Jim Johnson and John McNamara, two of the co-founders of the Democracy At Work Network (DAWN), joined our monthly livestream to share the history of this worker co-op peer support network that was conceived, built, and run by worker-owners across the US. DAWN provided training for worker-owners to become peer-advisors and help shepherd fledgling worker co-ops into existence. Despite its successful operation and low-overhead, the USFWC decided to abruptly end funding for the group in 2018. Jim and John walk us through the details of how DAWN functioned in its heyday, and some of the lessons they took away from both its successes and its eventual shuttering.
Transcript
John McNamara: Yeah, I really don't feel worthy, but-
Josh Davis: Oh, you're very worthy, John.
Jim Johnson: We're live.
Josh Davis: Yes we are. We are live once more with GEO Live, number 18. We're here this month - a very special treat for us - we have two guests" John McNamara from the Northwest Cooperative Development Center currently, and Jim Johnson, an all round co-op developer with more than one group, I think. And they're going to give us a history of the Democracy at Work Network, which they were both co-founders of. So I will just turn it over to you guys. Take it away.
Jim Johnson: All right. Thanks. Greetings, everybody. I have no idea how many people are watching us, but hopefully somebody is watching us.
Josh Davis: We've got 14 right now.
Jim Johnson: Terrific. Well, welcome to everybody. We're going to start off with at least a few slides to sort of recap the history here, to try to give some framing to the Federation, and the project of the Federation that DAWN was really. The U.S. Federation worker co-ops, John here was on the first board, started 20 years ago. This is the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops, so it's a big deal. And that's one reason we're inspired to do this.
And as I understand it and John may have some additional history here, but the in the meeting that founded the U.S. Federation in 2004, there was a set of goals that came out from all the brainstorming that people did for what what should the federation do. And one of those goals was what they called a "Worker Co-op Peer Technical Assistance Network". And there's a lot in there. Worker co-ops, peer technical assistance - meaning worker-owners helping worker owners - technical assistance, which we'll get into in a minute, but which means- that's a technical term we use about helping small businesses as well as co-ops get started. Whoever's doing the helping is considered to be rendering technical assistance. And then the last word there was network, which indicates a horizontal, decentralized collection of people, as opposed to a hierarchical structure.
So you can see in the slide now that that was very much encapsulated in our memorandum of understanding. DAWN never existed as a formal organization. We were always "umbrella-ed", so to speak, as a project of other organizations, especially the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops and the Democracy at Work Institute, which was a 501(c)3 started by the Federation, not to be confused with the Democracy at Work Network, which is what were.
But I will take a moment to recite this, almost like the preamble to our Constitution: "an autonomous, self-regulating and self-sufficient network of certified peer advisors with strong social and professional ties who cooperate in training themselves and providing technical assistance services to worker cooperatives. Its basic goals are to: meet the demand for technical assistance and development advice with high quality services, and to increase worker cooperative technical assistance capacity from inside the movement." Those are those are some really key concepts. I want to invite any feedback from John before we move on.
John McNamara: Yeah, actually it brings up a lot. So at the time in 2004 and really into 2014, I was a member of Union Cab of Madison Cooperative, and in 2004, I would say almost all the co-op development community was pretty much focused on either consumer or producer co-ops. When I did training as a board member at Union Cab in 1996, we were the only worker co-op people in the room; everyone else were farmers. And I remember one one director was explaining to us that if you can't agree with the president as a director, it's your duty to resign from the board. That was how they approached- and there was nobody that really understood, like our boards almost always had 5-4 votes. And I was like, "Well, that's an odd way of looking at it.".
And there just really wasn't anyone that really understood that uniqueness of worker co-ops, where you have both capital and labor in the same stakeholder group. And consumer co-ops, consumers are the owners, and they don't necessarily have the worker's best interests at heart, likewise with producers, and so on; so it's really important. I think that's why in 2010, in a piece I wrote that ended up in GEO, that this was really something we desperately needed in our community was co-op developers that actually not only understood the model of worker co-ops, we'd have a lived experience of being in a worker co-op, and had a much richer, deeper relationship to just how much work goes into creating a co-op, and a worker-owned-and-controlled business.
Jim Johnson: Thanks for that context, John. I want to add to that because I realize I should introduce myself too. I was also in a worker cooperative when we started DAWN in 2009. I had been there for about ten years, Sligo Computer Services in the Washington, D.C. area, and we were a conversion. And you'll see that terminology elsewhere in our presentation, meaning the founder of the company made a decision to sell the company to the workers, and the workers bought out the owner and formed a workplace democracy.
John, also thanks for mentioning a little bit on the history of co-op development there, John, because co-op development is a field within many parts of the world, including the United States and here in the United States. It's largely been rural in its history, for about 100 years. And that did present us with cultural challenges as worker owners and worker co-ops, because if you really wanted to freak out the general manager of food co-op, all you had to do was talk to them about making their consumer co-op a workplace democracy. It was really a very radical notion for almost every co-op in the country to think about actually giving power or ownership to workers.
Most co-ops in the country are not workplace democracies, and so that was definitely one of the headwinds. And I think one of the reasons I wound up in the founding cohort of DAWN was because I went through a training to become a certified co-op developer through a national organization called Cooperation Works. And we had our trainings in Madison, and that's where I met John for the first time. We toured Union Cab and I met John McNamara there while I was there getting my training as a co-op developer. So, as an organization Cooperation Works was just beginning to get very interested in worker co-ops at the time, and so it was an exciting time. And, you know, there weren't that many certified co-op developers around. And I was a worker-owner in a worker co-op who was also a certified co-op developer, and so that I think, made a difference there. So that's a little bit more history and context.
Josh, We lost this slide. We lost the screen share. There we go. Thank you very much.
So that relates to what technical assistance is. I'll try not to be too long winded here, but to continue to frame our story here. Technical assistance is another way of saying helping co-ops get started: co-op development. And it is assistance - and by the technical, they point to the fact that there are many really relatively technical aspects of starting up a co-op or any small business. There's the legal side of incorporation, there's the financial side of things, setting up your books, and figuring out what the taxes are, writing bylaws. So the screen shows, all these different elements that are similar to starting a small business and all the different aspects of starting up a small business.
But as worker co-ops, we don't just start a small business. We also create create a workplace democracy, a grassroots democracy. And of course, both of those things - starting the business, and creating a grassroots democracy - are challenging things. And of course, we're trying to do both of those very challenging things at the same time. Why? Because of justice and sustainability. If you have a worker-owned business, or any business that is an economic democracy, it's much more likely to further the causes of justice and sustainability because we've got real humans making real world decisions on the ground. So this is kind of a little bit ambitious.
But as experienced worker-owners and getting to the founding of DAWN here, I think one of the one of the really insightful things we realized in the creation of DAWN was, "what is the hardest thing to learn in helping people start worker co-ops?" It's actually the cultural aspects, okay? It's thinking like a worker-owner, thinking like a worker, and also thinking like the co-owner of a business. That is the most challenging thing to the success of a worker co-op. So if we're going to provide assistance to worker co-ops, let's start with people who have already learned that. Let's take people who are already worker-owners in successful worker co-ops, and let's teach them the other aspects of helping worker co-ops, which are actually easier to learn than learning the culture.
There's a lived experience aspect here to worker co-ops that I think bound us together and gave us a kind of zeal. What is very, very difficult for people to understand [about] worker co-ops, if they haven't really been worker owners - if they don't have that lived experience of workplace democracy - your paycheck is dependent upon your workplace democracy. And so there's a very special perspective that comes with that. And it's a critical part, I think, of what made us a special network. John, any thoughts before we move on?
John McNamara: No, not right now.
