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Welcome to Cooperative Developer Stories and Cooperation Works Podcast. I'm your host, Tara Williams. Can't wait to hear your stories.
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So this is episode 0. We're going to start and jump into the conversation with the executive director of Cooperation Works, Alex Stone. And her and I are going to have a little bit of a conversation about why we're here, what we're doing, and the value we're hoping you get out of this podcast.
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Hey Alex, thanks for joining me for this conversation as we jump into curating this podcast. I really wanted to make sure we have an opportunity to set a bit of context for our listeners. So before we get into what this podcast is about.
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Let's start with why we were starting this conversation. As the National Network of Cooperative Developers, we both spend our time with cooperative developers. But if you were to ask people outside of our network, they might be like, what is co-op development? Who is a co-op developer? So I'm hosting this podcast as the education and training manager of Cooperation Works.
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but I'm also a co-op developer myself. One of the things I love about this work is that everyone has their own journey, story and approach to co-op development and I'm always learning tips and tricks on ways to support groups through their life cycle.
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So when I think of some contextual questions our listeners might have, the first one that comes to mind is what actually makes someone a co-op developer? What do you think, Alex?
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I think that's a great question. And one thing that stuck out just as you were talking right now is if you ask people outside of our network what a co-op developer is, they probably don't know. But I think I would even take it a step further. And a lot of folks outside our network don't even necessarily know what a cooperative is, right? So when you're talking about what a co-op developer does,
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few steps back and start talking about the cooperative business model and what that means and provide some context for that. And in terms of what actually makes someone a co-op developer, I think that honestly, like that's the point of this podcast, right? Is that there's actually many varied experiences and people find this path for
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from many, many different places. And it shows up hopefully with some similarities, but also with lots of differences. So we really wanted to highlight just the diversity of experiences, communities that folks are working with and in, what types of co-ops they're working on, and what parts of the process they might be more keyed into, right? So with cooperative development, you're working with a group of people who are building a business together, who are trying to meet their needs collectively with democratic decision making. And there's a whole set of values and principles
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that hopefully folks listening to this podcast are familiar with that really inform sort of how that business is created and what it's intended to do. So developers can have a hand in the entire part of the process. They might help more specifically with getting folks set up with bylaws and strong governance structures and ways of handling conflict. They might really be masters of developing business plans or doing feasibility studies.
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they might help a group all along the process and maybe tag in referrals to professionals who spend more time on certain parts of the process that might be able to better help the group. And so even just thinking of it like that, you can see where it gets really varied really quickly.
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And I think that's crucial. And as we go into these stories is really, you know, people come from all different backgrounds. They're doing this in all different ways. And that's really why we really want to highlight that it can be done from different ways. It can
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be done by different people. And you might even be doing this work and not even know that that is an official title for the work that you're doing.
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Something that stuck out to me from Blanca Delgado at the Texas Rural Cooperative Center has done some presentations on a really amazing project that she's been helping recently. And I don't know that she was the first one to say this, but one of the things she said in one of those presentations was co-op developers are also doing human development. And I would just highlight that. I think that's a really good way to think about the work
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you're helping to create a business, but you're also really intimately working with a group of people and helping facilitate their dynamics, helping them address blocks that they might not know they have, helping them potentially become owners, right, in a culture that sort of discourages that on a broad scale.
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Alex, how did you find your way into this type of work?
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How did I get into this work? I, well, one, a connection I didn't even realize until I had already been, I think even with CW for
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a while was that my mom was actually a member of a artist cooperative as I was growing up. And I went with her as a kid to a lot of her gallery sitting, which is essentially the work shift. I think she was, I learned last summer, which I didn't know until then, that I think she was a founding member of this artist cooperative gallery, which is wild. And you know, that gallery, they never talked about the Rochdale principles. I didn't really hear them wax poetic about what it meant to be a cooperative, but I definitely saw the impact, right? She had access to
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Sometimes they got to be the focus of the shows. Their work was always up on the walls. They all took shifts watching the gallery, and they paid a portion of sales to the cooperative. So all of the elements were there. They just didn't connect it to the larger movement, which is probably why it took me so long to connect that. But I would say generally I found cooperatives in college with student housing co-ops. And that was, I think, before I even started at the school, somebody handed me a pamphlet with photos of people
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cooking together and being in community. And I was smitten like before I even knew that was where I was going to school. And then I lived in them for three years. During the time there was a movement on campus that was sort of anti-chain. There was to get Panda Express to not move on to campus and shifted into, well, what do we want instead? And that was a student-run food cooperative. And so that was really the first foray into any kind of development. And it was very DIY. We didn't know anything about the process. We didn't know it was a career. We didn't really know there were people who could help us. And when occasionally it
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came up that like the California Center, for instance, existed, I think we're like, no, we got it, we can do it, which doesn't usually work out. In this case, it did. And we were really confused when we were getting it together and didn't even know we were confused. So I've talked about this a lot in some of my presentations in the art and science of cooperative development is we were coming from the student housing context. All of the grocery store co-ops in the Bay Area weirdly are worker-owned co-ops, which is an anomaly, like generally they're consumer-owned across the country or multi-
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a stakeholder, being a fully worker-owned grocery store is much less common in the US. And then we also knew obviously about like Park Slope, and we're looking at some of those sort of examples. And we ended up really getting a mishmash of like some of the ethos of like living in a housing cooperative and how work shifts are doing, how folks should be involved with
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talking with the worker cooperatives in the area and getting a lot of guidance from them and then really pulling in what we could from Park Slope and then it incorporated as a, it's a nonprofit anyway. So it's a really interesting mishmash that happened to work, but again, kind of an anomaly and now they're 16 years old.
