Built for This Moment: Organizing for a Stronger Cooperative Movement with Esteban Kelly

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Welcome to Cooperative Developer Stories, a Cooperation Works podcast.
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I'm your host, Tara Williams.
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Can't wait to hear your stories.
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Hey folks, and welcome to Co-op Developer Stories, the podcast where we get curious, get honest, and get inspired by the people building the cooperative economy, one community at a time.
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October is Co-op Month, and this year's theme is built for this moment.
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Throughout October, we're exploring what that means for cooperative developers and the broader movement, and how we can build on what we've learned to create a stronger cooperative economy.
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Joining me again is co-host Alex Stone, Executive Director of Cooperation Works.
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So far in our Co-op Month series, we've explored two important perspectives.
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Dr.
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Jessica Gordon-Empard reminded us that cooperation has a long and powerful history and that there is so much we can learn from people and communities who came before us.
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Doug O'Brien from US Co-ops helped us look at the larger ecosystem that supports cooperative development and why advocacy, relationships, resources, and cooperation across sectors are so important.
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Today we're building on those conversations with Esteban Kelly.
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Esteban brings a perspective on cooperative leadership, organizing, and the work of building a movement that reflects the people and communities it serves.
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If cooperatives are truly built for this moment, what does that ask of us as developers, leaders, and movement builders?
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How do we turn our values into action?
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And how do we make sure we're building a movement that is ready for the challenges and opportunities ahead?
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Esteban and Alex, welcome to Co-op Developer Stories.
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Let's get into it.
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All right.
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Welcome to the podcast.
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Before we jump into the hard questions, can you please do a quick intro?
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Who are you?
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Where you're joining from?
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Who do you work for?
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How long have you been working with co-ops?
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My name is Esteban Kelly.
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I've been involved in cooperatives since the late 90s and so there's, so your question is intimidating to me.
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But nowadays I am a board member with many different cooperative organizations at different scales.
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I've founded different kinds of cooperatives over my years working in the field.
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And currently I'm the executive director for the US Federation of Worker Co-ops.
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I've been doing that since 2015.
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At that point, I was midway through a maybe 15 year arc of time with a worker co-op that I co-founded called AORTA, which stands for Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance.
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And prior to that, I'd actually been on the board for the Worker Co-op Federation while I was working at a grocery food co-op.
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worker member as part of the management collective that ran the consumer-owned grocery store.
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And I've been involved in different cooperative sectors and scales and initiatives around development.
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I'm currently on the board for the International Worker Co-op Association called CCOPA.
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Yeah, there's different elements.
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elements to this, depending on what's helpful and where we want to go.
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I'll say, I mentioned my background in the co-op I founded, Aorta, which I only left recently less than two years ago.
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But because a lot of that involved being a consultant and a political educator and being embedded in different kinds of organizations who were learning from or trying to implement
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elements of democracy or conflict resolution or organizational planning and development that was based on kind of mission and vision and aspirational principles.
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And many of those were cooperatives.
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Many of the groups that we worked with were co-ops.
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In fact, that's
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That was our first client base was working with youth and student run co-ops and a lot of student groups on campuses and then eventually a lot of consumer co-ops and worker co-ops in our early years.
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This podcast is about co-op developer stories, but we can't do this work alone.
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Co-op developers are part of a much bigger cooperative ecosystem.
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And we'll get into some questions asking about that in a minute.
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But before we get into that, can you tell us what's your why?
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How do you find your way here originally?
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What keeps you in this work and leading this work in the way that you have?
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I love these questions.
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They are rich, you realize that, right?
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That could be the only question.
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Okay, well, okay, finding my way into it.
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So some of this is, I got involved at a young enough age.
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I was a teenager when I enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley
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and they happen to have the largest student cooperative in the country.
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And it was on the heels of doing a lot of organizing in adjacent movements.
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So collectives, flat, small local organizations, many of them were, or not even organizations, they were like informal for the most part.
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Some of them were, I guess, a little formalized, but a lot of it came out of
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anarchist organizing, which was fairly prominent in the 1990s.
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And a lot of it was inspired by the work that the Zapatistas had been involved in, particularly since January 1st, 1994, when NAFTA was enacted.
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And they, as a counterpoint to that, kind of launched an opening salvo about their
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politics of an alternative of what it looked like to not give in to corporate and colonial consolidation and a lot of the capitalist ways of organizing our system.
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So that was inspiring to myself, a lot of my friends in New York where I was growing up, the suburbs of New York.
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And through that, there were many different kinds of groups.
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that were part of a spokes council model.
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So we had a collective of collectives, and some of those separate groups were, we had a chapter of Food Not Bombs, there was an anti-racist group, there was a feminist reading group, there was an animal rights group, and there was an anarchist reading group or study group where I first learned, I guess, a lot about the political history of cooperatives and
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times throughout history and around the world where they had been established, including some of the work that the Sapatistos were getting involved in, and later on the landless workers movement in Brazil, kind of learning about that.
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So some of that history and theory led me into really looking at what now I would understand as solidarity economics.
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I guess I didn't come across that term until a little bit later.
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But people were writing about or sharing case studies from history or different parts of the world about cooperatives and cooperative economies and things like worker or community ownership.
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And to me, it just felt like another wonderful abstract theoretical idea that maybe someday we'll get after some hypothetical revolution.
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And then I got
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got involved in cooperatives out at Berkeley.
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You know, initially they were in the background, you know, that's where the best parties were or whatever.
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I was living in the dorms at first.
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You know, like all the interesting people are up at the co-ops.
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And so I really associated with not just the housing, but a kind of a community there where there was a lot of like cultural work happening, dance parties, vegan potlucks, whatever, all of that stuff.
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in fact, later on when I moved into one of the houses, we had hosted trainings.
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I think it was like there was a bunch of environmental, like forest defender kind of work happening, and we happened to have a giant redwood in our front yard.
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And
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We allowed an environmental group to come and do trainings on how to do tree climbing and how to set up a tree sit to defend some of the old growth, the last remaining old growth forests up in Northern California.
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So it was like immediately my understanding of cooperatives was fundamentally tied with, first of all, historical lineage.
