreement with The Industrial Commons’ 501(c)(3). They each have a loan, so they’re paying it back. But then there’s a third mechanism where 3% of their profits, once they’re able, will go back into the account as well. So there’s kind of three layers of income back to TIC.

We are now in official communication with the folks in Mondragon around receiving some support from them. But you know, while there’s this desire to build meta systems, I think it’s local economies which are going to get us out of this mess. I think the question is, if you can just organize your local economy, that’s tens of thousands of people.

So I’d say, instead of building something bigger, let’s just build something deeper. If we can just organize ten percent of the people in our region, that’s more than anybody else has organized. Even three percent of the people of our regions. I think we need to keep our heads down and do what’s right in front of us versus trying to build some meta-system.

Yeah, I think there’s a difference between scale versus impact. And systems grow, but then they reach their edges, when they often become less functional. I think that’s where you create another system that’s a sister system. It’s about deepening the impacts, building resiliency, all the ways in which you can deepen the work without making the assumption it has to keep getting bigger and bigger.

So I think there is something about how ecosystems are interconnected. But there’s also a level of decentralization that allows them to be more resilient too.

I think that’s really interesting, because we talk a lot to people that are in coal country in West Virginia. There are just some industries you don’t want to revitalize and for good reasons.

Here we’re in an industry where the infrastructure lends itself to revitalization and participation and a newer, better triple bottom line economy. I see some infrastructure that doesn’t do that.

So there is a uniqueness to where we are. One of the huge problems is the 12% of global carbon emissions coming from the textile industry. And it’s a water heavy industry. But now there’s this sweet moment we’re in where we have an industry ripe for revitalization, for a green solution and infrastructure that is still concentrated in our region. That can lend itself to rebuilding out this green new economy from a textile takeback perspective and kind of can lead the model of circularity. Sometimes I don’t realize how much we have going for us.

The other aspect of scale is accessing more markets, even though you might have a very regional identity. Sometimes you can scale into new markets and with a consumer advantage.

Everybody’s socks are made right here. Everybody’s yarn is made right here. And we have already built out some of these supply chains that are both green and employee owned with 1,200 or 1,300 workers in them.

So this one project we’re doing with SmartWool: we can take everybody’s socks back in order to sew and process those socks into fabric in a worker cooperative. The fabric can all be made in a 100% employee-owned company, all the waste accumulation can be done by an employee-owned company. And you can build that product right back within 75 miles of here. So it’s a greening of the economy and a humanizing of it at the same time. And it’s done in a very tight footprint and yet the product can be shipped all over the world.

When you look at our strategic plans, we already have an internal school with all our staff. And I think that’s probably my roots. Because my real training is as a teacher.

Just studying figures in adult education like Paulo Freire and then having the influence of the Highlander Education Center, the Black Mountain School — all those folk schools that really changed the face of organizing is where we have drawn inspiration.

So I think also of our commitment to all our leadership and co‑op workers — they are coming from frontline workers. And we’re in a very red part of the country, so we’re not all a bunch of liberals here.

But education is a real necessity because it’s developing consciousness. If you have a real intention to work across race and class, you have to give people the tools and the language. So we naturally wanted to infuse a lot of education from the beginning.

The outcome of all that is we’ve kind of developed our own curriculum that we use. We’ve shared that curriculum with the other ecosystems and now some of our training. We do have programs in the elementary schools, and particularly our art program, we work with 250 elementary school students every month.

And we now have a curriculum base called Hometown Walkabout, which is more of our diversity work, but we don’t pull apart diversity work and economic justice work. It’s now in one of the public high schools. We’re trying to push that curriculum down to a younger age because then you’re not trying to unlearn behaviors, you’re setting higher expectations for younger people.