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And then I worked on a couple of co-ops in the Bay after that didn't, they were great lessons. They didn't quite work out. One was a yoga teacher cooperative. And I think a big issue with that was that a lot of yoga teachers really want the flexibility to be able to travel at any time, which made the co- ownership piece a little harder. And then there was also a movement for a grocery store in Jack London Square. And it was really interesting because a lot of why that didn't work out was interpersonal stuff that was there right from the beginning. And it took us like 2 years to
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So really helps me appreciate why the human component, the group dynamics component, the conflict resolution management component is so important to the process. And I had also founded the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, which at the time was training students on campuses across the US to open food cooperatives and has since transitioned into really much more of like a food sovereignty QTPOC training resource for youth across the country, but also still focusing like very heavily on sustainable, healthy, nourishing, enriching food.
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And then a friend posted about this job on Facebook and I saw the posting and decided to throw on my hat and that was now 10 years ago and I've been here ever since. How did you get into co-op development?
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I was just thinking you started with an art co-op and really like my journey into cooperative development started by me finishing my master's in cooperatives and credit unions from St. Mary's, which you've done that program as well and wanting to get more involved, like really wanting to dig in and do this more at the
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To do that, I joined a board of an artist co-op. So it's a producer co-op, a terminal city glass cooperative. And through bringing my learnings to that board, I said, hold on a second, there's more people that could use this knowledge and expertise that I was lucky enough to grow at a large credit union. And so from there, I developed, I guess, that we could be considered almost like our own little center here in BC. And we were able to start to use our skills
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to work in this co-op development space, but it was really from that glass cooperative where I started. You know, I didn't do any of the formal like our training in art and science or the co-op zone training, which is available in Canada. I used the skills that I had from business, from more traditional credit union business, and then the master's learnings on cooperatives in order to do things in the various spaces of co-op development.
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And it's interesting because when you talk to a lot of Canadians and they refer to that cooperative development, oftentimes they think it's just incorporation.
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And I think being connected here into CW and learning from all of our centers and continuing to learn from the people in our network is when we think of co-op development, it really is broader. It's supporting, like you talked a little bit about, right? It's supporting them through the life cycle. So right from incorporation through any challenges that might come up, whether it's conflict or whether it's, you know, growth or through all the good and the bad, right, to winding down
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And through these stories, we'll learn a little bit about some of each of the developers' journeys through the life cycle.
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Yeah, just thinking about the variety of co-op developers and sort of the many winding paths that people take to find themselves.
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doing cooperative development. I think, we've been running the art and science of cooperative development, which is our three part training program for new co-op developers for a very long time. It's been revamped a couple of times even since I've been here. And we get to see a lot of the folks who are new to co-ops and or co-op development come through that program. So a good chunk are sent by centers.
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some of our members who have been hired and the centers want to make sure they're trained up. But we also get to see all the people who kind of find this training on their own. And they are coming from community organizing, from small business development centers. Maybe they've been activists. Maybe they're coming at it from like climate change work or something. It's just such a wide variety of experiences that end up leading people
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to wanting to know more about the process of helping to start these businesses.
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Yeah, I think that's really important. I didn't have the privilege to go through this as I was learning. And I think what we've heard and what we will hear throughout this podcast is really how valuable going through a bit of that formal training when you're getting started can be and has been for our experienced developers. Any thoughts on what makes co-op development
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different from traditional business development?
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We've already really touched on, I think, big pieces of that, which is people element, frankly, right? That if you're looking at so many traditional entrepreneurial startups or VC backed startups or investor owned startups, they're existing really to make profit, right? Like someone comes up with an idea, they think that it can make money, they get people to put
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money into that idea on the expectation that it's going to yield large returns, right? And cooperatives certainly need to be feasible. Ideally, they are paying, you know, living or thriving wages or more. They have to make it as a business, but they're also existing to meet an unmet need, which could be economic, but it could also be social, cultural, environmental, some mix of those. And they're also values driven. And so anybody who's helping to support
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that kind of a business needs to be really keyed in on the cooperative identity, the co-op principles and values. Because it's a group of people coming together to meet their needs, you also really do need to emphasize that interpersonal piece. If you're just starting a business on your own, you might not need to think much about how you're interacting with other people or treating them or how a decision's getting made. I mean, maybe they should be giving some more care to that as well. But with co-ops, it's built in. It's a necessity. If you can't make decisions well with
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other people, like that's going to be a major stumbling block for the cooperative. So I think just having that level of like interpersonal awareness and sensitivity is one of the huge differences. And I think because they are businesses that are developed to meet the needs of a group of people that are really rooted in the cooperative principles and values, there's also a much broader range of like how we can define success and co-op developers I think need to be
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very aware of those of those, like the non-profity side of co-op success as well, even though obviously being feasible is very important. It's like how many jobs are being created by this cooperative? What needs are getting met? Is it providing a community space? Is it freeing up time so that somebody can be present with their kids or partake in some other civic engagement? And might also all come about from at least some forms of traditional business, but they're not quite as inherent to that. It's not something that we'd be like keyed into.