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an aspirational, some might say prefigurative idea of what do cooperatives offer for building a world that is not only just, but sustainable and meaningful and joyful and where democracy, I mean, to whatever extent we believe in democracy, that the only way for that to be embedded in our everyday lives is through economics.
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And that has everything to do with cooperatives as one of the key vehicles for making that possible.
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I guess I was able to sort of see, I had this juxtaposition where I was in high school learning about these models.
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And I'm trying to be careful with my words because I don't mean to imply that it was political education that was skewed toward cooperatives.
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Cooperatives were in the background, but I encountered them in learning about kind of anarchist models and economics and politics and
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all of that stuff of philosophy, like political philosophy.
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And then I was materially and directly involved, signed a lease in a very large and well established student owned and operated cooperative where I as one of what, like 12, 1300 students, we employed a bunch of grownups who were
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paying for their kids to go through college and they weren't anarchists, they weren't hippies, they weren't students, they were our employees.
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And that was a really powerful thing to realize at the age of 18, not to mention the complexity.
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So in contrast to the collectives I was involved in where you could experience rotating responsibilities and facilitation and consensus and decision making and all of those things.
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Then I was involved in this cooperative that had highly sophisticated logistics and governance because there's no way to survive.
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At the time, the co-ops had been around for over 70 years by the time I moved in, and that was a long time ago, so they're coming up on 100 years.
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You don't get that resilience without really having some systems figured out that work.
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And initially for me, it was as basic as passing the health inspections from the city in order to operate the industrial kitchens because these cooperatives on average had 50 people living in them.
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On the lower end, maybe 20 something and on the upper end, 100 or even 150 people in some of these houses, not to mention the apartment complexes where people kind of lived in
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groups of two to four, but those buildings themselves often have hundreds of people living in them.
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My final semester was in, I kind of graduated up into that at some point.
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So it's a level of, our board president, in other words, who was a student, was negotiating with the University of California about,
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like the leases to the deeds to the land.
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The student co-ops had built new construction in the 70s on top of land that was actually owned by the University of California.
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It's a land grant university.
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And so just all of the complexity and sophistication that was involved in everything from doing HR and overseeing a general manager and a staff of over 25 full-time adults and all of their needs.
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evaluations, et cetera, all of that, down to negotiating with one of the largest universities in the country, not to mention powerful ones.
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And then everything from the just municipal bureaucracy, which a lot of which we gained a respect for that.
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It wasn't just
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the health department is threatening to shut us down because they found rat poop in the pantry or whatever.
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It's like, oh, there's a reason it matters that we have those standards.
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And it forces us at the age of 20, 21 to step it up.
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Like we need to pass this inspection.
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This isn't like a random set of goals that we just invented.
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And
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Anyway, so it did give me a pretty strong appreciation for those things.
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I'll just say that the juxtaposition of what I saw happening, particularly in the 90s with a lot of righteous, small scale, hands on DIY anarchist projects that did not really have assets, staying power resilience, it was very ephemeral.
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And on the other hand, this highly structured, highly sophisticated economic
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this whole business complex that had provided affordable housing, healthy, nutritious and affordable meals, work for hundreds of students and dozens of grownups.
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And then a whole culture, I mean, we had to learn about like earthquake safety.
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I mean, this is not, again, this is in California, there's like very sophisticated things we were navigating here.
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And yet in that day-to-day, there was very little articulation or recognition that what we were doing was prefigurative or like radical in any way.
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It was just like, this is fun, this is great, this works well, this is affordable.
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And so I pretty much since that time when I had this realization, I was like, wait a minute, the thing I was like already living in
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in one of these houses at the time when the light bulb went off and I was like, the thing I've been reading about is, it's actually here.
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And it just really stood out to me that a lot of the people who are yearning for this new society and a different economics, it just, it's like, it may as well be Shangri-La for them.
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And yet I was probably,
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like still digesting the food that I had eaten from and like sleeping under the roof of a thing that was a manifestation of all those ideas.
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So to me, it really lit a fire under my butt to both make sure that those two worlds were aware of each other.
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Like how are we building anything useful or impactful without just a baseline level of solidarity and awareness that these things exist?
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the theoretical people need to know about the practitioners and the practitioners need to be pushed and driven and inspired by knowledge production and vision and like what kind of world we're trying to build.
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Otherwise, yeah, you end up with a novel project that just lives in the Bay Area and it's not what our society looks like at large.
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And so that's what I've been trying to do ever since then.
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Timing wise, I had the good fortune to graduate
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just a year or so prior to the founding of the Worker Co-op Federation.
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And at the time I'd been working with NASCO, which is a association for primarily youth and student controlled businesses, but not exclusively.
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I think a lot of it, there's also a lot of community projects.
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I think the distinction is that many of them operate on a communal equity basis and so
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It's not like a limited equity cooperative where you have your own unit that you control and can sell or accrue wealth building through that process.
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You might buy in, you have to, you buy in your share to enter, but then you sell that share when you leave to the next person and that keeps it permanently affordable.
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the vast majority of the members of this organization, it's present in both Canada and the US, so it's not a national organization, but we called it binational.
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But because so many of them were students, and not just students, but most of them were undergraduate students, 80% of them at least, it really meant that we needed to perfect something about education and training.
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So that's what NASCO was set up to do, was really
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what is good governance?
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How do you run meetings effectively?
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How do you pass along institutional knowledge?
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How do you set up, yeah, everything from maintenance systems, because you might be the group of students that are there the year that the fridge dies or the...
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furnace or whatever it is that needs replacement.
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But everything from that all the way up to just basic decision making and facilitation and really learning how to do that with a diverse group.
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And I think that's what stood out to me compared to being in movement spaces where everyone is sort of ideologically on the same page.
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But I moved into my first
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co-op, and one of my housemates was a Navy SEAL.
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I don't know if it was active.
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I think he was former or in between or in college.
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I don't know what his deal was, but he was a Navy SEAL.
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A tall, strapping white guy, and his girlfriend was a very short Southeast Asian woman, and they had different politics.
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I mean, it's just like what we're talking about when we talk about democracy and decision-making and what it means to set up systems, governance, conflict resolution that can account for that.
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I think it's different than the kind of warped perspective that gets broadcast on social media and things like that.
