On Worker Co-op Development

I just read this simple but very helpful article titled "Worker Cooperative Development Models and Approaches: A Brief Overview," by Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Michael Johnson, Jim Johnson, Len Krimerman, and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo.

As someone who has been hanging around the world of cooperatives for a few years, mostly in the developer role, it was helpful to read an article that clearly stated analysis around cooperative development that reflects my own. Specifically, the article talks about supporting co-ops that are "accessible to all populations" and "develop an authentic, organic ownership culture among the worker owners," among other things.


The article also points readers towards other co-op staples, suggesting that the ICA's seven cooperative principles and co-op values, the ten Mondragon principles and values, the Madison Principles, and the Cooperative Index's eight principles can be used to measure effectiveness in cooperative development.

As someone who was previously doing cooperative development work without a major hub around in relative isolation in Appalachia, I had heard about these principles, but it took me a long time to think about incorporating them into the work I did with worker-owners of our co-ops, much less did I think about using them to measure success rates in our co-ops, something I might consider developing evaluations pedagogy around in the future.

The article really gets exciting when it presents its framework of bottom-up versus top-down co-op development. Initiation and Capitalization are both presented in this bottom-up or top-down framework. Precipitation and Motivation includes points that could apply to either. The article also includes helpful questions to help identify how a co-op fits into either of these frameworks.

As someone who worked at a nonprofit doing development work, I can attest to the fact that much of our work originated in a top-down fashion. However, as the article is careful to note, I would say that our work was a sort of hybrid. We were very aware of our role as developers in our community: we held some power through access to information and resources. Because of our commitment to popular education processes, we spent much of our time figuring out how to avoid being gatekeepers and instead facilitating an approachable and efficient process for worker-owners to gain access to the resources they need.

Also, keeping in mind our reality in less capitalized, more isolated communities, I wonder exactly how our dream of bottom-up cooperative development could take shape. I like the idea of community-sourced capitalization models and would like to spend more time thinking about them. Does anyone have more thoughts on this? I'm attaching this chart from the article below because it really summarizes the article: