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I fumbled into collective entrepreneurship the hard way. After 7 years of operation, our business hit a hurdle, a moment of financial hardship. We did what many owners do, we moved to protect the team from what was going on versus dealing with it collectively. Even though everyone was impacted, the situation was not shared thereby creating much frustration, anxiety and misinformation for the team and great stress for the owners. The strong relationships that we had developed began to fray.

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As CEO for over 30 years of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (now Inclusiv), I worked to create the CDFI Fund at the U.S. Treasury. I regard the growth of the CDFI Fund as one of the foremost domestic policy achievements of the last half-century.

The Brightly^® franchise isn’t the first family of worker cooperatives to utilize a single brand. In fact, CFL spent years researching strategies used by the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives and Mondragon federation to help worker co-ops sprout and thrive under the banner of a strong brand name. But the nascent enterprise is the first legal worker cooperative franchise in the United States.

2019 Results - The world’s top 300 cooperatives and mutuals operate in various economic sectors, but this year’s results show an increased presence of the insurance sector in the Top 300: insurance accounts for 39%; agriculture 31.7%; wholesale and retail trade 17.7%; banking and financial services 7%; industry and utilities 1%; and health, education and social care 1%. There is also new data on employment and cooperative types.

During our lifetimes we’ve observed founders grooming potential future generations of leaders including us. Today David, 73, is stepping back. Jeff, 63, Robin, 52, and Hilary, 51, are transitioning to senior leadership.

Their ascendance is having a cascading effect. Andrew, 30, has lived at Magic for almost a decade, half of it as a fellow. He now coordinates

“A lot of times, selling to the public doesn’t necessarily make the company or its service a better experience for the user or the workers,” Start.coop founder Greg Brodsky previously told TechCrunch. “Often it gets worse. It’s only really better for the investor.”

For over a quarter of a century, Orca Books has been a mainstay of Olympia, Washington. It is the largest locally owned bookstore in the community. The "retail apocalypse" hit local bookstores first, but Orca survived. Orca Books has persevered through power outages, earthquakes, and even blizzards. The store is ready for a new type of ownership that reflects its long relationship with the community it serves (from Bellingham to Portland and the Olympic peninsula).

The first thing we realized back in 2014 was that we needed a better system to organize the paid and pro-bono work.  We decided to adapt an abandoned open-source governance model and orient it towards our ideology and needs (the original had a strongly traditional “startup” flavor). We discussed it for more than a year but, due to lack of engagement, we never arrived at a final version.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Massol Deyá acknowledges that people wanted to be helped by their fellow townspeople. “They discovered soon that the true meaning of ‘just recovery’ is that the resources end up providing services that change the reality of constant vulnerability,” he said.

New Economy Project and NYC Community Land Initiative recently wrapped up a dynamic, two-year community land trust (CLT) learning exchange for NYC groups. In November, we took our learning on the road, visiting mission-aligned CLTs in the Greater Boston CLT Network - the first in a series of planned visits.

Click through the slideshow for highlights!

See the slide show at New Economy Project

Hernandez last worked at a corporate agriculture farm in 2008 as a contracted farmer. That year, he was ordered to work in the fields in the middle of winter, with snow on the ground. He got frostbite on his feet after hours of pruning and spent seven months in the hospital as a result. Eventually, he had parts of his feet surgically removed. He now uses prosthetics and walks with a cane.

“If they’d listened to me at first, it wouldn’t have happened,” Hernandez says. “That’s what happens [in a corporate farm].” 

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“We wanted to explore all the different ways we can break the system that’s keeping all our money in Wall Street,” says Pat Thompson, one of the offshoot’s founders. One result is a community investment group called Local Dough. Each month, its 23 members pool their contributions to invest in local businesses that support community and sustainability. Their first two investments are solar projects. The first, Cooperative Energy Futures, is a community energy cooperative that builds solar gardens atop urban structures.