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These are not, in other words, inherently ideologically left projects.
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And what it means actually taken to an extreme, what a very radical vision for transforming our economy means is
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It means an economy is including everyone.
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It's not a social project for just people who are like you and share your culture and politics.
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It's like, what does it mean to design a world where we actually all have a stake and a say?
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And I think that's very much in contrast to consolidation and oligarchy and corporate capitalism and the things that we're seeing right now.
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Now we don't even own our own music we like, everything is rented and borrowed and streamed.
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And so
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Yeah, that's I think been inspiring to me.
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I'll just say, sorry, I digress.
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I was working for NASCO.
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I was working for NASCO and there was an opportunity to represent youth and students at the founding conference for what would become the US Federation of Worker Co-ops.
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So I was invited to be on a panel with Frank Adams.
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It was like a whole intergenerational panel and then participate and it
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It felt empowering to have a voice, which at the time I was like, wow, this is cool that I'm being included.
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And now that I'm older, I'm like, actually it's messed up that there weren't more young people being represented like that.
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I should have been given 10X votes to represent how many people and how many perspectives I was bringing to the table for folks who weren't present in the room.
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But that was, I think, another key event that kind of set me on the course of where I ended up.
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in life.
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So I see a lot of my work as bringing, not just bringing those worlds together, but we got to mainstream the solidarity economy.
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And I understand my role formally is with worker cooperatives, and I have obviously a lot of experience with that.
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But my role is much broader than that.
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And even in my cooperative career, like I've spent a majority of it in food co-ops and housing co-ops, and I don't even think I've spent half of it in worker.
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Well, at this point, probably I have.
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So
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As an educator, political educator, facilitator, and someone who brings vision, strategy, and leadership to what it is we're trying to do, I see my work as demystifying this very technical, jargony, nerdy world of cooperative economics, demystifying that to political movements and mainstream institutions, politicians, the media, whoever, academics who aren't studying, who aren't specializing in
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the solidarity economy, they need to understand this, whether that's business school or law or any number of disciplines.
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And it's, I think, part of how we build the level of the volume of power and scale that we need in order to really shape a society that can actually help us survive.
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Thanks so much for sharing all that, Esteban.
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It's a.
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I've talked to you a little bit about some of your background before, but that was a way deeper dive and really great to learn more about your why.
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And I'll definitely ask you about what housing, what houses you lived in the Berkeley system later.
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But yeah.
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In the meantime, during your career, obviously you've been all over the cooperative movement in so many roles and you have a really rich breadth of perspectives on that.
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But I'm wondering if you can talk a bit more about how throughout your career you've supported, built and connected to cooperative development, whatever that looks like in the various roles you've played.
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Yeah, it's looked like a lot of different things.
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I mean, I mentioned the cooperative education, which that really was my entry point.
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I think it was pretty reluctant
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that I've wound up more on the business side because I really started in education and governance.
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And it just turns out that through that process, I saw how, whether it was cooperative boards or some of these support organizations and their governance who were really trying to figure out field building, I saw how much of that work needed.
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It just kept circling back to cooperative development.
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and not just the stewardship of the things that already exist.
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But but how do we build out and expand into more of the economy and and and more coverage for the spectrum of things that we need in our lives, you know, economically.
00:23:29.000 --> 00:23:42.000
And yeah, I think while I was while I was with NASCO, I was sort of mentored by by Jim Jones and started learning more about
00:23:42.000 --> 00:24:01.000
about financing, about capital, financing, cooperative development, and the whole ecosystem of groups who are involved in technical assistance, the CDFI, the community development financial institutions and cooperative banks and other lenders.
00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:08.000
and including the grassroots members themselves, whether they're coming together for a grocery store or housing co-op.
00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:14.000
It was really interesting considering what a small part of the broader cooperative sector they are.
00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:26.000
It's really interesting having that early education around cooperative development come from that sector because a lot of what they were doing was leveraging the assets that they had accrued.
00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:30.000
Again, I was in one of the oldest ones, but they'd spent,
00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:38.000
At the time where I was getting started at this point in my career, they'd spent 70, 80 years building up equity in properties.
00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:50.000
So we're not talking about small businesses who maybe have a pizza oven or something and a lease, or maybe manage to buy a small bakery.
00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.000
I mean, we're talking about multimillion dollar homes.
00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:56.000
all over two different countries.
00:24:56.000 --> 00:24:59.000
And so I really did have like a broad perspective.
00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:01.000
I was like, do you know what's possible?
00:25:01.000 --> 00:25:16.000
Through, you know, just getting a group of students to go to the bank and refinance, suddenly there's a ton of cash that can be used to fight gentrification, to purchase more properties or to buy
00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:21.000
green space for farms or community gardens, so many other things that our movement needs.
00:25:21.000 --> 00:25:37.000
And this is what I mean about this huge realization where I saw on the one hand movements and the ways that they were kind of adapting to the nonprofit industrial complex and a lot of the trappings of philanthropy and funding cycles.
00:25:37.000 --> 00:25:45.000
And on the other side, the solidarity economy where I was like, there's literally billions of assets that are just hanging out.
00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:52.000
in the cooperative field, not to mention the solidarity economy when you get into land trust and some of these other elements.
00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:57.000
And so that for me was instructive.
00:25:57.000 --> 00:26:10.000
A lot of it was by listening in and being part of governance and conversations as a facilitator in the rooms when people were thinking through their strategic plans and things related to cooperative development.
00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:14.000
And then otherwise being involved as a
00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:20.000
as a staff person who was giving technical assistance to cooperatives across two different countries.
00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:39.000
And then, of course, through that opportunity, I got to learn about things happening all around the world, going to ICA conferences and the International Cooperative Alliance, which is the largest nonprofit or non-governmental organization in the world, representing a billion members of cooperatives and credit unions.
00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:42.000
It's pretty
00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:58.000
when we're trying to think about scale, the moments where I find myself kind of sharing stories with movement organizations and in other spaces about that scale.
00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:00.000
Because two things are true and they're a little bit contradictory.
00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:06.000
One is that we already have scale through the cooperative economy.
00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:09.000
It's responsible for
00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:16.000
a huge amount of the global agricultural system, a lot of the banking in the world.