Jim Johnson: Okay. So this was one of the things we really didn't know. My recollection of the first couple of years - this was 2009. Five years after the founding of the Federation is when Melissa Hoover, executive director of the US Federation of Worker Co-ops, she convened - I think it was about ten of us - John, myself, and about eight others, and she said, "We got to get this thing going. The Federation needs to provide assistance to startup worker co-ops. We're going to take this group of ten, mostly experienced worker-owners, and we're going to try to make this happen." So, yeah, go ahead.
John McNamara: And really, I think we kind of started in- I want to say 2007, or 2008 there were meetings. Tom Pierson was part of the group. Ajowa [Ifatyeo] was part of the group, and there were a lot of people. Not all of them went on to become actual DAWN service providers, but we really brought the whole community together to really think what this would look like, in building it from a very grassroots, bottom-up sort of method. By the time we got to 2009, we'd really already spent a couple of years of development.
Jim Johnson: Thanks for clarifying that. I got recruited in 2009; I was not familiar with that process that came before it, the predecessor process. But one of the things that we were talking about was we were trying to do something that I think really it was very difficult to know the market, so to speak. It was very difficult to know of all the people who were going to come to us for help: how many of them, if any, can pay for the time we have? How many of them we might we be able to get grant money for, or do we need to get grant money to pay ourselves and just give them give them the service for free? So we really didn't know this, if I recall correctly, John. We didn't know what to expect when we hung out our shingle. And I believe we spent a couple of years really training ourselves, the founders cohort. We put ourselves through the first training and the first certification process, which I believe we completed in 2011.
John McNamara: Right.
Jim Johnson: And then we also recruited the second cohort of apprentice peer advisors in 2011, as I recall. And I believe it was 2012 - the U.S. Federation Conference was in Boston that year - and that's, I think, when we really hung out our shingle. We had a booth at the conference, we did workshops, we presented ourselves as an assistance service - the Federation's assistance service - making itself available to the community of both existing worker co-ops, start up worker co-ops, as well as businesses in which the owners were potentially interested in selling to the workers and converting the business to worker co-op. So that's sort of where we got going. But we really weren't sure what to expect in terms of where the money was going to come from. And in the long run, of course, that became a big issue. We actually entertained the idea that it might be financially self-sustaining without grants for a little while, but I think we quickly got a reality check on that, and that we always needed grant funding to make it happen because there was just too many people needing help who didn't have money. Any other thoughts about that, or corrections, John?
John McNamara: Yeah, I agree. I think also too because there had just never been worker co-op focused developers. Co-ops at the time really kind of became do-it-yourselfers and just didn't really see the value in paying outside developers to come in, because what you do is you're getting someone that doesn't really know co-ops. And so I think that was a headwind that we didn't really plan on, that we ran up against a pretty strong culture within the worker co-op world that I don't think exists as much today, of doing it yourself and not really bringing in outsiders.
Jim Johnson: Right on. Lots of different cultural barriers. If you want to go to the next slide, Josh, thank you.
So this was a rigorous program. I mean, think of DAWN - two big chunks of DAWN - and one was there was a training program taking mostly experienced worker-owners and making them into what we call peer advisors. And then the other was the consulting aspect of it: matching those peer advisors with the needs of start-ups and worker co-ops in the community. This was a rigorous program, a year long. You know, we're scattered around the country, so we had to do a lot of things online: ten online webinars, two in-person weekends - which means people were flying into someplace from wherever they were - needing to do a research project, and needing to do a 40 hour internship. So this was the training program as we knew it. Can you advance the slide, Josh? Thank you.
And we decided - if I recall correctly, John - we decided early on this needed to be a certification program. Our experiences as worker-owners with the co-op development field not really being tuned in to worker co-ops. We wanted..we were sensitive to delivering high quality assistance, really truly qualified assistance. And so we made this a certification program. And so after this, after going through this year long training, there was a 50 to 60 minute face to face session with each apprentice. We did role plays. We grilled them on things. They had to present a research project and there was a certification board basically that would be made up of some outsiders and some DAWN members that would decide they were qualified to become a peer advisor. Any thoughts about that, John?
John McNamara: Yeah. And not everybody was certified after the process. I mean, it really was something that we all took very seriously. And it was I think it was really incredible to do that because people..we wanted to make sure that people were really going to be representing us and doing the work that we were envisioning.
Jim Johnson: Right on. So next slide, please.
John McNamara: I will say my project was with The Hub Bike Co-op just shutdown. So sad to see them shut down because..personal relationship with that. And we did the Co-op Index which I still talk about that experience when I'm telling people about the Co-op Index tool.
Jim Johnson: It's a shame The Hub shutdown. They were around a long time.
John McNamara: Yeah. It's just, you know, the bike industry, the biking industry is just always been a struggle and hasn't..after the easing of the pandemic, a lot of bike shops are really seeing now what happened to them.
Jim Johnson: It's rough. Josh, could you back up one slide? I think there might be one in the middle there. Yeah. And so we didn't just certify. We also realized our field of worker co-op development is evolving so quickly. Pure advisors needed to recertify every 2 to 3 years. So there were requirements for ongoing training. And in order to remain a pure advisor, you had to do some committee work in supporting the governance of DAWN, the organization itself. And and there were some also a certain number of volunteer hours. Ajowa was asking me what was my project? I believe my project as a peer advisor was actually to work to support University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives on a website project that they had going on. And so I remember that was big and long and complicated. I honestly can't remember the outcome of it, but that was my internship project..was University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives. Very important. One of our one of our very important think tanks in the in the co-op movement. And helping them out with a website project they had. So, yeah. Next slide, please. Part of the ongoing training was what we call 200 level trainings. And John and I served together on one of the one of the committees that was training and certification and advanced topics. And one of our most fun activities actually was show and tell, where different peer advisors would do a presentation on one of their projects, and then everybody would sort of brainstorm and workshop it and what went well and what could have been done better and how could it have been don- e better. And it was really to be able to talk shop about worker co-op development with experienced worker owners. That was what we had a lot of special things, but that was one of the most special things - to get together and talk about..just to workshop ideas or issues with each other when it was so rare. There were so few opportunities to really sit down and talk shop with other experienced worker owners. It was really a special bonding experience. And show and tell was, I think for me, one of the most fun things. John, any reminiscences you want to share about that?
John McNamara: Geez, it's kind of hard for me to remember all of it, but I know that there is just..there is just a constant, you know, thinking of what else can we be doing and training. And I think we at some level, we would have probably even had gone up one more level. But we always wanted to see this as a constantly educational process. And, you know, keep in mind too that, you know, the goal also is that..these are pure technical assistance providers so that not only are they being trained, but they're being tools passing on to their co-ops that can..their co ops benefit by having them in the organization as well. And so that we're always thinking about what what more can we be doing..was constant.