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Now I'm getting into the differences between co-ops and traditional businesses. But I guess you can't talk about one without the other. Like the fact that co-ops are different is why the process of co-op development is different as well. And I know on some of the podcasts already and outside of that, some folks even don't like the term developer. They much prefer cooperative organizer for a lot of reasons. But I think part of that is just the difference in how you're working with and relating to the group that you're supporting.
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Yeah, Alex, you're so right. You know, when you're working with cooperatives,
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and groups that want to form cooperatives, it's really important to start from a place of understanding what is the difference between a cooperative and a traditional investor-owned business. Building from things like the cooperative values and principles,
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the cooperation works principles for cooperative development, having those as a place to root yourself as you're working with groups is really powerful in how you're helping groups to solve for the need that they've identified. Helping them work collectively together, whether they're choosing a traditional cooperative business structure as the outcome or they're using other types of
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structures like LLCs, B Corps, C Corps, and adopting cooperative principles, that core understanding right at the beginning and throughout any of the challenges that they're solving is crucial in working as a successful cooperative developer. And where I've seen groups fall down a bit is when they look to people who don't have that fundamental understanding of the difference between a cooperative business model
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why it's important, why it's important to market your cooperative advantage, who your members are, what your member value proposition are, as they're working through the work, that's where groups can really get into a bit of trouble. Really excited for the listeners to get into that and hear and be able to answer this question hopefully for yourselves if you're coming from a more traditional background. So why do you think that it's important that we're sharing these stories from across our network?
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on some thoughts that like Fred Medica, a former CW member and board member has shared, which is really just this notion that like one of the things that's empowering about cooperative development is certainly you need some training and education. You need to know some things, but really anybody can do it.
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And it is going to look different potentially in different communities, with different cooperatives, with different developers, and depending on what part of the process or parts of the process that they are involved in. And so I think with that in mind, it's really important to just really show and highlight all the different ways that this work is done. So even within just the network of CW, right, we're a national network of cooperative developers. We have organizations that are members. We have individuals who are
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We have some folks who have been around since the beginning or just about. A lot of them have retired at this point, but folks who've been around for decades. And we have new people joining and new organizations joining that are coming up in different contexts. One thing that stands out, you've been involved in the professional development committee where there's been conversations around some of the newer organizations and one that's like
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technically a lender, like not actually classified as like a quote unquote co-op developer. Part of their model of lending is being very intimate with the cooperative, doing a lot of pretty intensive development work to make it work and having really strong relationships with them. And one of the things that's interesting about that is that it's especially in the context of that conversation, it was kind of presented as at odds with how people were talking about how co-op development should be done.
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20 years ago. And I think especially with the rise of worker cooperatives and as there's more folks coming into the fold in that movement, we're getting a wider variety of folks who are becoming worker owners, maybe have different experiences, relationships sort of with the ownership mentality are coming at just all sorts of things. There's like a shift in even what we think of as okay or really good
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in the development process. So I think highlighting these stories is also a way to just to even show like the evolution of how co-op development is being thought out in the country.
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And I think like for me, you know, also, you know, drawing on like our ancestors and storytelling and how that is connected throughout. So, you know, sitting around a campfire or sitting, you know, sitting at a kitchen table and having a meal, it really feels like, tell me about yourself, really have this question, share your story.
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and learn from each other. So I think it's dependent like it doesn't matter where you come from. That is a part of your culture and I think you know we're trying to bring it here to CW because we have developers from all across the country with so many different valuable stories, learnings, expertise that we even don't get to share across our network. And now we're opening this to.
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our network, but also beyond to bring people in to understand and maybe also be able to help you to point to your mom or somebody and be like, this is what I do. Going back to what is a cooperative and what is cooperative development? Why did we decide to make a podcast that is more about the people instead of like, and this is how you might develop a cooperative?
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Because we already have those resources.
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If you want to learn how to develop a cooperative, take our insights of cooperative development.
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I mean, then there's some other resources out there you could get as well.
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But this, I think you just, I love how you just shared about sitting around the fire and sharing stories.
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I think this is really tapping into, I guess it's like not exactly networking.
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if somebody's just listening to the podcast, but I think like one of the strengths in CW as a network is the relationships that people are forming with each other and knowing about each other's experiences, the challenges they've encountered, how they've overcome them, they're building that rapport, that trust so that when they have a question, they feel really comfortable going to other people in the network.
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And while this is sort of, it's that parasocial like one way learning, hopefully it's
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Also a way for people to listen, whether it's other members of the CW network, folks who are thinking about joining CW, people who are just wandered upon this randomly and thought it was interesting.
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Hopefully it's also sort of building a little bit of that rapport of like, oh, this person has experience with this.
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And maybe if you are doing this work, you might feel comfortable sending them an e-mail afterward or connecting with them on LinkedIn, right?
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Like I almost, that's interesting because I don't know that I would have said this
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maybe at the start of it, but it almost does feel like a stepped back way of relationship building in some ways.
