Correct. And along the way I read about cooperatives. And when I read about the Mondragon cooperatives in particular, I thought, this is what we need to do. Because if you don’t change the economy, you don’t really change the basis of the society.

So I started looking around for examples of things that change the economy and ran across a book about the Mondragon cooperatives. I read that and said, that’s it, that brings it all together. An economic basis for teaching people how to run a society democratically. And I started looking around for other people who were interested in that.

We formed a study group and wondered why there were more successful networks of cooperatives in other parts of the world than in the U.S. We learned a great deal and then we also learned a lot through making our own mistakes. For instance, with our first co-op, we did a really good job training the founders how to manage the co-op, but we didn’t teach them how to teach the next generation.

So we changed the recruitment process for the next cooperative where we only chose, I’d say, three quarters of the people who we thought we needed for the co-op so that we could help those folks recruit the last few people and train them. So it became a process of not just training people in things but training them well enough that they could adapt it to their own culture and keep carrying on.

We seemed to attract people who already knew about the co-op movement, which is not necessarily what we wanted. We wanted to recruit new people into the cooperative movement.

Later on, we decided first on the neighborhood we wanted to develop in before we recruited people — instead of just recruiting people and then picking the neighborhood, which left us with a very unfocused group. So we had a mission to make it a much more diverse group from the beginning.

Yeah, we wanted our cooperative members to be part of that local community. Although we didn’t discriminate against people if they came from further away.

Sure. I come from a background where there was a lot of bias against even the concept of leadership, like it’s a negative thing. Because if you have leaders, you have other people that are followers, we didn’t want to have that.

And I came to feel over time that that was a very toxic thing on the left and among progressive organizations, that in fact we need leadership, and part of the role of a democratic leader is to make other people into leaders.

We learned that the association needed to provide some education, particularly around worker ownership. When a business is new and has the greatest need for labor and fast growth, it tends to throw people into the work at the cash register or in front of the ovens. There’s not much time to develop the larger skills.

So we started to put on orientation sessions — six different ones that we provide at the association level for anyone hired at any of the individual co-ops. And we added one that was called democratic participation in leadership so that we could talk to people about what their pre-hire views on leadership were. We ask them the question, what should leadership look like in a co-op context? And how do we build towards that?

I think so. We do have ways that we try to institutionalize a certain amount of shared leadership. So one of the innovations we came along with is called the collective evaluation committee. We’ve had committees that evaluate individual members, but we didn’t have a committee responsible for identifying when people are talking about an issue but no one’s addressing it.

And that also became an opportunity for us to identify people with potential for leadership and find a way to mentor them to take on more leadership. These days, when we start a bakery, we recruit people to be the founders only four months before opening. And our candidacy process is six to seven months. So they’re not even owners when the store opens.

One of the functions of that collective evaluation committee is for us to connect with new people. I would sit on that committee and at first I might say when an issue comes up, Oh this is what I would do. Then the next time, I would say, well, these are some questions I would ask. So I get more and more indirect, urging them to think through things. That was a really important innovation for us. Since we’re all equal, everyone’s just waiting for someone else to actually bring up difficulties. And you need to have some support for people to bring the difficult things up.

Sure, we have six bakeries or bakery pizzerias, and we now also have a construction co-op and a landscaping/design-build co-op. And I’m part of the ninth co-op, which is a technical assistance cooperative. We’re the bookkeepers, the trainers, the attorneys, that kind of thing.

It’s really not about what personality people bring beforehand. Although I would say that there’s a reason why bakeries often work as co-ops because they tend to attract people who naturally like to take care of other people.

Our general analysis from studying efforts to replicate the success of the Mondragon cooperatives — which were factory cooperatives, because that’s what they had in the Basque region. But those developed under very special circumstances. Then when they were no longer embargoed in Spain, they were competing against General Electric and Westinghouse and that was a recipe for eventual failure. So we looked at where we thought co-ops did the best.

We said, what if we don’t have to compete based on capital but instead on high skilled labor? So we thought, let’s find jobs that involve high skilled labor because that is a competitive advantage. And co-ops tend to perform best and retain their workers when they offer people the most room to grow in their life.

I think there’s a framework but we’re still figuring it out. We like to create new problems for ourselves. And part of our model is to let each co-op experiment enough that they’re able to take those innovations and share them with the other co-ops. So we try to keep it loose, we try to keep it as still a learning process for everyone.

But in terms of starting up a co-op, we have certain things that we think need to be in place for a co-op to succeed — in terms of committees, structures, training and things like that. We put those things in place, but we also say to everyone, we’re training you to be the owners, and then you’re going to take over and make a decision.

So we’re giving you a structure that we have found succeeds over time. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the right one for your culture. And we expect you to adapt, and we hope that you’ll share your adaptations with other people.

Yeah, we think of ourselves as an upside down franchise, where instead of shared essential services that control the people they’re supposed to serve, we turn it on its head. We have shared central services but without central controls. It’s not so much a re-invention as maybe taking franchises back to the roots, or combining a democratic co-op with a franchise model.

I would say, to a small extent — we do own a stake in our latest two bakeries but that was because we founded them right after the 2008 collapse. We used to be able to put in a small amount of money as equity and then just pay our bakers to go train their folks to bring in our business team to set up their systems.

But after that crisis, these bakeries wanted to make sure that there was a certain amount of equity in the existing business to leverage the bank loan to get it going. We had to create a type of member ownership that was just for the cooperative association. But realistically, we don’t use that for anything.

So we’re not trying to be a holding company for them. We’re just trying to help them get going, like by holding the initial leases for them since they are early-stage businesses.

Yeah, we certainly look at how we might combine parts of the same supply chain, eventually making our own cheese or things like that. But really, our analysis is all about how you create the most jobs and the most impact. Eventually, we would like to have a comprehensive economy, buying and selling to each other, a bioregional economy.

But when we look at the next business to start, where it’s going to be and what kind of line of business it is, we’re really thinking more of the local economy and the ecology for building a cooperative system.