Starting a worker cooperative is proving to be a challenging and rewarding endeavor. In many ways it is a shock to the system to have an unknown and democratic organizational structure laid in front of us. How are decisions made? Who is responsible? How is this different than a nonprofit volunteer organization?
A worker cooperative “can be considered to be businesses that make a product, or offer a service, to sell for profit where the workers are members or worker-owners.” The mission of a worker cooperative is to provide for its members, normally by providing jobs and therefore income/a living. In our case, the first goal is to provide food to our members and eventually jobs. This is different from other organizations who engenders a mission to change an external issue. For example, the United Way’s mission is: “To improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of communities.” Like many nonprofits, this mission is externally focused. It is meant to instigate change in the broader community or in specific communities.
We are building our own community that is open and voluntary. We will decide on requirements, financial and participatory, but the nature of a worker cooperative is to be inclusive. We will be based on democratic principles and likely incorporate consensus decision-making into our procedures. We’ll place authority with trusted owner-members and share in the responsibility of accomplishing our tasks and reaching our goals.
This weekend we start the challenging work of cooperatively making decisions. We’ll review consensus and other models of making decisions and then apply those to our membership requirements. Also, we’ll choose a steering committee to facilitate the management of our work until we incorporate sometime this Spring. We must be patient and adaptable, our biggest challenges. We’ll find that some decisions require expediency and others time to reflect. We may look to those more experienced to weigh in with heavier opinions but we won’t lose our place in the process as individuals.
As time moves on we’ll see that we are working on two tracks. Governance (or the system of rules and processes for making decisions) and operations (the day to day functioning and practicing of our decision-making processes.) It may be that as a group we give more authority to individuals in representing us for governance issues, while retaining a more interactive and group oriented process for operations.
There are many models we can follow, but most importantly this is an opportunity for a group of caring individuals to collaborate and create a sustainable future.