00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:26.000
Again, it's not the corporate banks, but a lot of poor and working people, certainly farmers and peasants around the world, like they're banked through credit unions.
00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:34.000
Even in this country, which turns out we're still mostly working class in this country, there's over 100 million members of credit unions.
00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:36.000
And so that's
00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:39.000
That's true on the one hand that we already have scale.
00:27:39.000 --> 00:27:45.000
And on the other hand, that scale has not seemed to matter.
00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:53.000
It has not prevented the consolidation of what is now an emerging global oligarchy.
00:27:53.000 --> 00:28:01.000
And through that consolidation, their ability to kind of co-opt and
00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:07.000
hijack democratic systems and processes and governments and institutions all around the world.
00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:30.000
So there's something there that still needs to be kind of unlocked because it just isn't the case that merely by having a cooperative or let alone having it at scale globally or otherwise in any given local, you know, dense co-op, mature co-op ecosystem,
00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:34.000
it doesn't always translate into what we do with those cooperatives.
00:28:34.000 --> 00:28:56.000
How do we leverage the economic power into political power and show that we're not just, I think a lot of it is that we spent a lot of time, our movement spent a lot of time prior to us being involved in it, really introducing itself as an alternative
00:28:56.000 --> 00:29:03.000
And I led in the beginning by saying that I think what the work that I see us trying to do is to mainstream all of this.
00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:18.000
I think to whatever extent we sort of relegated to say, you go and have your mainstream grocery chain, we're just gonna be the first purveyors of granola and soy milk and tofu and organic vegetables in our little thing and we're not even contesting
00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:27.000
for how our food system, what our food system should look like, or what your behavior should be, or let alone that this is the model that should be mainstreamed.
00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:36.000
And you fast forward a couple decades, and in fact, those very things have been co-opted by one of the richest people in the world.
00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:42.000
I mean, this is Jeff Bezos now is the largest purveyor of organic food in the United States.
00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:50.000
through his acquisition of Whole Foods, which itself was modeled on grocery food co-ops, like literally from our movement.
00:29:50.000 --> 00:30:00.000
And even the organic movement, a lot of that came from Organic Valley and a lot of the work that they were doing, especially in the 80s and 90s.
00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:03.000
not to mention fair trade, which has been co-opted as well.
00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:06.000
And that comes out of equal exchange, which is a worker co-op.
00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:23.000
So these things, it's like, we're really good at innovating what is the socially responsible, ecologically sustainable, just way of providing goods and services and of doing business and setting up good jobs.
00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:29.000
But it's like, unless we mainstream that, it's just another thing that gets co-opted by these other systems.
00:30:29.000 --> 00:30:30.000
So
00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:35.000
We do need to be kind of contesting for power.
00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:51.000
Yeah, generally, I think being involved in the cooperative ecosystem through conferences, learning things through professional development, panels, sessions, really brass tacks workshops, all that stuff has been really helpful for me.
00:30:51.000 --> 00:30:59.000
Sometimes going to the pre-conferences where they'll do a deep dive intensive for current or aspiring cooperative developers.
00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:06.000
So yeah, I think I've had maybe a bit of a non-traditional entry point into cooperative development.
00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:11.000
The other one is just by being a really involved member.
00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:27.000
In my grocery food co-op, which I worked in for eight years as part of the staff collective, which was in charge of management before there was a general manager there or other things that have happened since my time there.
00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:37.000
Learning a lot, consultants would come in or we would be talking with lenders about our pro forma, about sales projections.
00:31:37.000 --> 00:31:52.000
I mean, even when we were looking at expanding and looking over market analysis of how many blocks from where we used to be for 40 years, how many blocks away from that can we even go and still be successful and viable?
00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:55.000
And sometimes kind of going
00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:02.000
toe to toe with the consultants who often don't understand the context of the neighborhood.
00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:15.000
And they were, yeah, there's a lot of stuff related to, I guess the point I want to make is that was an instructive time for me learning about cooperative development.
00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:24.000
And it also revealed to me that expertise, the limitations of expertise and how expertise, what's
00:32:24.000 --> 00:32:34.000
held up as expertise often ignores how important embedded wisdom and knowledge is.
00:32:34.000 --> 00:32:50.000
And that meant that there was a lot of racist and classist assumptions that went into the economic models from the consultants who did not live in Philadelphia, where I'm based and where a lot of this work was happening.
00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:52.000
And
00:32:52.000 --> 00:32:55.000
they said all up and down, you cannot put your store there.
00:32:55.000 --> 00:32:57.000
It needs to be closer to these white affluent neighborhoods.
00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:00.000
And we were like, you don't understand.
00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:02.000
Not just on a justice basis.
00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:04.000
We're like, you don't understand what the demand is.
00:33:04.000 --> 00:33:06.000
This is going to be fine.
00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:18.000
And they're like, no, Fast forward to us keeping it truly one block from our previous location, further into a working class, multiracial, but primarily predominantly black.
00:33:18.000 --> 00:33:21.000
neighborhood, which is where we had been situated.
00:33:21.000 --> 00:33:28.000
And we, I think for five or six years in a row, set the highest record for sales growth.
00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:33.000
I mean, we just outpaced the sales of any food co-op in the country.
00:33:33.000 --> 00:33:37.000
So there's no amount of consultants that would have known that or predicted that.
00:33:37.000 --> 00:33:40.000
And we certainly didn't predict that we would be smashing.
00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:42.000
We didn't even know what the records were.
00:33:42.000 --> 00:33:44.000
But we did know
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:52.000
that it's kind of the marriage of technical expertise, best practices, the things that are kind of abstract, white label bound in a book or a manual.
00:33:52.000 --> 00:34:04.000
It's the marrying of that and local kind of situated knowledge that unlocks real, like the real strategy between like what's going to be relevant.
00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:07.000
All the theory in the world is in books.
00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:08.000
It exists.
00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:10.000
It's every ground.
00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:11.000
well tread.
00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:20.000
And so having the humility to realize that it's not about inventing new models in theory, it's about the praxis.
00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:34.000
Like what about being a practitioner and how you marry models and approaches and theories and how you marry that to
00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:39.000
the actual context of what you're trying to do and what's going to work for that specific group.