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But that just came to me now.
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I don't know that was actually an active thought as we were creating this.
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It just seemed like, hey, people want to listen to stories.
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Everyone's doing a podcast.
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You can do this as you're doing yard work or some other work or driving and get to hear all these wonderful stories.
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And now that I'm thinking about it more, it's like there is
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even in this medium, like a very interpersonal context to it.
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Yeah, and I think that that's really important.
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A lot of our show notes, actually, people have been gracious and sharing their contact information are encouraging you to reach out to them if you have questions if you are working in that space.
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That's one thing when we go back to that, what's the difference between working in a co-op versus in a business, you might get that in a traditional business, where people are offering that.
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But I
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I think you see it more holistically in the co-op sector where people are willing to share their knowledge.
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They're excited to help you.
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They're excited to support and share those resources.
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And so by developers in our network sharing those contacts, it's also a way for you to get plugged into this network if you are on the periphery of it.
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So you've had the opportunity for a sneak peek on some of these episodes.
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Are there any spoilers you want to pull out that might pique people's interests into listening to certain episodes?
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I mean, I feel like we've already sort of hit on what I would pull out, which is just highlighting the diverse array of backgrounds and experiences.
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People are really bringing their passion for certain parts of the process, I feel like, to these podcasts.
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So that's coming through and really interesting, right?
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We have somebody who's very focused on the interpersonal.
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We have some folks who are very impassioned by like worker cooperatives
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development, maybe that's it.
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Like people feel really passionately about this work, right?
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It's having a real direct impact in the lives of individuals, of communities, whether that is helping someone feel like more empowered as a co-owner or saving the last business in the small rural town or helping someone
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maintain affordable housing.
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Like there's some really big, solid impacts from this work.
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And I think when you hear people talk about their work, even in this podcast, sort of having that, having, like knowing that that's the impact of your work comes through.
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Like people find this very valuable and that really shows through.
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The interviewer, what stood out for you?
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Know, I've been having just so much fun doing this series overall.
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It's been really great to connect with people
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to spend a few minutes to slow down and just listen and learn from their stories, to have people reminisce about, there was this time, I did this thing.
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I think each individual brings something so important to the conversation and I'm so excited for the listeners to really be able to dig in with our network and beyond to really get as much value as I really have been throughout this entire
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What do we hope someone listening to this series gets out of it?
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I think we've at least touched on pieces of that as well.
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Like I was saying, the interpersonal element, right?
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Like maybe there's somebody you realize you want to connect with or learn from or just have a conversation with.
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And maybe after listening to this, if they share their contact info, you'll feel empowered to reach them.
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I think, again, just illuminating the vast like scope of what cooperative development
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potentially entails.
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And hopefully folks, especially if they are already consider themselves co-op developers, or maybe they are interested in it, or maybe they are dabbling a little bit, like maybe it's the person who's taking on an outsized role at their cooperative and realizing like, oh, there's like a here, that maybe they can start to see themselves or at least a path for themselves in the stories of others and have an idea for what their potential
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next steps might be for what the future could hold and start to, I think, just have an awareness again of the bigger network.
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CW is a national network of co-op developers.
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There are certainly developers who are not part of the network as well, but there's a lot of interconnections generally across the cooperative space.
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And I think like once you join one organization, you start to see how many organizations have memberships with each other.
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And I think the network element is such a critical, critical
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piece of cooperative development like CW was formed because especially at the time, like, 25, 30 years ago, before we had Zoom, before we had as much robust internet, folks are working basically in isolation and they're like, wait, we're all working on the same issues.
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We should be talking to each other and learning from each other and not reinventing the wheel every time something comes up.
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How can we actually like move this field forward?
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And so I hope that in some ways this podcast can help people like
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find wherever their space is in this national ecosystem and connect with the folks that will help them on their journey and give them an idea for like where they even could plug in.
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Yeah, and I really hope that people get to know each other if you're part of the network.
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If you don't know each other, I think
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Even if you do, you might not know some of these stories that people are sharing.
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So it's a great way for our network to connect.
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I think externally to the network, like you said, it's a great way to just see that there is a national network that exists and the value that our members get out of being a part of this network.
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One of them shares a little bit about what they think about our network and how they're connecting and the value that they bring
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And then for our art and science participants who are learning from this, I think it's a great place for you to get started to kind of understand what's going on, what is it like to be a co-op developer at the beginning, middle and, you know, even at the retirement phases of this career and the value that it's brought to the individuals, the learnings that they've got, you know, some share their favorite tools as well, which is great when you're just getting started in this space.
00:27:59.000 --> 00:27:59.999
That's really what this podcast
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So we'll sit down with people who are at various points in their career, ask how they got to where they are, what they've learned, what they wish they'd known at the beginning, what they love about being developers and how they're working with groups.
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These are their stories and we hope you love listening to them as much as we have.
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Thanks so much, Alex.
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Thanks, Tara.
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Welcome to Cooperative Developer Stories and Cooperation Works Podcast. I'm your host, Tara Williams. Can't wait to hear your stories.
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So this is episode 0. We're going to start and jump into the conversation with the executive director of Cooperation Works, Alex Stone. And her and I are going to have a little bit of a conversation about why we're here, what we're doing, and the value we're hoping you get out of this podcast.
