The Evergreen cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio was the story everyone wanted to hear at the opening session on Saturday Aug. 7, 2010 of the U.S. Federation for Worker Cooperatives conference in Berkeley. 

Several video cameras - including PBS -- were rolling at the front of Krutch Theater as Ted Howard, executive director of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, which helped to organize the cooperatives and the strategy along with the late John Logue founder of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, spoke to an inspired audience of 270 worker cooperators from all over the U.S. and part of Canada.  Also speaking was Medrick Addison, operations manager at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry.

In order to compete in a corporations-dominated economy, worker cooperatives need millions of dollars to finance large-scale businesses in manufacturing and production.

"That's the hole in the cooperative movement which there needs to be some infrastructure for," said Michael Leung, of Somerville, MA, who last year earned a doctorate in Physics from Princeton University. "I don't personally see a way where co-ops have the mechanism for large-scale growth."

At the National Conference of Democratic Workplaces, two workshops focused on the challenges of raising capital for worker cooperatives. The first workshop presented a series of case studies of innovative strategies for raising capital. In the second workshop "Building Community Wealth," lenders and foundations with a track record of investing in worker cooperatives described their mission.