00:34:39.000 --> 00:35:04.000
And I think part of why we found a lot of success, certainly when I was doing this as a consultant in Aorta, we found a lot of success with cooperatives is because there's already a model that presumes that the unit of the person, the member, the individual matters, that there's a voice behind
00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:28.000
that shareholder and that there's a there's a return on your investment on cooperative education that like the more the more legible your systems are, the more people understand risks, understand finances, including all the people who are like, Yuck, finances, numbers.
00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:30.000
But you can get
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:43.000
Like if co-op people can get their folks to really understand numbers and finances, then I think we do have a lot of hope for how we can mainstream this for the rest of the world.
00:35:43.000 --> 00:36:00.000
But being able to pair some of those different pieces so that the folks who are stewarding and making decisions or assessing the challenges and risks of any given situation are the same ones that are weighing in on where we go.
00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:03.000
something about that is particularly helpful for resilience.
00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:08.000
So there's really close ties between the worker co-op movement and co-op development.
00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:14.000
Can you speak a little bit about where you see the opportunities for these groups to work together?
00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:23.000
When I say co-op development to you, what does that mean to you?
00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:28.000
I don't see a difference between the worker co-op movement and co-op development.
00:36:28.000 --> 00:36:51.000
And I think that that is, sorry, I'm not to say that they're coincident, but I see different from credit unions and a lot of other, most sectors, cooperative sectors in the US, they're doing stewardship of something that exists, something that's already at scale, agricultural co-ops, rural electric co-ops, whatever.
00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:53.000
But I'm not picking on anyone.
00:36:53.000 --> 00:36:54.000
That just is true.
00:36:54.000 --> 00:37:01.000
Whereas in the worker co-op, certainly the worker co-op movement, we're all development oriented.
00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:03.000
There's nowhere to go but up.
00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:12.000
When I started, when I entered this movement, I mean, we probably had like barely 150 worker co-ops in the whole United States.
00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:19.000
And so, yeah, there's a reason why for a few generations we're going to be in a development mindset.
00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:23.000
So that really characterizes the kind of
00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:31.000
culture and the leadership and the disposition when we come to vision and strategy of the worker co-op movement in the United States.
00:37:31.000 --> 00:37:33.000
I don't think that's as true in other parts of the world.
00:37:33.000 --> 00:37:50.000
And in fact, even though we have a lot of catch up to do, the feedback I received from friends and colleagues overseas is that they experience our leadership as very entrepreneurial, like as thinking about development in a way that
00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:51.000
just isn't true.
00:37:51.000 --> 00:38:03.000
Like they think about stewardship in the same way that a lot of the consumer and credit union co-ops in the United States do because it's already reached scale in so many parts of the world.
00:38:03.000 --> 00:38:08.000
So yeah, there's positive elements to it.
00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:19.000
I think it means that we tend to think more expansively because it's not like we're only trying to solve one piece around
00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:28.000
capital or one piece about a policy regulation or taxation or partnership with labor, we are constantly trying to solve all of it.
00:38:28.000 --> 00:38:41.000
And so there is this more open orientation to relationships and partnerships and being like, oh, yeah, what can we learn from the union co-ops movement?
00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:46.000
What can we learn from the environmental justice movement where we're thinking about green jobs or we're thinking about
00:38:46.000 --> 00:39:10.000
electrification of the grid or weatherization and what does it look like that for the cooperative, the worker co-op community to offer a solution that dovetails with things that other people are doing, whether that's around work for returning citizens who sometimes are called formerly incarcerated people.
00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:13.000
And so what does that workforce
00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:20.000
opportunity look like where you might not be employable depending on what state you have a federal conviction on your record.
00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:23.000
Well, in a worker co-op, you can, you're self-employed.
00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:40.000
And similarly for immigrant movements who are working with domestic workers or restaurant workers, there's a lot of space for innovation and creative thinking.
00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:42.000
I would say probably to a fault.
00:39:42.000 --> 00:39:55.000
In our sector, by which I mean there isn't a lot of, here's this thing we figured out, now let's just do it a bunch of times and get to either scale or have more of an impact that way.
00:39:55.000 --> 00:40:09.000
It's very much like an orientation where we feel accountable, and it's true, we are, to being responsive to whatever the intake pipeline is.
00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:11.000
The person who wants to start a business,
00:40:11.000 --> 00:40:15.000
with three of their best friends and one cousin or whatever it is.
00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:18.000
And then we put all the energy into these micro enterprises.
00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:35.000
And there really isn't a lot of thinking on the development side of what does it mean to just create the jobs and have hundreds of people at a time enter into the cooperative movement as workers.
00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:41.000
I see the employee ownership mostly on the ESOP side doing a lot of that.
00:40:41.000 --> 00:40:42.000
Not for good reasons.
00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:52.000
I mean, there's no agency for the workers that just like employee ownership happens to them because their boss made a decision and they set up a retirement plan and it's just a workplace benefit.
00:40:52.000 --> 00:40:55.000
It's basically a fancy 401k plan.
00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:57.000
And it's awesome.
00:40:57.000 --> 00:41:05.000
And it's not because of a thing that the workers themselves thought about or elected to do.
00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:10.000
So I think the cooperative development
00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:22.000
A lot of it comes from, I think in some ways, I said that my skilling up in co-op development was a little quirky, but in some ways I think that's common.
00:41:22.000 --> 00:41:36.000
Like I think that a lot of people have their own, this like idiosyncratic journey where you're sort of mentored up as much as we have fellowships and cohorts and things like that.
00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:38.000
It very much is
00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:40.000
kind of an idiosyncratic journey.
00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:48.000
Whereas if you look at the way that other professionals, accountants or lawyers or whatever, are trained, like it's very regimented.
00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:50.000
You move through these steps and these credentials.
00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:56.000
You know the institutions, I mean, certainly in the case of law schools or whatever, of how you move through that pipeline.
00:41:56.000 --> 00:41:59.000
And I don't know that we have that yet.
00:41:59.000 --> 00:42:07.000
Up to and including the lineup, like a dozen of the largest co-op development organizations and
00:42:07.000 --> 00:42:09.000
We have different methodologies.