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Hey Alex, thanks for joining me for this conversation as we jump into curating this podcast. I really wanted to make sure we have an opportunity to set a bit of context for our listeners. So before we get into what this podcast is about.
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Let's start with why we were starting this conversation. As the National Network of Cooperative Developers, we both spend our time with cooperative developers. But if you were to ask people outside of our network, they might be like, what is co-op development? Who is a co-op developer? So I'm hosting this podcast as the education and training manager of Cooperation Works.
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but I'm also a co-op developer myself. One of the things I love about this work is that everyone has their own journey, story and approach to co-op development and I'm always learning tips and tricks on ways to support groups through their life cycle.
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So when I think of some contextual questions our listeners might have, the first one that comes to mind is what actually makes someone a co-op developer? What do you think, Alex?
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I think that's a great question. And one thing that stuck out just as you were talking right now is if you ask people outside of our network what a co-op developer is, they probably don't know. But I think I would even take it a step further. And a lot of folks outside our network don't even necessarily know what a cooperative is, right? So when you're talking about what a co-op developer does,
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few steps back and start talking about the cooperative business model and what that means and provide some context for that. And in terms of what actually makes someone a co-op developer, I think that honestly, like that's the point of this podcast, right? Is that there's actually many varied experiences and people find this path for
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from many, many different places. And it shows up hopefully with some similarities, but also with lots of differences. So we really wanted to highlight just the diversity of experiences, communities that folks are working with and in, what types of co-ops they're working on, and what parts of the process they might be more keyed into, right? So with cooperative development, you're working with a group of people who are building a business together, who are trying to meet their needs collectively with democratic decision making. And there's a whole set of values and principles
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that hopefully folks listening to this podcast are familiar with that really inform sort of how that business is created and what it's intended to do. So developers can have a hand in the entire part of the process. They might help more specifically with getting folks set up with bylaws and strong governance structures and ways of handling conflict. They might really be masters of developing business plans or doing feasibility studies.
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they might help a group all along the process and maybe tag in referrals to professionals who spend more time on certain parts of the process that might be able to better help the group. And so even just thinking of it like that, you can see where it gets really varied really quickly.
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And I think that's crucial. And as we go into these stories is really, you know, people come from all different backgrounds. They're doing this in all different ways. And that's really why we really want to highlight that it can be done from different ways. It can
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be done by different people. And you might even be doing this work and not even know that that is an official title for the work that you're doing.
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Something that stuck out to me from Blanca Delgado at the Texas Rural Cooperative Center has done some presentations on a really amazing project that she's been helping recently. And I don't know that she was the first one to say this, but one of the things she said in one of those presentations was co-op developers are also doing human development. And I would just highlight that. I think that's a really good way to think about the work
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you're helping to create a business, but you're also really intimately working with a group of people and helping facilitate their dynamics, helping them address blocks that they might not know they have, helping them potentially become owners, right, in a culture that sort of discourages that on a broad scale.
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Alex, how did you find your way into this type of work?
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How did I get into this work? I, well, one, a connection I didn't even realize until I had already been, I think even with CW for
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a while was that my mom was actually a member of a artist cooperative as I was growing up. And I went with her as a kid to a lot of her gallery sitting, which is essentially the work shift. I think she was, I learned last summer, which I didn't know until then, that I think she was a founding member of this artist cooperative gallery, which is wild. And you know, that gallery, they never talked about the Rochdale principles. I didn't really hear them wax poetic about what it meant to be a cooperative, but I definitely saw the impact, right? She had access to
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Sometimes they got to be the focus of the shows. Their work was always up on the walls. They all took shifts watching the gallery, and they paid a portion of sales to the cooperative. So all of the elements were there. They just didn't connect it to the larger movement, which is probably why it took me so long to connect that. But I would say generally I found cooperatives in college with student housing co-ops. And that was, I think, before I even started at the school, somebody handed me a pamphlet with photos of people
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cooking together and being in community. And I was smitten like before I even knew that was where I was going to school. And then I lived in them for three years. During the time there was a movement on campus that was sort of anti-chain. There was to get Panda Express to not move on to campus and shifted into, well, what do we want instead? And that was a student-run food cooperative. And so that was really the first foray into any kind of development. And it was very DIY. We didn't know anything about the process. We didn't know it was a career. We didn't really know there were people who could help us. And when occasionally it
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came up that like the California Center, for instance, existed, I think we're like, no, we got it, we can do it, which doesn't usually work out. In this case, it did. And we were really confused when we were getting it together and didn't even know we were confused. So I've talked about this a lot in some of my presentations in the art and science of cooperative development is we were coming from the student housing context. All of the grocery store co-ops in the Bay Area weirdly are worker-owned co-ops, which is an anomaly, like generally they're consumer-owned across the country or multi-
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a stakeholder, being a fully worker-owned grocery store is much less common in the US. And then we also knew obviously about like Park Slope, and we're looking at some of those sort of examples. And we ended up really getting a mishmash of like some of the ethos of like living in a housing cooperative and how work shifts are doing, how folks should be involved with
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talking with the worker cooperatives in the area and getting a lot of guidance from them and then really pulling in what we could from Park Slope and then it incorporated as a, it's a nonprofit anyway. So it's a really interesting mishmash that happened to work, but again, kind of an anomaly and now they're 16 years old.
