Who is this track for?

Lenders, funders, developers, and movement thinkers who want to explore how capital can spur the growth of worker cooperatives.This track will explore the role of capital in building regional cooperative movements. The first section will show that other worlds are possible, inviting stories of capital from cooperative movements in other places and times. The second section will focus on the current U.S. field, demonstrating the main paths to capitalization worker cooperatives are using now. Finally, a third section will focus on futures, and new norms to grow worker cooperatives.

Agenda for the Day

• Another world is possible:
  • Community ownership in historic Black Wall  Streets
  • Latin American solidarity funds, Quebec labor funds
  • Leveraging unemployment benefits to fund buyouts in Europe
• US paths and cases:
  • Debt
  • Preferred shares
  • Crowdfunding
  • Investments
• Futures:
  • New norms for changing times
  • Risk and reparations in evaluating loan readiness
  • New government supports
  • Capital in a solidarity culture

This track is for lenders, funders, developers, and movement thinkers who want to explore how capital can spur the growth of worker cooperatives. We will explore the role of capital in building regional cooperative movements. The first section will be a conversation about the supply of socially-aligned capital from loan funds and others. The second will discuss models of government incentives and enabling environments. After the lunch break we'll hear case studies of cooperative projects.  Finally, we'll watch short videos from remote guests about capital models from other places and times, and discuss how they might be applicable in our regions. 

Speakers

Understanding socially-aligned capital

• Daniel Wallace, Coastal Enterprises Inc

• Ellen Vera, Co-op Cincy

• Josh Glickenhaus, LEAF

• Sarah Kaplan, Cutting Edge Counsel

• Zoe Schlag, Common Trust

Government incentives and of enabling environments

• Christina Curella, formerly at the New York City Mayor’s Office

• Hendrix Berry, Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network

• Matt Licina, Colorado Employee Ownership Office

• Tammy Shapiro, New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives

Case studies of raising movement-aligned capital

• Clark Arrington, Downtown Crenshaw

• Justine Belle Lambright, Kalche Wine

• Ed Pap, Southwick Social Ventures

• Erik Forman, Drivers Cooperative

Short videos of other places and content, followed by discussions

• Matt Hancock on the Italian Marcora Law

• Jessica Gordon Nembhard on Black community ownership in the 1930s and 1960s

• Olivier De Broves on Quebec Solidarity Cooperatives

• Chris Mackin on factory rescues of the 1970s

Who is this track for?

Early-stage cooperative start-ups or cooperative conversions looking for a one-day immersion into the basic building blocks of democratic business ownership. We welcome active worker owners looking to learn more, community members looking to bring cooperative development to their neighborhoods, aspiring worker-owners and everyone else! Come alone, or bring a team!

Are you interested in starting a worker-owned cooperative, or converting an existing business to worker-ownership? Curious about cooperatives and how they really function in everyday practice? Looking for ways to build and strengthen a cooperative ecosystem in your city? Our Worker Cooperative Jumpstart is for YOU.

Organized by a group of longtime worker-owners and ecosystem allies, The Baltimore Roundtable's Worker Cooperative Jumpstart is a hands-on opportunity to get started on the cooperative path, or to expand your knowledge and understanding and learn best practices for your existing worker cooperative.

Learn about: Why workers choose cooperative ownership structures, How cooperatives impact the racial wealth divide, How your early structure choices impact your cooperative's ability to thrive, How to start, organize, grow and maintain your cooperative enterprise, How to finance your path forward ... and more!

Agenda for the Day

• A Day In the Life: Coop Workers Share Their Stories
• An Introduction to Cooperative Structure
• Interactive workshop: Building a Business Plan
• Interactive workshop: Building a Financial Plan
• Building a Culture of Communication
• Interactive workshop: Steps to Startup

Who is this track for?

Worker co-op members, lawyers, accountants, and cooperative developers. This track offers a deep dive on legal and other tools for addressing systems of oppression (such as institutionalized racism) in your worker-co-op and with your co-op, and to co-create justice and build inclusivity and deeper connection.

Agenda for the Day 

Introduction

Business entity options for worker co-ops, including ownership and governance models.

What is a corporation and why incorporate as a cooperative? LLCs and other legal critters.

• The importance of written policies and decisions.

• Overview of non-hierarchical decision making and conflict resolution in governance documents.

• Choosing not to incorporate.

• Multistakeholder co-ops

• Case Study: The Industrial Commons: industry and place-based strategy for housing, education, better workplaces (textiles).

Money in, money out: fundraising, finance, and the place of capital in a worker cooperative.

• Startup funding and building economic equity.