00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:11.000
There's different approach with different sectors.
00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:24.000
I mean, not even, I'm still not just talking about the worker co-op, but yeah, like the groups in cooperation works, often state or regional co-op development centers, they're cross-sector.
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:25.000
So there's a lot of things going on.
00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:31.000
I mean, it's I think it's common that it's the bespoke journey.
00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:33.000
And I think the
00:42:33.000 --> 00:42:38.000
which is fun and beautiful and wonderful, and there's a lot of relationship building that happens as a result of it.
00:42:38.000 --> 00:42:47.000
What gets difficult is that that's mirrored in the development projects themselves, where there's no reason for that to be idiosyncratic.
00:42:47.000 --> 00:42:50.000
And currently it is.
00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:53.000
And by the way, I think we've learned that from the grocery food co-ops.
00:42:53.000 --> 00:43:08.000
I think that a lot of that has been this idiosyncratic development model where you are expected to quarterback the whole process of organizing your community, signing up people for membership, rallying for your capital campaign.
00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:12.000
You tag in consultants, but the consultants are not the people on the ground doing that with you.
00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:14.000
They're there to help.
00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:18.000
And right now, I think it's holding back the worker co-op
00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:23.000
movement from the kind of development that I see as possible.
00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:41.000
If we're able to figure out ways that don't require founders to be this like the entrepreneur, the small business entrepreneur who's going to quarterback the whole process and here's a bunch of toolkits and resources and trainings and webinars that we can throw at you.
00:43:41.000 --> 00:43:48.000
I think we need to figure out institutional partnership where there could be incubation, there can be more of a workforce development approach.
00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:55.000
and things that maybe go beyond what we've been able to figure out by partnering with community-based organizations in the nonprofit sector.
00:43:55.000 --> 00:43:57.000
Do you have a favorite cooperative principle?
00:43:57.000 --> 00:44:08.000
A lot of the way I think about the principles is they kind of flow into-- it's like when there's those terraced waterfalls where one cascades into another pool or a ledge and then that cascades into the next one.
00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:16.000
I think they're sequenced in a very deliberate order where you can't get to principle six or seven without
00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:18.000
the first ones.
00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:42.000
But I like the coupling of Democratic member control with education, principle five, because it's like you actually, it's important that you have the control to make direct decisions or indirect, by the way, is also democratic.
00:44:42.000 --> 00:44:46.000
and what most co-ops do about things.
00:44:46.000 --> 00:44:49.000
But it's so important that that's coupled with the orientation and the information.
00:44:49.000 --> 00:44:56.000
It's irresponsible to have all of the power of whether it's the sledge hammer or the scalpel.
00:44:56.000 --> 00:45:06.000
It's inappropriate to have that power if you're not appropriately educated about context, about risk, about everything from the boring fiduciary responsibility stuff.
00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:09.000
down to business stuff like where is this going?
00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:10.000
Are we going to be outcompeted?
00:45:10.000 --> 00:45:16.000
Are we going to have to like to really have all that information prior to weighing in on a thing?
00:45:16.000 --> 00:45:36.000
And I think sometimes the way that we talk about democracy and some of those principles, you know, autonomy, independence, whatever, it has this like libertarian thread to it, which it's okay if you're a libertarian, that's fine, right or left, I don't care.
00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:56.000
I think because that is so part of the waters we swim in, we don't recognize that this is meant to be an exercise of collectivity, of coming together more so than your liberal, independent, free expression
00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:14.000
to make a ruckus or submit a proposal or whatever, that it actually is about, democracy is about groups of people coming together, not necessarily to just vote or say your piece, but actually to think together and problem solve like that a lot of democracy is listening and sharing that information.
00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:25.000
So for me, those principles are really closely tied and they're the most exciting part to me about what it is we're doing with cooperatives because they're a model for how I think we need to be
00:46:25.000 --> 00:46:28.000
designing a society at a larger scale.
00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:31.000
I love that idea of democracy being about mostly listening.
00:46:31.000 --> 00:46:33.000
I think we could all lean into that a little more.
00:46:33.000 --> 00:46:37.000
I'm wondering if you have a favorite CW principle for cooperative development.
00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:38.000
Do I have a favorite?
00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:44.000
You know, I have not spent enough time reviewing them to be like, here's my favorite, but I can do a rapid fire one.
00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:46.000
Like I can, it's funny to call it my favorite.
00:46:46.000 --> 00:46:49.000
I can like pick one.
00:46:49.000 --> 00:46:55.000
I think it would be, does build upon co-op development models mean
00:46:55.000 --> 00:47:00.000
a foundation and let's have that foundation matter and then build what happens next.
00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:04.000
I mean there's this other piece about recognize that development never ends.
00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:06.000
Those seem to be in
00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:09.000
conversation with each other also.
00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:12.000
Our principles are in conversation with each other.
00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:30.000
The build upon development models is recognizing that there can be an evolution in that, you know, definitely use tried and tested models and also recognize that depending on context and the time and who's involved, that there's always the opportunity to sort of create new models that will continue to meet the needs of whoever is starting to cooperate.
00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:32.000
Yeah, yeah.
00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:34.000
I think I'm going to go with #2.
00:47:34.000 --> 00:47:38.000
Build upon co-op development models.
00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:44.000
Again, it's this like fractal thing where I see it containing, it contains #9.
00:47:44.000 --> 00:47:45.000
Honor our history.
00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:49.000
Like you can't do #2 if you're not doing #9.
00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:52.000
Like that is a principle about how.
00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:54.000
It's not just an idea of honoring our history.
00:47:54.000 --> 00:47:56.000
It's saying like, here is how to make that actionable.
00:47:56.000 --> 00:47:58.000
Here's a way to approach doing the work.
00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:21.000
I think also number seven, like you can't help build the movement if you're not building upon, sorry, I think you can think you are, but I don't think there's any way to do useful, impactful, successful, to like gain traction, in other words, in building a movement if you're not building upon the models that have been, that have come previously.
00:48:21.000 --> 00:48:23.000
So yeah, I'm gonna go with that one.
00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:27.000
Couple more rapid fire questions for you here.