Jim Johnson: Yeah that's..I will get to governance structure in a minute here but John just reminded me of something that goes back to actually one of the first slides. The..no need to go back to that, Josh..but the idea of building development capacity within the worker co-ops themselves and it's to me an important thing in this whole field of co-op development is experience is the jewel of the realm really in co-op development. You know, the more experience you get, the more helpful you can be to co-ops. And it's really that lived experience of being in a co-op but the lived experience also of helping many different co-ops. It cultivates a brain trust, what I like to call a brain trust. And it's like that brain trust is going to live somewhere, right? And if as worker co-ops, we depend on nonprofit organizations or government agencies or professionals or whatever, if we depend on people outside of our co-ops for the expertise in strengthening and developing our co-ops, then we're going to cultivate a dependency. But if we cultivate that expertise within our co-ops, then we can be more autonomous and independent as the co-op principle states. We can have that brain trust to ourselves within our movement so that if, you know, the grant funding for a co-op development ever dries up, or if we end up with a government that's hostile to cooperatives, for example, as has happened in a number of countries, then we, you know, we have..we can be independent. We can have our own development capacity, our own depth and breadth of development experience within the co-ops themselves. And we'd be in a much better position to prevail if conditions become unfavorable to us. So to me, that's a critical part of the vision here. We did have a governance structure, even though we were never a legal entity under ourselves. We called it a board of governors because it wasn't really a board of directors because we didn't really have a corporation or an LLC. And in addition to a board of governors, we had three committees, marketing and outreach service and evaluation, training and certification. And these by and large, the governance structure of Dawn was volunteer and pure advisors were required to volunteer time within the governance structure. And we also had an intake process that's important, and I'm not sure I gave that much attention in this presentation. But, you know, when we had a forum on the U.S. FWC website, anybody who needed assistance could fill out the form. We had some paid staff. We had ten I believe. We had an intake coordinator at ten hours a week. And then we had, I believe, an administrative support person who would primarily support the committees at ten hours a week. And that was maybe not at all points in our process. But I think that was when we were strongest. That's how we sort of divided up the work. And the board of governors sort of made policy decisions and coordinated things and helped with coordinating strategy and all. But there was a lot of work that was done in the committees to get the word out to people that we were available to them. Service and evaluation was focused on ensuring the quality of service that the peer advisors were delivering. And training and certification, as we mentioned, was to provide initial training to apprentices, 100 level training, and then 200 level training to peer advisors in an ongoing way to support recertification and ongoing education. It was a lot of work and one of the things I think we would..I would look to improve was..we tried hard to come up with a more streamlined governance structure over the years and we never quite did. And this governance structure, it worked, but it was a lot of effort. John, do you have any reflections on our governance structure and how well it worked?
John McNamara: You know, I think it actually worked very well. I think we..I didn't really have a lot of critiques of it. I think the bigger issues is that, you know, we never really had the autonomy that I think we really needed to have. And so there is always a battle for resources and then challenges with that. And I should say, too, although it's not really part of the governance structure..we also had a very strong commitment to humor and having fun. Like if you were to say "the board of governors" you were supposed to refer to "governors" or greet each other as "governor" but with a really bad British accent. Upon certification, people would be given..or they would either choose a DAWN name or they would be given a DAWN name by the group. And mine was "Donnie Marie." I don't know what yours was, Jim. I forget.
Jim Johnson: You're embarrassing me because I think I might have forgotten my DAWN name.
Jim Johnson: I can't remember, oh my gosh.
Jim Johnson: Okay, that was fun. We're definitely about having fun.
John McNamara: We did not have any secret handshake, so..but I imagine over time that would have probably developed.
Jim Johnson: I think we would have. And it reminds me, though..I mean, to me, the highlight was..again, when we were strongest, we got together twice a year. Everybody flew in from everywhere and we had these weekends together where we would conduct business, we would have elections, we would do certifications and but just hanging out together and going out to a restaurant and, you know, staying in some place that had a hot tub or something, you know, it was just wonderful to be together and to talk shop. And there was this special vibe, even as we were all from, you know, very different parts of the country. It was..there was an esprit de corps that was really one of the highlights of my life, frankly. So it was beautiful. So, yeah, admin contractor, ten hours a week. That's the itemization of what the admin contractor did for the committee. Very important. And interesting model too about the tension between volunteer work in the organizational structure versus paid work. And I think one of the strengths that I would say is we didn't have any full time employee. Everybody who put in paid time, ten hours a week, the admin contractor and the intake coordinator, they were an active worker owner at the time also. And I believe. And they reported to a volunteer board or volunteer committee. And so I think that was one of the strengths that really kept the worker owners, the members of DAWN, st in charge because the paid staff responded to the volunteers. Basically. I thought that was a potentially very sustainable structure, even as sometimes I felt we were all kind of overworked. But anyway, next slide, please. Intake Coordinator. This is a very important position and intake in general in co op development is very important and challenging because you're basically scoping the request. Someone's coming to you for help with their co op or their start up and you need to sort of have a very global view and you need to do a lot of listening and there's a lot of insight that's required. One of the things I really liked about our structure was peer advisors were required to work intake rotations because, in my opinion, it's one of the best ways to get a feel for what's going on out there in the realm of the worker co ops and the start ups and where are things at? What is the state of the field? You could really get that by doing a couple of months of intake, fielding intakes. And so I felt it was one of the best ways to train peer advisors and helped build that brain trust of knowledge and expertise is to really, you know, tune in to what's going on with the people in the field. So I'm not sure there's anything else there.
Jim Johnson: Yeah, go ahead.
John McNamara: And it's kind of funny because at NWCDC, you're just sort of building now after, you know, 20 plus years of an intake system that kind of doesn't look exactly like this. But we have one person who handles the first call and then we have a weekly stand up meeting to where the general development team reviews all the intakes. And we..it helps us keep each other accountable for the process. Also make sure that we're all seeing what's out there. And so not thinking about how much I internalized some of this, but I guess, yes, I have.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. I remember we had a series of flowcharts weeding out the wackos. Thank you, Hazel. Yeah..it was..we did refer things out. We would get some really wild things. One of the more common things we would get is we would get..field the call from somebody and they're like, "I really want to start a worker co-op, but I want to have a veto over everything. You know, if the worker owners end up doing something crazy, I need to be able to step in for them." We're like, well, you know, I'm sorry, that's not a worker co-op. You might want to start a nonprofit organization. We got a lot of things like that where people just didn't get the whole..it really is a democracy thing. So the..anyway.
John McNamara: So yeah, just aside, Aaron Dawson and I had a meeting at the last time the worker coop conference was in Chicago. This is the person who we wanted to start a co-op that would do bike pickups of waste oil from restaurants that would then be used to turn into biofuel and we get through the whole thing of talking with them about it. And then we asked the question, "How many people do you have involved doing?" He says, "Well, no one." And we asked him, "Well, who's going to do this work?" And they said, "Well, we'll find people." And I thought, well, you know, you really should have people that want to do this work. Riding your bike around, picking up waste oil from restaurants cannot be fun in the summertime. And, you know, we still get stuff like that where people have a great idea for a coop. Only they don't want to do it, they want other people to do it.
Jim Johnson: Right.
Jim Johnson: Right and the worker owners will just own it. And then we'll farm out the work to non owning workers. And we also..we actually have an item on our intake form that was for one person with an idea.
Jim Johnson: Right? And because we got a lot of that and I was like, "Well, you know, you need to have like at least three people if you want to start a co-op, frankly." And it was.. we got a lot of one person with an idea. You know? So it is what it is. The whole population is still learning about what really is involved here. Yeah, you're right. Understanding workplace democracy isn't something society prepares us for. Quite the opposite. I would say we're actively discouraged from exploring workplace democracy, but that seems to be changing, too. So a lot of operational stuff on the part of the committees here. Client evaluations were hard to get. It was really hard to get our clients to give us like evaluations about how well we did. Annual peer evaluations. There was one time John and I ended up wrangling, you know, we had a 360 method for a while where every peer advisor got to give feedback to every other peer advisor. And I remember one weekend John and I ended up with a massive amount of work trying to compile all the different feedback that came in. That was..and so there was definitely a matter of streamlining systems so that we're mindful of how much labor we're getting ourselves out for. So that's committee work. You can move on if you want, Josh. I should point out one of the most fun things we did was the "Ask the peer advisors" sit downs at conferences. Sometimes it was a booth, sometimes it was just this desk with a couple of chairs. But I think that was one of the most engaging and fun things is to just sit at the conference and people would come up with their questions and you could be there face to face with them. So this was probably one of our busiest and biggest years, 15 active certified peer advisors. We had four that cycled out. We did have a fair amount of turnover in peer advisors, mostly having to do with people just going through life changes. We did have a type of membership, professional and co-op development organization members. We wanted to have ties to the larger cooperative movement. That was one of our motivations there and they represented an important resource for us as long as they really got worker co-ops, which there are..there are co-op developers and other allies who have never been worker owners, but they do understand worker co-ops. Those people are out there working for our members. A lot like I became, you know, I left my worker co-op in 2009 and became a freelance co-op developer. So I guess I really should have been a working pro member at some point. There were a lot..the training course, the year long training course was so rigorous. We actually had 17 apprentices who did not complete the course. Another thing I would rethink - would there be an easier way for people to go through the necessary training and become certified? Because we did have what I think is a relatively large number of people falling out of the training before they finished. Any thoughts about that, John?