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And then I worked on a couple of co-ops in the Bay after that didn't, they were great lessons. They didn't quite work out. One was a yoga teacher cooperative. And I think a big issue with that was that a lot of yoga teachers really want the flexibility to be able to travel at any time, which made the co- ownership piece a little harder. And then there was also a movement for a grocery store in Jack London Square. And it was really interesting because a lot of why that didn't work out was interpersonal stuff that was there right from the beginning. And it took us like 2 years to
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So really helps me appreciate why the human component, the group dynamics component, the conflict resolution management component is so important to the process. And I had also founded the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, which at the time was training students on campuses across the US to open food cooperatives and has since transitioned into really much more of like a food sovereignty QTPOC training resource for youth across the country, but also still focusing like very heavily on sustainable, healthy, nourishing, enriching food.
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And then a friend posted about this job on Facebook and I saw the posting and decided to throw on my hat and that was now 10 years ago and I've been here ever since. How did you get into co-op development?
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I was just thinking you started with an art co-op and really like my journey into cooperative development started by me finishing my master's in cooperatives and credit unions from St. Mary's, which you've done that program as well and wanting to get more involved, like really wanting to dig in and do this more at the
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To do that, I joined a board of an artist co-op. So it's a producer co-op, a terminal city glass cooperative. And through bringing my learnings to that board, I said, hold on a second, there's more people that could use this knowledge and expertise that I was lucky enough to grow at a large credit union. And so from there, I developed, I guess, that we could be considered almost like our own little center here in BC. And we were able to start to use our skills
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to work in this co-op development space, but it was really from that glass cooperative where I started. You know, I didn't do any of the formal like our training in art and science or the co-op zone training, which is available in Canada. I used the skills that I had from business, from more traditional credit union business, and then the master's learnings on cooperatives in order to do things in the various spaces of co-op development.
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And it's interesting because when you talk to a lot of Canadians and they refer to that cooperative development, oftentimes they think it's just incorporation.
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And I think being connected here into CW and learning from all of our centers and continuing to learn from the people in our network is when we think of co-op development, it really is broader. It's supporting, like you talked a little bit about, right? It's supporting them through the life cycle. So right from incorporation through any challenges that might come up, whether it's conflict or whether it's, you know, growth or through all the good and the bad, right, to winding down
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And through these stories, we'll learn a little bit about some of each of the developers' journeys through the life cycle.
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Yeah, just thinking about the variety of co-op developers and sort of the many winding paths that people take to find themselves.
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doing cooperative development. I think, we've been running the art and science of cooperative development, which is our three part training program for new co-op developers for a very long time. It's been revamped a couple of times even since I've been here. And we get to see a lot of the folks who are new to co-ops and or co-op development come through that program. So a good chunk are sent by centers.
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some of our members who have been hired and the centers want to make sure they're trained up. But we also get to see all the people who kind of find this training on their own. And they are coming from community organizing, from small business development centers. Maybe they've been activists. Maybe they're coming at it from like climate change work or something. It's just such a wide variety of experiences that end up leading people
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to wanting to know more about the process of helping to start these businesses.
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Yeah, I think that's really important. I didn't have the privilege to go through this as I was learning. And I think what we've heard and what we will hear throughout this podcast is really how valuable going through a bit of that formal training when you're getting started can be and has been for our experienced developers. Any thoughts on what makes co-op development
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different from traditional business development?
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We've already really touched on, I think, big pieces of that, which is people element, frankly, right? That if you're looking at so many traditional entrepreneurial startups or VC backed startups or investor owned startups, they're existing really to make profit, right? Like someone comes up with an idea, they think that it can make money, they get people to put
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money into that idea on the expectation that it's going to yield large returns, right? And cooperatives certainly need to be feasible. Ideally, they are paying, you know, living or thriving wages or more. They have to make it as a business, but they're also existing to meet an unmet need, which could be economic, but it could also be social, cultural, environmental, some mix of those. And they're also values driven. And so anybody who's helping to support
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that kind of a business needs to be really keyed in on the cooperative identity, the co-op principles and values. Because it's a group of people coming together to meet their needs, you also really do need to emphasize that interpersonal piece. If you're just starting a business on your own, you might not need to think much about how you're interacting with other people or treating them or how a decision's getting made. I mean, maybe they should be giving some more care to that as well. But with co-ops, it's built in. It's a necessity. If you can't make decisions well with
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other people, like that's going to be a major stumbling block for the cooperative. So I think just having that level of like interpersonal awareness and sensitivity is one of the huge differences. And I think because they are businesses that are developed to meet the needs of a group of people that are really rooted in the cooperative principles and values, there's also a much broader range of like how we can define success and co-op developers I think need to be
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very aware of those of those, like the non-profity side of co-op success as well, even though obviously being feasible is very important. It's like how many jobs are being created by this cooperative? What needs are getting met? Is it providing a community space? Is it freeing up time so that somebody can be present with their kids or partake in some other civic engagement? And might also all come about from at least some forms of traditional business, but they're not quite as inherent to that. It's not something that we'd be like keyed into.
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Now I'm getting into the differences between co-ops and traditional businesses. But I guess you can't talk about one without the other. Like the fact that co-ops are different is why the process of co-op development is different as well. And I know on some of the podcasts already and outside of that, some folks even don't like the term developer. They much prefer cooperative organizer for a lot of reasons. But I think part of that is just the difference in how you're working with and relating to the group that you're supporting.
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Yeah, Alex, you're so right. You know, when you're working with cooperatives,
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and groups that want to form cooperatives, it's really important to start from a place of understanding what is the difference between a cooperative and a traditional investor-owned business. Building from things like the cooperative values and principles,
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the cooperation works principles for cooperative development, having those as a place to root yourself as you're working with groups is really powerful in how you're helping groups to solve for the need that they've identified. Helping them work collectively together, whether they're choosing a traditional cooperative business structure as the outcome or they're using other types of
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structures like LLCs, B Corps, C Corps, and adopting cooperative principles, that core understanding right at the beginning and throughout any of the challenges that they're solving is crucial in working as a successful cooperative developer. And where I've seen groups fall down a bit is when they look to people who don't have that fundamental understanding of the difference between a cooperative business model
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why it's important, why it's important to market your cooperative advantage, who your members are, what your member value proposition are, as they're working through the work, that's where groups can really get into a bit of trouble. Really excited for the listeners to get into that and hear and be able to answer this question hopefully for yourselves if you're coming from a more traditional background. So why do you think that it's important that we're sharing these stories from across our network?
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on some thoughts that like Fred Medica, a former CW member and board member has shared, which is really just this notion that like one of the things that's empowering about cooperative development is certainly you need some training and education. You need to know some things, but really anybody can do it.
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And it is going to look different potentially in different communities, with different cooperatives, with different developers, and depending on what part of the process or parts of the process that they are involved in. And so I think with that in mind, it's really important to just really show and highlight all the different ways that this work is done. So even within just the network of CW, right, we're a national network of cooperative developers. We have organizations that are members. We have individuals who are
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We have some folks who have been around since the beginning or just about. A lot of them have retired at this point, but folks who've been around for decades. And we have new people joining and new organizations joining that are coming up in different contexts. One thing that stands out, you've been involved in the professional development committee where there's been conversations around some of the newer organizations and one that's like
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technically a lender, like not actually classified as like a quote unquote co-op developer. Part of their model of lending is being very intimate with the cooperative, doing a lot of pretty intensive development work to make it work and having really strong relationships with them. And one of the things that's interesting about that is that it's especially in the context of that conversation, it was kind of presented as at odds with how people were talking about how co-op development should be done.
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20 years ago. And I think especially with the rise of worker cooperatives and as there's more folks coming into the fold in that movement, we're getting a wider variety of folks who are becoming worker owners, maybe have different experiences, relationships sort of with the ownership mentality are coming at just all sorts of things. There's like a shift in even what we think of as okay or really good
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in the development process. So I think highlighting these stories is also a way to just to even show like the evolution of how co-op development is being thought out in the country.
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And I think like for me, you know, also, you know, drawing on like our ancestors and storytelling and how that is connected throughout. So, you know, sitting around a campfire or sitting, you know, sitting at a kitchen table and having a meal, it really feels like, tell me about yourself, really have this question, share your story.
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and learn from each other. So I think it's dependent like it doesn't matter where you come from. That is a part of your culture and I think you know we're trying to bring it here to CW because we have developers from all across the country with so many different valuable stories, learnings, expertise that we even don't get to share across our network. And now we're opening this to.
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our network, but also beyond to bring people in to understand and maybe also be able to help you to point to your mom or somebody and be like, this is what I do. Going back to what is a cooperative and what is cooperative development? Why did we decide to make a podcast that is more about the people instead of like, and this is how you might develop a cooperative?
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Because we already have those resources.
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If you want to learn how to develop a cooperative, take our insights of cooperative development.
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I mean, then there's some other resources out there you could get as well.
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But this, I think you just, I love how you just shared about sitting around the fire and sharing stories.
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I think this is really tapping into, I guess it's like not exactly networking.
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if somebody's just listening to the podcast, but I think like one of the strengths in CW as a network is the relationships that people are forming with each other and knowing about each other's experiences, the challenges they've encountered, how they've overcome them, they're building that rapport, that trust so that when they have a question, they feel really comfortable going to other people in the network.
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And while this is sort of, it's that parasocial like one way learning, hopefully it's
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Also a way for people to listen, whether it's other members of the CW network, folks who are thinking about joining CW, people who are just wandered upon this randomly and thought it was interesting.
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Hopefully it's also sort of building a little bit of that rapport of like, oh, this person has experience with this.
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And maybe if you are doing this work, you might feel comfortable sending them an e-mail afterward or connecting with them on LinkedIn, right?
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Like I almost, that's interesting because I don't know that I would have said this
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maybe at the start of it, but it almost does feel like a stepped back way of relationship building in some ways.
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But that just came to me now.
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I don't know that was actually an active thought as we were creating this.
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It just seemed like, hey, people want to listen to stories.
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Everyone's doing a podcast.
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You can do this as you're doing yard work or some other work or driving and get to hear all these wonderful stories.