• Equity, patronage, and the ownership share.

Labor and worker co-ops: Cooperative corporate tools for creating “equity” in every sense of that word

• Different ways to integrate undocumented individuals.

• Co-ops helping people re-enter (or just enter) the labor market.

Labor session part 2

• Union co-ops

• Worker rights: filing civil rights and labor law claims

Legal tools to integrate consensus, restorative justice and indigenous models of conflict resolution into your legal framework to address institutionalized racism with case studies.

Decolonization - Comparative international, alternative and collaborative cooperative models

• Mutual Aid

• Housing cooperatives

• Indigenous and African cultural examples

Ask a lawyer session with breakouts.

Reflective Exercise/Co-creating Solutions

Who is this track for?

This track is for anyone interested in building a stronger cooperative movement by connecting with larger labor movement groups. Labor union members and organizers, cooperative developers, cooperative members, and anyone interested in recent developments in the labor movement or worker cooperative movement will benefit from the track.

This Union-Coop track will address issues, challenges and opportunities regarding building a stronger solidarity movement between labor unions and worker cooperatives. Union-Coop experts such as labor union organizers and cooperative members will offer their perspectives on each other's movement, and will share successful cases of union-coop partnerships, strategizing how to build a stronger eco-system of worker organizing.

Agenda for the Day

Philosophical debates regarding labor unions and worker cooperatives: Participants will learn about ongoing historical tensions between labor unions and worker cooperatives and learn the major factors contributing to tensions between two labor organizations.

Historic examples of collaboration between labor unions and worker cooperatives: participants will learn about historic examples of collaboration between labor unions and worker cooperatives.

Successful cases of union coops: participants will learn about successful cases of union cooperatives including emerging collaborations between platform cooperatives and labor unions.

The current trend of the labor movement in the US: worker cooperatives have been an important part of the labor movement and participants will learn about how union-coop models can become an important strategy to organize informal, precarious, and platform workers.

Union-Coop Council at USFWC: participants will have an opportunity to learn about the USFWC’s Union-Coop Council and ways to participate in building the labor movement alongside the cooperative movement through the UCC.

Who is this track for?

This track is for cooperative worker owners and cooperative developers who are looking to fortify their regional co-op ecosystem and want to imagine new relationships that can expand cooperative thinking and practice.

This track will focus deeply on partnerships of all kinds! From policy makers, to cooperative supporters, from traditional businesses, to social movement organizers—how can we expand our imagination about who is building cooperative power? We will explore a range of approaches to building out cooperative ecosystems and partnerships: mapping relationships and power, appreciative inquiry, listening techniques, event hosting, and relationship building.

Agenda for the Day

Participants will learn strategies for building partnerships, including. . .

Practices that weave peer networks in order to build horizontal power and inter-cooperative support (incl. what doesn't work!)

Design parameters for secondary co-ops that engage both worker cooperatives and non-cooperative businesses to build power and better compete in the market.

Case studies of organizing cooperative allies to build cooperative power

Case studies of how communities are using popular education and place-based community organizing to expand cooperative thought and practice

Steps to building trust and relationships with government workers and policy makers to increase support for worker cooperatives

Who is this track for?

This track is for worker owners and board members that are operating in collaborative teams. This track is best for small and medium sized cooperatives and especially useful for cooperators who facilitate meetings.

Sometimes 'Why We Come Together' as cooperators gets lost in the power dynamics and tensions that come up in the work and in our meetings. This track provides a space to share experiences of those power dynamics and tensions and to learn from each other. If your cooperative has challenging meetings, you are not alone. Just because we believe in the power of cooperatives, does not mean we always get it right. Uncomfortable dynamics are inevitable, but there are generative ways to shift the ways that aren’t serving you and your collective. We must continue to unlearn (together).

In this track, we make space for all types of power dynamics. However, we focus on meetings. Meetings are a place where miscommunication, power dynamics, and disengagement often happen. Meetings have SO much potential! In this track you’ll dig into how we can set up meetings to help align us, build community, share power together, and work through these tensions with facilitation skills and collaborative meeting processes.

Agenda for the Day

The track will be fun! It will include story circles, group work, panel, Q&A and more to get into the concrete tools for sharing power.

Track attendees will:

Learn a framework to understand, analyze, and shift power dynamics that show up in their cooperative

Reflect and share their experiences with power and explore how to shift unhealthy dynamics to better actualize cooperative principles

Learn tactics and develop skills related to cooperative facilitation

Understand a useful tool: tension-driven meetings to support shared power

Process their team’s meeting flows and practices and how to bring more participation, clarity and inclusivity

Who is this track for?