John McNamara: Yeah. I mean, definitely. I mean, if we're doing it, they would probably have something that would be more, more streamlined and maybe more self or asynchronous learning and other types of programs. I think it was, you know, the amount of time that DAWM was really active was really, you know, about 5 or 6 years. So we didn't really have enough, I think, time to really sort of do a shakedown cruise and make new iterations. I think that would have happened and we probably would have, you know, had we hadn't had enough time to really build that sort of experience and the knowledge.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. Right on.
Jim Johnson: So a ton of co-ops here. This includes some of the biggest and oldest co co-ops in the country at the time. Some of y'all may recognize some of the names here. Yeah, go ahead. And you go ahead to the timeline. Unless you have something you want to reflect on with that previous slide, John. So this is the rough timeline. I may need to stand corrected on this and John's memory may correct me on some of this. But, you know, we got going there. Yeah, 2013 to 2016, I would call the peak years. Interesting to know how much activity we did. But I think the maximum budget we ever had was 50,000. I don't think we ever cost more than that. And I think that delivers a lot of bang for the buck, considering we had, I think in that year, we had about 15 active pure advisors, the training program, everything that was going on, working the conferences, and we still only soaked up 50,000 in grant money. To me, that's, you know, in terms of the amount of assistance that we delivered, I think that's an incredibly good value myself.
John McNamara: Yeah, absolutely.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. Considering, you know, it's not even one full time employee, really. Right?Maybe if you're in a low cost of living area, that's one full time employee at a co-op development center. Maybe. Right? So? So in 2017 - 18, this is a much larger topic. I don't know how deeply we can go into this, but one of the things that happened is the federation grew as the Democracy at Work Institute was formed. The 501C3 arm of the Federation. And we no longer as a project of the federation or as the Project of Democracy at Work Institute, we would we would have a staff liaison from those organizations. But after a number of years, we lost..we lost our direct connection to the decision makers. And so my recollection in 2017 - 2018 is we couldn't get a direct access to decision makers as a project. And we couldn't get a budget. We couldn't negotiate a budget. And I understand that, you know, particularly as things evolved, there was a question about on the one hand of, thank you, the, the funding generally came either through the US Federation of Work or Co Ops or through the Democracy Work Institute. And we sort of moved back and forth between those two organizations in terms of who our parent organization actually was. Often our money would come from..the USDA has a co-op grant development grant program. Some of our funding came through that. But it could be challenging to get. I realize it could be challenging to get funding for us, but the main thing that I found was..to me that where we really struggled at some point was when we could no longer get direct access to the decision makers. We were an autonomous, self-governing network, but the US Federation of Co-ops, US Federation and also Democracy at Work Institute, they needed some sort of accountability. That was a conversation we had a number of times, especially starting in 2016 - 2017. What does accountability look like if DAWN is an autonomous, self-governing organization? And we would try to negotiate a memorandum of understanding, but it was very difficult and time consuming to actually settle on the terms of how are we accountable to the federation while also being autonomous and independent. And it touches on the question of we never had our own funding stream, we never had our own legal entity. We were dependent upon those two organizations for both of those things. And I believe that was something that came back to haunt us in the long run.
John McNamara: Yeah, I mean, so it started as..when it was known as a project of Dowie. And then once it stayed a project of Dowie, when Dowie became a 501c3, and then at some point a decision was made by Dowie and the US Federation for it to go to the US Federation and get off of basically Dowie's books. And that was I think probably like 2017. And then in 2018, the Federation killed it. And none of that was done with discussion or support of any of the members in DAWN.
Jim Johnson: Right. It was a surprise to us, in fact.
John McNamara: Yeah. And yeah, you know, in fact, I think the notice that DAWN is being shut down, at least the email I got was the night before the Worker Coop conference in L.A. started. So late Wednesday night, around 11:30 p.m. Pacific, an email went out saying, "By the way, DAWN's done."
Jim Johnson: Right.
John McNamara: That was..that was our notice.
Jim Johnson: Libby Stewart is asking, "Why didn't you incorporate this?"
John McNamara: Well, I mean, you know, I don't remember all the reasons at the time. I guess if I had known that..know what was going to happen, we probably would have pushed harder for that. I think that would have been the better plan to have it spin off as its own 501c3 and get its own grants. It could have done as well. I mean, obviously, he showed me, you know, the accountability thing..I think it's just it was kind of a red herring discussion, too, because it's not..we all do great reporting and it's pretty easy, you know, to set up a system of reporting and projects. And so it wasn't..it would be very difficult.
Jim Johnson: Ajowa asked, "Was the reason given for shutting down DAWN? How did governors respond to that notice?" I'd like to take that question at a moment, but to follow up on what what John was saying - I think it could have been worked out. But like I say, you know, I remember there being, you know, the memorandum of understanding that could have addressed the accountability issue, the so-called accountability issue. It would take months to get a response, months to get feedback on that. And like I say, we couldn't get a budget last couple of years. And so we struggled. We were going forward on a volunteer basis. I'm not sure even our intake coordinator or administrative staff person was even being paid the last year or two. I'm not sure if the peer advisors were being paid. Maybe. But my recollection was that I also got that email just before the L.A. conference and it..my recollection - correct me if I'm wrong, John - was they said that the government, the governance of DAWN was failing. And which..I didn't think was the case at all because the Board of Governors was still meeting and getting things done. But it was difficult to get things done without money. But I believe we were still meeting and we were still conducting business and taking intakes and such.
John McNamara: Right. Yeah. I wasn't, of course, on the board at that point, so I was..that was a little bit more removed because, you know, I was full time coop developer then. Yeah. But yeah, it was very vague and it's kind of sort of setting up..you know, setting up a situation where the organization suffers and then says, "Well, look, it's not working. We have to shut it down." So I think it was kind of a predestined by decisions that were made. And then, you know, the federation started the coop clinic, which is just not the same, right? I mean, it provides a needed service for sure, but..especially in areas of the country where there isn't a coop development with worker coop experience. But it's..that it's just really transactional. It wasn't about the education and sharing information.
Jim Johnson: Yeah, I agree with that. And in fact, you know, in fairness to the Federation, I want to try to be balanced here, even though I was very much on one side of the whole process. But that was a big part of the memo that came from the Federation staff was that they had this larger vision for what they called the co-op clinic that was not only pure advisors but also professional developers, partner organizations, and so forth. So that was a big part of their justification or what you might call a larger vision for providing assistance. But it was..I felt it really sort of, you know, downplayed or even perhaps eliminated the whole mutual aid ethic that DAWN was and the autonomous and independent network that DAWN was..much more of a federation organ that was..seemed rather hierarchical. Yes, John, go ahead.
John McNamara: Yeah. I should say, you know, that we also created the Worker Owners Collaborative, which does provide some networking and limited training, but it's also a much bigger tent employee ownership rule that includes a lot of people and employee owned trust folks as well. So it's not really the same thing.
Jim Johnson: Yes. Yeah. One other thing I would add, and I see a question about when we think about incorporating and reincarnating DAWN, but to add to what John just said, the..another aspect that I think was critical, logistically important was that - correct me if I'm wrong, John - but when we moved from DAWE to the Federation.. DAWE said we will continue the training program. Right? And so..and there was one reason I think we didn't incorporate and one reason we were willing to try leaving the training program with DAWE was capacity, right? My recollection was being very busy. The volunteer commitments were not insignificant, really. And so we were like, okay, DAWE wants to continue to do the training program with the funding that they have, we'll do the apprentice training program through DAWE, you know. But then DAWE terminated that training program after another year or two, if I recall correctly. And that meant that the incoming supply of trained peer advisors was going to dry up eventually. So we discussed incorporating a number of times, as I recall, we sometimes thought, should we become a worker cooperative? But we realized we needed grant funding by that time. That was one of the things we learned was we won't be able to be financially self-sufficient. And an important lesson, I think we will always need grant funding because there's too many people who need help. And we can't..we can't take money from other projects to subsidize the people who can't pay. Nowadays, with so many conversions taking place - a little bit about the future here - with so many conversions taking place now no where, you know, the development project can actually be financially self-sustaining. There might be some feasibility where if you work enough conversion projects, you can generate enough surplus revenue that you might be able to subsidize, you know, no charge support to start ups. That might be possible. Then when it comes to re incorporating..excuse me, starting up DAWN again, I want to touch on that in a minute, but I'd like to finish this thread if that's okay. John, anything else before?
John McNamara: Yeah. I would also add, you know, in addition to conversions, there's also a stronger willingness of co-op friendly lenders like Shared Capital and Seed Commons to build in technical assistance as part of the loan agreement that we.. you know, when you borrow from these lenders that they, you know, they're kind of following the Rock USA model where there needs to be some sort of technical assistance agreement in place during the life of the loan. And so that also really changed the landscape. Answering Libby's question real first, I could only really speculate that the real reason. I think you'd have to ask the executive directors of the federation and DAWE at the time and maybe that opportunity will happen at some point.
Jim Johnson: Yeah that's a good point. The board of governors did respond..back to Ajowa's question before we move on. The board of governors did respond to the memo from the federation staff that basically..the memo that declared DAWN governance to be abolished. That's kind of how they did it. They..I saw them framing as DAWN as being folded into the co op clinic, but the governance of DAWN was declared, you know, nonfunctioning, which again, I disagree with. We vehemently disagree with that. You know, the DAWN governance is still functioning, in fact. But we also didn't have the capacity to go forward on our own. And this touches on the incorporation question and the, you know, the resurrection question, which I want to delve deeper into in a minute. But it was, you know, the governors convened a number of meetings after the federation declared the governance of DAWN to be defunct. We continue to meet, we continue to talk about what to do to go forward. But it was..you know, none of us really had the capacity to do that. And one of the interesting things that went on was a number of us had become more prosperous. Like, you know, we weren't able to pay our I think it was $40 an hour. Peer advisors I believe were paid $40 an hour for development assistance. And I believe peer advisors got $25 an hour for working an intake shift. And so that was..and we got to a point where people were making more than that in their worker co-ops. Some of them. And so they wanted to work for DAWN, but they had to take a pay cut in order to work as a peer advisor because we didn't have..we couldn't afford to pay more than 40 bucks an hour for fewer advisors. And that was as a contractor, so you'd have to pay taxes out of that and so forth. So that was another factor. And like, what's our business model going forward? You know? And yeah, we would have to be a 501c3, we would have to chase grants. And that's no small effort. Anybody who runs a co-op development center like John knows, that is no small task to actually, you know, pay salaries, create a nonprofit organization, do all the due diligence and paperwork and, you know, taxes and, you know, so forth involved in operating a 501c3 like GEO..is also operates a 501c3. So it's not a small task to go forward as your own organization. It's really not. And you need this constant inflow of money. And we had already found out that our business model can't stand alone. We would need to chase serious funding in order to keep it going. Any thoughts on that, John, before we roll on.
John McNamara: You know, I think that's correct. I mean, it would have been a pretty heavy lift especially because, again, as you mentioned, you know, the members of DAWN were really part time and had full time jobs. And so this would be one more thing they're trying to do. And it would really require probably hiring a full time staff person. Not that that was insurmountable, it's just that it was definitely not something that you could do in a crisis, right? I mean, I was going to..it would have probably taken a couple of years to really pull all that together.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, lessons learned. I really, you know..going forward, I think a lot of the answers to people's questions are going to be what lessons did we learn here, you know? And things going on in people's lives..we lost a number of apprentices out of the training program because they got pregnant actually. There were a number of those. And then even in the final year of DAWN, three of our board members had babies. And so people had things going on in their lives. In addition to being full time with a worker co op and the time they were putting into DAWN, they had things going on in their lives. And we determined 100% fee for service..that is 100%, you know, paid service not possible. We needed at least 50 K funding per year. Like any small consulting organization. There were busy times and slow times. And so there was supply and demand, you know? It would tend to come in waves. Requests for assistance would tend to come in waves. We would be swamped, then it would be slow and people would be like, "Hey, I'm available for project work. You know, I could use the extra money." You know, but there wasn't necessarily work. So every small consulting firm has that challenge. Myself coming from a small I.T. consulting firm..capacity issues, full time worker owners providing assistance on the side. I felt that was a big issue. We might have been able to get better support from regional federations and worker coops. You know, there might have been other models, like maybe a full time worker at a worker co-op. Maybe their worker co-op would say, "Okay, go down to 32 hours a week, give eight hours a week to DAWN." There might have been other business models we could have come up with that wouldn't have made people's worker coops more of a partner in supporting the delivery of assistance to worker co-ops. Those are just some ideas floating out there about, you know, regional federations. More on that in a minute. Next slide - for lessons learned. I think there's one more slide here. Yeah. "When your program might have been too steep, I've been thinking about something more modular or incremental. Tough to get feedback from clients." Yeah. We should..if we'd created a legal entity early on, we might have worked it out and worked it into our business model so that it could work. We hopped back and forth between the Federation and DAWE. If we'd secured our own funding sources, that might have been a really heavy lift. Or who knows, we might have gotten the funder who really believed in us and would give us multi-year funding so we wouldn't have put the energy into chasing it. And a seat at the table where strategy is developed. Access to decision makers. We had that early on. And because of changes in the way we related to the federation and DAWE we lost that direct access to decision makers, we lost our seat at the table where the strategy was developed. And eventually the strategy became, let's do the co-op clinic. You know, DAWN, governance, you know, is not on the table anymore. So that was I think..that's a big lesson learned for me going forward. Don't lose your access. Don't lose your voice in the strategy development process. Don't lose your access to whoever holds the strings of your budget and your entity.
John McNamara: Yeah. I mean, I think don't assume that their agenda includes you, right?e I think there was a general assumption that we were part of a long term vision of the national organizations. And at some point that changed. And it's never really.. we were never told that until..you know, we got the letter.
Jim Johnson: Yeah.
Jim Johnson: Rebecca - "Who created that vision?" Yep. I hear you. Well, there's..there's definitely bigger questions here about, in my opinion, you know, how do supposedly member driven organizations continue to be truly member driven? And I..I'm anxious about other, you know, other thoughts on this. But I continue to struggle with the board model, frankly, and I'm not sure I have a great alternative. Sociocracy is an interesting model for me that I've been exploring for quite a while. John actually recruited me into a sociocracy organization in which we're still active and it's an alternative to board governance that also encourages very much..something very similar to a self-directed work team model, a decentralized network of small groups. And so I think there may be fundamental problems with the board model of nonprofit organizations. There's more to it than that. But I think that's one critical factor here is can you really have a democratic organization where the power is delegated through a representative democracy to a small number of people? John, any thoughts on that?