00:48:27.000 --> 00:48:30.000
Okay, cooperative with a hyphen or no hyphen.
00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:34.000
Co-op hyphen, cooperative no hyphen, always.
00:48:34.000 --> 00:48:36.000
And do not capitalize that second O.
00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:41.000
I swear to God, if I see it one more time.
00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:49.000
All right, if you were stranded on a deserted island with groups of people who wanted to start co-ops, what is one thing you wish you had with you?
00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:51.000
Food, yeah, food, water.
00:48:51.000 --> 00:48:59.000
I think breaking bread, first of all, like if you're hangry, you're stressed, you're on a deserted island, like food can go a long way.
00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:01.000
De-escalate people.
00:49:01.000 --> 00:49:09.000
We've all had that situation where you're traveling with too many folks and you're hunting for a restaurant that's gonna meet everyone's dietary needs or whatever, or that's still open.
00:49:09.000 --> 00:49:16.000
And it's like how much everything changes once the blood sugar, like once you have calories.
00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:24.000
So I think, yeah, having food is a good way to introduce the idea of, and it also, it builds itself.
00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:36.000
Like once you're making the meal, you're doing the meal prep, you're doing the cleanup, like there's things around all of the rituals that are food in that kind of context that I think naturally lend themselves into a cooperative.
00:49:36.000 --> 00:49:41.000
And then you just sort of say, hey, you guys, we could make this more of a structure and a routine.
00:49:41.000 --> 00:49:43.000
Yeah, that's what I would want.
00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:45.000
What's your favorite book on cooperatives?
00:49:45.000 --> 00:50:03.000
One book that I find instructive that comes to mind just because I was talking about this with a friend in Belgium recently, who's trying to set up cooperative housing for aging LGBTQ communities.
00:50:03.000 --> 00:50:06.000
Like there's like, he has this whole vision for this.
00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:15.000
And I was like, have you ever read books by the great thinker of politics and science fiction, Cory Doctorow?
00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:17.000
And he said, no.
00:50:17.000 --> 00:50:23.000
There's a lot of books that Cory Doctorow has written, including nonfiction ones that talk about cooperatives.
00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:29.000
In fact, he was one of the keynotes at the last international co-op conference in New Delhi.
00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:35.000
But he has a science fiction book called Walk Away, where
00:50:35.000 --> 00:50:43.000
I don't know that this is as helpful for developers other than maybe it helps you kind of vent or let off some steam.
00:50:43.000 --> 00:50:51.000
But there's a group of people who, it's a post-apocalyptic future where we don't own anything, whatever.
00:50:51.000 --> 00:50:58.000
So there's these like deserted zones and that are left to self-organize and do their own thing.
00:50:58.000 --> 00:50:59.000
It's basically going off grid.
00:50:59.000 --> 00:51:03.000
It's kind of like a burning man type of thing.
00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:14.000
And so through the eyes of the protagonist, you enter into one of these like co-op eco village kind of situations where, and this is like total anarchism.
00:51:14.000 --> 00:51:22.000
It's not, this is not a, by which I mean there's structures and systems, but it is not, it's not like ossified.
00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:23.000
There's not like bylaws and things.
00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:27.000
There's like, you know, loose principles and people vibe it out.
00:51:27.000 --> 00:51:30.000
but there's not equity and shares and things like that.
00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:39.000
But being able to see through the eyes of somebody who is like first a visitor and maybe gets a little more embedded in that structure.
00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:47.000
Like, yeah, I was like, oh, this feels exactly like the housing, exactly like the housing co-ops, including the characters that you come across.
00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:56.000
And the one thing that might be transferable for cooperative developers, depending on what sort of group you're dealing with, certainly food co-ops, housing co-ops, worker co-ops,
00:51:56.000 --> 00:52:02.000
some of these personality archetypes that you encounter come up as characters in the book.
00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:06.000
And I do find that helpful because it problematizes.
00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:09.000
It's not like, hey, we're all on board for this vision.
00:52:09.000 --> 00:52:11.000
It's like, there's going to be people who...
00:52:11.000 --> 00:52:17.000
are very selfish or who manipulate process or who disregard the rules, even though the rules exist.
00:52:17.000 --> 00:52:20.000
It's like the rules existing doesn't mean everyone's gonna follow them.
00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:26.000
So what does it mean to really envision and encounter the way some of these systems can end up breaking down into different ways?
00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:36.000
And then also like the risk assessment, like they have to deal in the context of that novel with external threats, which could be police, government, fascism, whatever.
00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:41.000
And I think that it's important for people to keep those things in mind instead of always having the rose-colored
00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:42.000
glasses on.
00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:47.000
So as a consultant, that's something that I try to impart to clients from time to time.
00:52:47.000 --> 00:52:51.000
That's the answer that comes to mind today.
00:52:51.000 --> 00:52:52.000
Awesome.
00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:58.000
And if you could hear one person's development story, whose would it be?
00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:01.000
Their story being a developer or their story being...
00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:02.000
Okay.
00:53:02.000 --> 00:53:05.000
Wow.
00:53:05.000 --> 00:53:12.000
You know, I have had occasion to chat with Steve Dawson from time to time.
00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:19.000
And including I saw him a week ago at a retreat because he just has a new book out.
00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:27.000
And he was involved in like so many things that are now just in things we take for granted as institutions.
00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:39.000
And yeah, I think spending more time and hearing a little more about the various things that he developed and why and what it meant for him to kind of be this Johnny Appleseed
00:53:39.000 --> 00:53:42.000
of specifically worker ownership.
00:53:42.000 --> 00:54:00.000
This is the person who was essentially a co-founder of Cooperative Home Care Associates, which is the largest worker co-op in the country, and later PHI, which is the kind of non-profit that is like an adjunct for a lot of the ongoing training for the healthcare workers in that system.
00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:05.000
And then also in partnership with the union inside, it's also the largest union co-op.
00:54:05.000 --> 00:54:07.000
in the country.
00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:24.000
But he was also involved in a predecessor to the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, which I co-founded back in 2012 or so, which was a group called PACE, which was maybe the Philadelphia Area Cooperative something.
00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:29.000
Yeah, he's just as a brilliant thinker who's too humble to tell his story all the time.