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And now that I'm thinking about it more, it's like there is
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even in this medium, like a very interpersonal context to it.
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Yeah, and I think that that's really important.
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A lot of our show notes, actually, people have been gracious and sharing their contact information are encouraging you to reach out to them if you have questions if you are working in that space.
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That's one thing when we go back to that, what's the difference between working in a co-op versus in a business, you might get that in a traditional business, where people are offering that.
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But I
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I think you see it more holistically in the co-op sector where people are willing to share their knowledge.
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They're excited to help you.
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They're excited to support and share those resources.
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And so by developers in our network sharing those contacts, it's also a way for you to get plugged into this network if you are on the periphery of it.
00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:02.999
So you've had the opportunity for a sneak peek on some of these episodes.
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Are there any spoilers you want to pull out that might pique people's interests into listening to certain episodes?
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I mean, I feel like we've already sort of hit on what I would pull out, which is just highlighting the diverse array of backgrounds and experiences.
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People are really bringing their passion for certain parts of the process, I feel like, to these podcasts.
00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:25.999
So that's coming through and really interesting, right?
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We have somebody who's very focused on the interpersonal.
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We have some folks who are very impassioned by like worker cooperatives
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development, maybe that's it.
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Like people feel really passionately about this work, right?
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It's having a real direct impact in the lives of individuals, of communities, whether that is helping someone feel like more empowered as a co-owner or saving the last business in the small rural town or helping someone
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maintain affordable housing.
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Like there's some really big, solid impacts from this work.
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And I think when you hear people talk about their work, even in this podcast, sort of having that, having, like knowing that that's the impact of your work comes through.
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Like people find this very valuable and that really shows through.
00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:15.999
The interviewer, what stood out for you?
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Know, I've been having just so much fun doing this series overall.
00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:23.999
It's been really great to connect with people
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to spend a few minutes to slow down and just listen and learn from their stories, to have people reminisce about, there was this time, I did this thing.
00:24:36.000 --> 00:24:53.999
I think each individual brings something so important to the conversation and I'm so excited for the listeners to really be able to dig in with our network and beyond to really get as much value as I really have been throughout this entire
00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:57.999
What do we hope someone listening to this series gets out of it?
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I think we've at least touched on pieces of that as well.
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Like I was saying, the interpersonal element, right?
00:25:04.000 --> 00:25:08.999
Like maybe there's somebody you realize you want to connect with or learn from or just have a conversation with.
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And maybe after listening to this, if they share their contact info, you'll feel empowered to reach them.
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I think, again, just illuminating the vast like scope of what cooperative development
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potentially entails.
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And hopefully folks, especially if they are already consider themselves co-op developers, or maybe they are interested in it, or maybe they are dabbling a little bit, like maybe it's the person who's taking on an outsized role at their cooperative and realizing like, oh, there's like a here, that maybe they can start to see themselves or at least a path for themselves in the stories of others and have an idea for what their potential
00:25:51.000 --> 00:25:56.999
next steps might be for what the future could hold and start to, I think, just have an awareness again of the bigger network.
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CW is a national network of co-op developers.
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There are certainly developers who are not part of the network as well, but there's a lot of interconnections generally across the cooperative space.
00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:12.999
And I think like once you join one organization, you start to see how many organizations have memberships with each other.
00:26:13.000 --> 00:26:19.999
And I think the network element is such a critical, critical
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piece of cooperative development like CW was formed because especially at the time, like, 25, 30 years ago, before we had Zoom, before we had as much robust internet, folks are working basically in isolation and they're like, wait, we're all working on the same issues.
00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:40.999
We should be talking to each other and learning from each other and not reinventing the wheel every time something comes up.
00:26:41.000 --> 00:26:42.999
How can we actually like move this field forward?
00:26:43.000 --> 00:26:47.999
And so I hope that in some ways this podcast can help people like
00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:57.999
find wherever their space is in this national ecosystem and connect with the folks that will help them on their journey and give them an idea for like where they even could plug in.
00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:00.999
Yeah, and I really hope that people get to know each other if you're part of the network.
00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:03.999
If you don't know each other, I think
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Even if you do, you might not know some of these stories that people are sharing.
00:27:08.000 --> 00:27:10.999
So it's a great way for our network to connect.
00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:21.999
I think externally to the network, like you said, it's a great way to just see that there is a national network that exists and the value that our members get out of being a part of this network.
00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:29.999
One of them shares a little bit about what they think about our network and how they're connecting and the value that they bring
00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:58.999
And then for our art and science participants who are learning from this, I think it's a great place for you to get started to kind of understand what's going on, what is it like to be a co-op developer at the beginning, middle and, you know, even at the retirement phases of this career and the value that it's brought to the individuals, the learnings that they've got, you know, some share their favorite tools as well, which is great when you're just getting started in this space.
00:27:59.000 --> 00:27:59.999
That's really what this podcast
00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:15.999
So we'll sit down with people who are at various points in their career, ask how they got to where they are, what they've learned, what they wish they'd known at the beginning, what they love about being developers and how they're working with groups.
00:28:16.000 --> 00:28:19.999
These are their stories and we hope you love listening to them as much as we have.
00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:21.999
Thanks so much, Alex.
00:28:22.000 --> 00:28:28.000
Thanks, Tara.