John McNamara: Yeah, I mean, you know..it's always a difficult thing. I mean it's kind of, you know, classic isomorphism, right? I mean, boards are forced on the coop world by law. Really interesting..I...Joe Merefino actually sent me the article when I was doing my dissertation. It was about the history of where the board of directors comes from and was actually..came from King James I of Scotland. And it was..it was basically to protect the investors in the Virginia colony. So the very concept of a board of directors is an artifact of colonialism. And the idea was to protect the investors against the colonists from mismanaging the colony. And you think about that and here we are, you know, in this radicalized space of worker ownership and control and we're recreating a colonial structure to government. And yes, it's kind of crazy when you think about it. And, you know, some coops have worked around it. You know, I forget the name of the co-op in Manchester, it's a worker owned food co-op and they have 80 members. And so all 80 members are on the board of directors. Isthmus Engineering does the same thing. All three members are on the board of directors. The board becomes the de facto membership meeting..although, you know, just when they're meeting for the board issues it's called a board meeting. So there are ways of undermining boards. The group in Manchester uses sociocracy and Isthmus doesn't but they.. you know, their projects are all team projects. So that's how..so they have kind of something that looks and feels like sociocracy.
Jim Johnson: The worker owned co-op grocery in Manchester - is that Abby's organization, Rainbow perhaps? Was it Rainbow or was it was Unicorn?
John McNamara: Unicorn...Of course, Rainbow is the US worker owned grocery store.
Jim Johnson: US in San Francisco...the self-directed work team model. Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco.
John McNamara: Yeah. And Rainbow uses..Yeah, it's a network of collectives.
Jim Johnson: Right? Exactly. So there are alternatives to the board model. We have some living examples of that actually. And there are board models that scale large. Isthmus Engineering, like you say - 80 people, I think, in the board meeting. And yet, you know, my understanding is they meet every two weeks and it works pretty well. So there are ways. The conventional wisdom is once you scale up..and you even hear most co-op developers will say this..you know, once you scale up a decision making body larger than 10 or 15 people, they'll say you have to go to a representative democracy..but we see there's other models..that isn't necessarily true.
John McNamara: Right. Cecosesola in Venezuela. I probably butchered their name, but they are a huge, huge cooperative. Multi-stakeholder cooperative with thousands of people and they use consensus and they use the membership meetings. And they just won some international award last year, I think, for their work.
Jim Johnson: Yeah.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. So we..I think that's one of our..one of the ways we could go forward. And I would say that's not the entire reason that DAWN met the fate that it did. But I think there's a substantial amount of that is..the governance structures that we use may naturally lend themselves to the disenfranchisement of members at the grassroots level. I think that's a critical lesson learned here. And John mentioned isomorphism, which I want to make sure we clarify. John, do you want to give a definition of that? Because I think it's something that affects all of our progressive movements.
John McNamara: I mean, basically it is that it's kind of organizational version of entropy, only the opposite..that organizations in a field..in a similar field will gravitate towards what the dominant organization is and will look like. Sometimes that happens through laws that are enacted, like credit unions are forced to follow banking laws even though they have a different ethical space..so they end up having to get bigger and bigger and then look like banks. And there's also a mimetic where people are chasing the so-called best practices for their industry, not thinking that best practices are there for shareholders, not for workers. And so as you get bigger, you start talking about best practices. You have to really..if you aren't thinking carefully about it, it's very easy to start looking and acting like investor owned businesses and then normative, which is, you know, again, just ways of how you approach the whole work that you're doing that, you know..banks are going to determine success on your profit loss statement, not on your meeting your mission, like a Union Cab right? Our mission or the mission in Union Cab is to create jobs, a living wage, better living in a safe democratic environment while providing quality transportation. All of those items on a profit loss statement would be on the expense side.
Jim Johnson: Right
John McNamara: So that's why just by chasing its mission, Union Cab is not meeting the normal standard of what success looks like for a cab company.
Jim Johnson: Yeah.
Jim Johnson: I want to acknowledge a couple of questions in the chat. Hazel had a question about co-op development training for people in Canada. And yeah, I want to tackle the question of what would the DAWN of the future look like? Where..is there some place we should go from here? Before I move on I want to credit Saint Mary's in..is it University? Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary's University for turning me on to the concept of isomorphism along with John. And that there..that's the home of the master's degree in credit cooperative and credit union management. John may be able to give us an update on that. A very important academic ally in all of this. Incredibly important and where I really got my first in-depth understanding of isomorphism. When I'm training people in co ops I try to incorporate isomorphism into it. The way I describe this is the..we have a tendency to inadvertently recreate the oppressive systems that we are actually trying to escape because we come from a cultural and organizational and economic context of these oppressive systems. And so we're always at risk for inadvertently recreating oppressive dynamics even as we try to create liberated organizations. And so it's..there's a sort of an eternal vigilance question here, but there's also a structural question. Do we really need to use board models to organize our movement or are there better ways that may, you know, undermine this tendency towards isomorphism? So I think those are some critical questions to ask. And Hazel clarified her question I think. "Where can..where is worker co-op development training happening?" Thank you for duplicating that comment, Hazel. I believe that Cooperation Works is now doing a fair amount. Doesn't the Cooperation Works training give a couple of days out of their training to worker coops? John? That's my understanding.
John McNamara: Yeah. And they include a lot more worker co-op choices now in their training. And I would say, you know, there's been a real sea change and partially..part of that is because of those overall..a lot of changes, right? Those baby boomers retiring, making conversions a really big issue now. A worker collaborative does some training, but it's really specifically around conversions. And there is different..you know, the..I think Rutgers is in partnership with DAWE still to do their school of management. Is that right?
Jim Johnson: Right, right.
Jim Johnson: Right. DAWE has a...right..a school of cooperative management. A school of democratic management program. I'm not too familiar with that program, but that seems to have been going for quite a few years.