00:54:29.000 --> 00:54:31.000
I think that's my answer to that question.
00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:37.000
Are there any lasting pieces of wisdom that you'd like to leave in this space before we sign off?
00:54:37.000 --> 00:54:44.000
I'm looking at the Madison principles, or sorry, formerly known, looking at the Cooperation Works principles for co-op development.
00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:52.000
And I think this thing around achieve resiliency is popping up to me as a parting piece of wisdom because
00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:58.000
It's both something that we should look out for in our project and in the ecosystem overall.
00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:01.000
And what are the things we need to have in place to do that?
00:55:01.000 --> 00:55:04.000
Commitment to anti-oppression, anti-extension, right?
00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:05.000
There's all these pieces.
00:55:05.000 --> 00:55:07.000
You can't do that without feminism, et cetera.
00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:18.000
But today, I'm really thinking about how do you hold, how can you, there's a certain level of resiliency that only you can steward and control and nurture.
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:22.000
And I think sometimes that gets distorted into this idea of self-care, which is this
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:30.000
individualized Western kind of like new agey wellness thing where people want to sell you a Silicon Valley meditation app or something.
00:55:30.000 --> 00:55:45.000
But I think about like, what is your role in engaging in community, in getting, seeking out mentorship and then also offering it in breaking bread with friends, whatever it is that keeps you resilient.
00:55:45.000 --> 00:55:50.000
Like, I think all the
00:55:50.000 --> 00:56:13.000
all the signals and stories we get about burnout in movement spaces and in communities and on the left, especially given the information we're receiving on a daily basis and the times we're living through, really finding ways to take that seriously and to center that and to not have that just as an afterthought.
00:56:13.000 --> 00:56:26.000
It's like, if you're listening to this podcast, you matter, the work you're doing matters, and your spiritual, psychological, physical well-being matters, and it's embedded in a social context.
00:56:26.000 --> 00:56:37.000
So that's the one I would say, invite joy and your own kind of sustainability and resilience into the work you're doing and to not fetishize work.
00:56:37.000 --> 00:56:41.000
The reason we're doing all of this is about this broader
00:56:41.000 --> 00:56:47.000
community and what that, the healing work that puts out into the world.
00:56:47.000 --> 00:56:50.000
So that's the one I would leave as parting advice.
00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:59.000
And to the thing I always say when I'm giving speeches and stuff is sometimes cooperators forget to cooperate.
00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:02.000
And so I do think connect, like please connect.
00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:10.000
Like stop thinking that you were the first person to think of an idea because you had an insight or a light bulb go off, like see who else is working on it.
00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:20.000
ask how you can help, ask how you can plug in, see how we can build projects and institutions rather than everyone fracturing and having their own entrepreneurial ideas.
00:57:20.000 --> 00:57:26.000
Like how do we have a little more cohesion and consolidation so that we can have forward movement given the times that we're living in?
00:57:26.000 --> 00:57:29.000
And I think it has a lot to do with like membership.
00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:43.000
Like stop being stingy with dues dollars, with being members that donate, be sustainers, plug in, like little, every little bit that we can do to just like build our own ranks and shore them up and have them be more solid.
00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:49.000
And I think a lot of that has to do with like the mentality of belonging and of participation.
00:57:49.000 --> 00:57:53.000
And yeah, so promoting membership.
00:57:53.000 --> 00:57:59.000
And if there are conflicts about the organizations that you would want to be a member of,
00:57:59.000 --> 00:58:01.000
just remembering it's a co-op.
00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:13.000
So use the democratic process to articulate what you think should be different and reach out and talk to the people who are around and can or should be listening.
00:58:13.000 --> 00:58:18.000
So I think that's something that sometimes gets forgotten even in the co-op world.
00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:25.000
And if we can't practice that, then we have no business preaching it outside of the co-op universe.
00:58:25.000 --> 00:58:32.000
Esteban, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your perspective on the cooperative movement and the work ahead.
00:58:32.000 --> 00:58:39.000
One of the things we've been exploring throughout co-op month is what it really means to be built for this moment.
00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:40.000
In our conversation with Dr.
00:58:40.000 --> 00:58:46.000
Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, we looked at our history and the lessons we can carry forward.
00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:56.000
With Doug O'Brien from US Co-ops, we explored the organizations, partnerships, and resources that make cooperative development possible.
00:58:56.000 --> 00:59:06.000
And today, we've continued that conversation by thinking about the kind of movement we want to build and the role each of us can play in shaping its future.
00:59:06.000 --> 00:59:16.000
For me, one of the important reminders from this series is that cooperative development isn't just about helping individual co-ops get started.
00:59:16.000 --> 00:59:24.000
It's also about building the relationships, knowledge, leadership, and systems that help cooperation grow.
00:59:24.000 --> 00:59:36.000
As cooperative developers, we have an opportunity to connect what's happening in our communities to something much bigger, and we don't have to do that work alone.
00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:41.000
To everyone listening, this is the third episode in our four-part Co-op Month series.
00:59:41.000 --> 00:59:54.000
Next, we'll be joined by Co-op Hall of Fame recipient Tom Webb to bring another perspective on where the cooperative movement is headed and what it will take to build for the future.
00:59:54.000 --> 00:59:58.000
Interested in strengthening your own cooperative development practice?
00:59:58.000 --> 01:00:06.000
Registration is open for our toolkit implementation training, which begins November 12th.
01:00:06.000 --> 01:00:13.000
Join other cooperative developers to build practical skills and explore tools you can apply in your work.
01:00:13.000 --> 01:00:23.000
You can also visit the Cooperation Works Member Locator to connect with cooperative developers and development centers across the country.
01:00:23.000 --> 01:00:32.000
Subscribe to Cooperative Developer Stories wherever you listen to podcasts and join us for the rest of our Co-op Month series.
01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:39.000
Every share helps us connect developers, exchange ideas, and grow the cooperative movement together.
01:00:39.000 --> 01:00:46.000
Thanks for listening to Cooperative Developer Stories, a podcast from Cooperation Works.
01:00:46.000 --> 01:00:51.000
Until next time, keep learning from one another, keep sharing what works, and keep building the relationships that make cooperation work.