This will be an interactive training designed for worker cooperative members, managers and management teams interested in learning how to use human-centered personnel practices in their workplaces. It's a fit for newly-transitioned businesses, growing worker-owned and managed companies, as well as well-established cooperatives.

The School for Democratic Management helps build a strong ownership culture by focusing on four corner posts of a democratic workplace: Information, Power, Money and People. This track focuses on the People corner post, specifically the mandate to develop people through effective personnel practices. While most cooperative members and many managers have little training in how to communicate well in difficult situations, how to hold people accountable, and how to support people’s growth, these skills can be learned. This session is designed to help you build awareness, skills and confidence in communication to effectively lead difficult conversations and de-escalate conflict. All are important to help new and established cooperative workplaces ensure democracy takes hold.

Agenda for the Day

The sources for this training include effective communication and coaching supervision practices developed and used by Cooperative Homecare Associates and PHI as well as the Guide to Democratic Management produced by DAWI.

The training will be highly interactive and include presentations, self assessment, role plays and group activities.

Learning outcomes include real life skills to use immediately in your workplace including:
self-awareness and self-management skills to use in difficult work situations;
active listening skills to help with conflict de-escalation and skills in giving effective feedback.

Who is this track for?

This will be an interactive training and discussion designed for worker cooperative developers, lenders and other business service providers interested in learning more about how to effectively support business conversions. Join us to learn and network with other business service providers as we share best practices, challenges and opportunities of converting a business to worker ownership.

This workshop track will celebrate accomplishments; create generative conversations through an interactive training; deepen knowledge and skills with expert panelists; and lift up innovations and learnings from the worker cooperative and employee ownership field.

Training topics might include but are not limited to legal aspects of business conversions; innovative ways capital can bring worker ownership to scale; democratic management tools and techniques; and explore how you can be part of a collaborative network doing conversion deals across the country.

Agenda for the Day

We will begin the day with a meeting (2hr) in the morning with W2O collaborative members (if you are a business service provider who is not currently a W2O member you are welcome to join us), followed up with an interactive training and discussion (4hr) in the afternoon.

Deepen knowledge and skills as a business conversion practitioner

Learn from capital fund models and democratic management training experts

Define how we as a field want to collaborate, learn and innovate on our collective work

Who is this track for? 

For worker-owners of cooperatives legally incorporated as a limited liability company or LLC.

We will dedicate this day to finances and we will try to break down the barriers that prevent you from being able to support and participate more assertively in the decisions of your LLC cooperative. If you are part of a worker cooperative and constantly get frustrated in meetings when making financial decisions or trying to understand financial reports, if access to capital seems like barren terrain and difficult to navigate, or if managing your personal finance is a constant stress, here you can take advantage of the knowledge, experiences and resources of experts in the field.

Agenda of the Day

• Learn about sound personal finance and basic business finance literature
• Learn how to read financial reports (Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow and Budget) to enable them to participate more actively in financial decisions
• Access to Capital - What options do we have?
• Learn how to structure your bookkeeping system
• Learn how to prepare for tax season

Who is this track for?

Aimed at cooperative efforts that are in the exploration and integration phase of their projects, helping to determine their viability.

We want to work with collective groups aspiring to become cooperatives to help them define their expectations in the creation of cooperative projects. To understand the phases and components of a cooperative project, in its various modalities and stages. So that they can understand the differences between a cooperative and a business, and begin to develop a culture of leadership that will help reactivate the economy in our communities.

Agenda for the Day

Workshop #1 "A cooperative from start to finish" (simple steps to give way to the creation of a cooperative)

Workshop #2 "Create a culture of leadership in our community" (incorporating stop being employees to be owners of the cooperative)

Workshop #3 "Types of cooperatives" (integrated, multi-culturally, based on a process that includes equity as a fundamental principle)

Workshop #4 "Conflict resolution" (ABC of how to prevent and not allow a conflict to escalate in a cooperative)

Who is this track for?

This session will focus on the sustainability of internal processes in cooperatives, as well as members. We want to be able to balance the facilitation of tools and structures to support transparency and communication. At the same time we want to explore the roots of our conflicts in cooperatives as well as the need to cultivate trust. We want to honor our bodies, our relationships, create spaces of healing and accompaniment for people who have had too much responsibility for too long. This space belongs to you, to all of us and is built among all.

Agenda for the Day

• Support transparency processes in important decisions
• Process for managing conflict internally and policies for managing conflict
• Practices for establishing transparency in communications
• Supporting the healing process
• Accompaniment to close a cycle of conflict and rupture