John McNamara: Our center partners with the Evergreen State College to do a sustainable cooperative development certificate. And of course the third quarter is field work. And so we pair students with a co-op that is usually a solidarity or worker co-op and mentor them through the delivery of technical assistance.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. And this dovetails into sort of what's in the future. You know, could a reincarnation of DAWN be feasible? And I would say that what we're leading to here in this discussion is a reflection of how the movement has changed and how the strategy of what we would call pure technical assistance, peer advising, mutual aid, peer to peer mutual aid is..good question there, Ajowa..make sure we don't forget that..is that I think the future is more local and regional than it is national. DAWN was a national organization and that was the best thing at the moment because it was the federation was behind it, the federation started it and the federation as a national organization. My personal hunch is that the future is local and regional and that that's..if we really want to build a strong peer mutual aid networks, plural "networks", then we need to focus on building resources and connecting people in local and regional ways. And somewhat accidentally, that has been my focus for the last about nine years or so, is working at the local and regional level. I've been for..since 2015. I've been with the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, which is a local loan fund, part of the Seed Commons non Extractive Loan network. And the Baltimore roundtable is made up mostly of current and former worker owners. And so a loan fund that is staffed by experienced worker owners providing assistance..part of our lending model is we provide what we call high touch assistance, intensive assistance, as well as non extractive lending to start up worker co ops and existing worker co-ops. And I, along with one of my colleagues there at the Baltimore roundtable, last year we mounted what we called an advanced cooperator training, which was very similar to the DAWN training. We took experienced worker owners and also people from start ups, and we put them through a six month training program so that they would have deeper, broader understanding of how co-op development happens, what the current state of the art is as best as we can determine it, and very intentionally cultivating mutual aid connections between the co-ops that these people came from. And so we're now in the process of chasing funding and trying to mount a second term for that. But it has really helped to jumpstart this network of worker co-ops where we want to jump start mutual aid between these worker co-ops in Baltimore. 14, 15, 16 new worker co-ops in Baltimore in the last nine years as a result of this loan fund that also delivers high touch assistance. I think that's where the future is. And..or at least that's a big part of our future. Another thing I did last year was in New York City - the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City (SCENIC). They staged a cross-sector training that went on for six months, cross-sector training. They got about 20 different co-ops - members of 20 different co-ops - in the room actively cultivating mutual aid connections while integrated into an advanced cooperator training, scaling up to a larger solidarity economy vision not focused only specifically on worker co-ops, but all types of co-ops and how co-ops and different sectors can collaborate. And so a different kind of advanced cooperator training, but again, integrated with a mutual aid network development model. So I'm..I feel strongly that instead of trying to recreate another national organization, we should look at this natural..what I think is a natural groundswell as we have more worker co-ops in this country, that means there's the possibility of building greater concentrations of worker co-ops in local areas. And that means that mutual aid networks in local areas, I think, are better positioned now than they are in the past to muster the funding, mount the trainings..and of course, we need to network the different regional and local efforts so there is a need for a national network. But I think in order to avoid the you could say the sort of top heavy approach that undermined DAWN's existence, we should really, really focus on bottom up. We should be very focused on strengthening the grass roots at the local and regional network..at the local, regional level and networking those efforts and supporting those efforts in more of a decentralized, networked fashion. Thoughts about that, John?
John McNamara: Yeah, absolutely. I think I think you really kind of hit it. You know, we're talking right now and one of our board members has been talking with us about community based development and what that looks like. And we're, you know, we are really interested in mentoring people and helping to train people to be coop developers. So especially within, you know, the tribal nation community, we have a number of nations in Washington and Oregon, but also other groups that are, you know..so I guess the idea of being that, you know, especially..We don't want to be extractive of communities by coming in and offer fee for service. I think what we want to do is for those communities, especially for, you know, bipoc communities..is being there to help train their community members to be delivering the cooperative development services and support them, not just coming in to do a project and then leaving. And I think that's more and more.
Jim Johnson: Amen.
John McNamara: People are talking about that now. And I think that's one of the ways that the current development community can really support this work.
Jim Johnson: Amen. Amen to that. Inadvertent extractiveness is a big problem. It really is. We shouldn't and..there used to be a lot more attention with the nonprofit industrial complex 10, 15 years ago. GEO talked about this a lot. I feel like that's mitigated some as we've identified and partnered with allies that..nonprofit allies who get it, you know, who are sensitive to questions of agency. And then there's people like John who comes from, what, 25 years on a worker co-op, and now you're running a co-op development center. Right? So, you know, we may have..we used to fear being colonized by the nonprofit world in some ways, and maybe that happened to a certain extent. But also what's happening is the worker co-op world is colonizing the nonprofit world in some ways. And for better or worse, it's..I think it's not a perfect solution. But the reality is, you know, resources are still scarce. Okay? And if we're not going to exploit ourselves terribly, you know, we need to be able to pay people for a lot of their time, if not all of their time. And so resources are a huge question in terms of how we go forward. But I really feel strongly that we need to emphasize, you know, supporting local and regional efforts. And if we want to have a nationally coordinated approach, it should be focused on supporting local and regional efforts and, you know, minding that extractive dynamic. And, you know, let's help the local folks make it happen as opposed to trying to do it ourselves. And then so I'm leading as a co-op developer. I'm leaning more into a train the trainer model, as opposed to doing more development myself and focusing more on helping people become those developers, helping worker owners become peer advisors, and even staying in their worker co-ops but providing assistance. So, you know, I'm biased, of course, but I really believe in that model. Good to see you, Chris. Glad you're with us. So let me see. I want to make sure we answered all the questions out there. I hope that..I wasn't..Hazel, we weren't able to give you a great answer about training because outside of Cooperation Works, outside of St Mary's, I'm not sure we have a solid training resource. One, you know, a one stop place to go for worker co-op development training, peer adviser training. What instead we have is maybe a number of regional efforts. But I don't know, I'm open to that discussion. I think, again, I think we should focus on cultivating resources to support local and regional training..where you can be face to face and you don't have to fly people around the country in order to get them together face to face. So that's my thoughts. And I'm sure there's other things out there that we can do that I haven't thought of yet. But if anybody has asked a question that they feel hasn't been answered, please do put it in the chat again. Chris, any thoughts? We're not hearing you. You don't appear to be muted, but we're not hearing you. All right. Josh, any thoughts? Apologies for my background noise. I'm trying to silence them. If anybody's hearing my background noise. So I think we have maybe up to 14 minutes left in our session. Josh may have some closing housekeeping he needs to do, I don't know. But we're definitely inviting any other questions or thoughts, anything we did not adequately respond to. This is Q&A time.
John McNamara: Well, I think one was about what would.. if DAWN had continued, what would things look like? And I guess it's..I mean, I think it's interesting. I think, you know, if it continued and was properly funded, you know, I think it could..I think it would have had an even bigger impact, you know? I think one of the things we've seen since 2018, of course, is the legal landscape for worker ownership has changed dramatically with the passage of the Main Street Employee Ownership Act, the Work Act and..which still hasn't been properly funded either. But and..then now the new bill for national worker coop development that Ro Khanna put in..introduced in the Congress. And so, you know, there's..I think just to have that organization that have been there during that time, I think would have been really dynamic also. Since 2018, I believe now five states have created state level employee ownership commissions. The one in Washington..both in Washington, of course, both has..both now a new center for employee ownership and employee ownership commission. And, you know, we definitely took a role in making sure that co ops got equal treatment with ESOPs. But that isn't always the case because in most states the employee ownership centers are pretty much dominated in the ESOP world. And so I think that's something that DAWN could have been there to..and its members could have been there to really help push getting more of an equal footing in that space.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. It is a very intriguing idea. I can't help thinking with a bit of a broken heart that if DAWN had kept going, we would have a much stronger brain trust of assistance, knowledge, experience, ability, skill within the worker co-op community itself. I do think that's happening organically anyway to a certain extent. And that's the good news, right? We've got more co-ops, we've got more people more experienced in the co-ops. And so it's happening. But I think it would have accelerated, you know? But again, the trend I see in a number of different ways is we're in a better position now to have local and regional federations, local and regional funders. I've had a very interesting experience. Now, the Baltimore organization I work with, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, they're a founding member of the Seed Commons Network. And so I've been able to sit in a couple of times a week on different network calls. And they were..they are a national network of peer funds. And their idea is they generally don't..the national organization generally doesn't do direct loans. They loan money through local entities, local loan funds that aspire to be co-op run funds. And they're still very much a startup. Most of their funds are still in a startup phase, but there's in excess of 40 local funds in the United States now that are providing non extractive loans. And I have had the chance to on a number of occasions to actually work with their loan paperwork. And it is remarkable because they genuinely seem to be non extractive. They don't want co-ops making loan payments until the co-ops are turning net revenue. They're like "don't make a payment on your loan if it's going to put you into the red." And so it's a fascinating model and it's still in development. You know, I think it is a model that is in the process of proving itself. But it's a loan fund of tens of millions of dollars in this loan fund now. And so it's..and it's the relevant thing to this discussion is these 40 plus local loan funds around the country that are getting grant money, that are making non extractive loan funds available to worker co-ops and other types of community owned organizations. And they represent local allies to co-ops, important local lending allies. And those of us who go far enough back in this movement can remember when your worker co-op just could not get a loan, okay? You could not get a loan without personal guarantees, without putting your personal assets, your house on the line. And, you know, it's remarkable how much more funding, both grant funding as well as loan funding, is much more available now than it was 15 years ago. And again, this funding is now available..much more available at the local level. And so, again, the zeitgeist I see is more and more strength, more and more power and empowerment being focused at local levels in terms of funding and in terms of assistance. And again, these local loan funds are also dedicated to providing high touch assistance. But we want our co-ops to be soaking up that assistance. We want our co-ops to become the brain trusts of that expertise because who knows what's going to happen to impact investing in the future. Who knows what's going to happen to foundation funding, government funding, all the money flowing out of philanthropy and impact investors right now. Who knows how long that fund is going to..that trend is going to last, right? Is it a fad or will it be permanent? I don't know. But we need to strengthen our co-ops and make it so that our co-ops can help other co-ops. I truly feel like that's what we need to focus on by whatever means we can. Well, questions came up in the chat and I hope somebody else caught them because I missed them. I was too busy flapping my jaw.
Chris Preciado: I just hopped on because Josh lost power. And he wanted to make sure there was someone here to end the stream when y'all are ready. Let me know, that's why I hopped on.
Jim Johnson: Josh is out in rural Montana and he lost his power. But Chris, I believe you're in Chicago and you've still got power, right? So. Thank you for joining and saving the host role. We appreciate that.
John McNamara: So there is a question from MJ. "If I were to.." It's popping up right now and you know, I would say..it probably..there's always seems to be more work than time for most development centers or projects, though I think it depends where you are. I would say probably in you know, I mean, New York has, what, about 100 or so worker co-ops right now? And it's a city of, like, 15 million people. So there's plenty of work to do in New York City. Olympia, you know, we have about a dozen and we're a community of 50,000. So maybe..yeah, I would say rural communities, if there's a development center active. But the key thing I think for coop development is being in the community that you're in. You know, like even our work is, it can be very difficult if we have to, you know, go to Ontario or Oregon for a meeting because we're going to spend two days traveling for a two hour meeting and it's just..and not being in the community where you can just kind of walk over to the place and meet in person. Even meeting in Seattle, depending on traffic, that can be a three hour drive to go the 65 miles to Seattle. And so, you know, it just..but having people in those locations just can make a huge difference. So I think it's more about, you know, where you want to be and then building a community, working with that community there. That's what really makes the value.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. That's a great answer, John. And I would I would add to that, I don't think there's any end to the need. And one of the special things about this period right now in the last ten years, really. I don't..I usually don't have to explain what a worker co-op does. Now people have heard of them and and they're not so skeptical about them. It used to be people are like, "workplace democracy, that's not going to work." You know, we don't get that much anymore. Right? Instead, people think it's easy. Okay? And they think it's easy to start a worker coop. And I was like, "Well, it's actually pretty tough, but yeah, you can do it." But..so there's no shortage of need..and right now, funding is easier to get than it's ever been, as far as I can tell. And I don't think anybody should expect that to last. John, any thoughts on that?
John McNamara: Yeah, I mean, it's..it always goes.. we're still waiting to hear..like the Catholic Campaign for Human Development's going to be funded this year because they kind of oversubscribed their funds and so we're waiting to see what the bishops say. I mean, there is more money, definitely, but it still can be limited. It's still can be focused very heavily on rural, not urban. But, you know, there's ways of finding it. Conversions can be really..if you have a willing seller who is really engaged and really is mission aligned to do that and that can make it easier. And yeah, I mean that's..there's..next year is going to be international year of the co-ops again and I think the last one in 2012..I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal and but I think it really did raise the bar. Following on the heels of Occupy in 2011. And I think it really catalyzed worker coops in this country and our organizations were there at the perfect time for that. And I think this time we're going to see a similar spike, especially as we're moving..and, you know, we have the Department of Labor office now and other things going on in the infrastructure of this country that we're definitely..I think it's only going to increase.
Jim Johnson: Yeah. I think I hope and I think that we're experiencing the challenges of a certain amount of success right now as opposed to the challenges of just not even being recognized or erased. And yes, Rebecca, that's exactly what I was thinking. That's why building self-determination is so important. In the challenge of success, that will be where we need to emphasize is even well-intentioned allies can inadvertently undermine our agency as autonomous and independent co-ops. And so yeah. And so that's I think hopefully that's where we're headed now is the challenges of success and how to sustain and develop our agency, including our development capacity internally as we go forward with governments at the table and, you know, impact investors at the table and loan funds at the table and so forth. All kinds of players at the table now. We need to make sure that we're, you know, building our own strength internally as a movement and as coops.
John McNamara: Yeah, and I think the real danger is of the success of it is other people coming into the employee, so-called employee ownership field like KKR with, you know, which..is how that even gets called employee ownership I don't know. Another people that are basically trying to use ways of sort of, you know, making them some more of a marketing tool to make themselves not look like, you know, extractors, I guess for lack of a better word. And so we need to, yeah, we need to really always be out there making sure that co ops and worker coops specifically have a space carved out for a very real and form of employee ownership for worker ownership.
Jim Johnson: Workplace democracy - don't settle for less than workplace democracy. That be my final word because that's where a lot of these half measures like ESOPs, that's where they seem to lose it. Right? And the sort of cultural empowerment and enfranchisement that comes from growing into a workplace democracy, there's just no substitute. We're down to..we're at 830 Eastern Time, Ajowa. So I want to be mindful, Chris, that maybe we need to sign off. Ajowa is asking, "it seems there's greater need for co-ops now to organize, perhaps unskilled workers to utilize some of that money out there." Yeah.."a conversation to unify interest and explore ideas both here and in Canada." Well, maybe those are items for the bike rack for us to follow up on. I think those are both big topics in themselves.
John McNamara: Definitely. People are going to be in Chicago for the worker coop conference. I'll be there and I'd be happy to have side conversations about that. I think if there was, you know, interest to revisit what that would look like and..I'd certainly be happy to have that or be part of that conversation.
Jim Johnson: Excellent. Well, that's what we like to do in the Geo Collective is start conversations and ask evocative questions without knowing the answersf course. So, anyway, Chris, do we need to fold it up?
Chris Preciado: Sure. Yeah. Thanks everyone for joining. If this conversation was of value to you, you can donate at geo.coop/donate. And if you want to get involved at GEO, whether it's writing or helping the collective out in other ways, you can..whether you got an article that you want to write on your own, you want help to write an article or someone else's article, GEO always welcome volunteers and you can get in contact through editors@geo.coop. Thank you, everyone and good night.
Citations
GEO Collective (2024). Remembering the Democracy At Work Network. Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO). https://geo.coop/articles/remembering-democracy-work-network
Comments
John McNamara
August 23, 2024, 10:30 pm
I want to be clear that I think that the landscape today has changed a lot since DAWN was planned. There are a lot of co-op developers now that engage in worker co-op work. Project Equity started in 2014 and the Main Street Employee Ownership Act in 2018 has helped push more co-op development centers towards worker co-ops. Likewise CooperationWorks! provides training with some focus on worker co-ops (although nothing like the certification program of DAWN) and could provide more if there is demand for it. Further the revised "Madison Principles" now the "CooperationWorks! Principles" provide much better guidance to developers including how to encourage worker dignity and support worker organizing. The one aspect that is missing is the place for comradery as DAWN Peer TAs. The sense of place (of TAs with direct lived experience in worker co-ops) that DAWN provided was important.
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