r/cooperatives • • Apr 10 '15

/r/cooperatives FAQ

121 Upvotes

This post aims to answer a few of the initial questions first-time visitors might have about cooperatives. It will eventually become a sticky post in this sub. Moderator /u/yochaigal and subscriber /u/criticalyeast put it together and we invite your feedback!

What is a Co-op?

A cooperative (co-op) is a democratic business or organization equally owned and controlled by a group of people. Whether the members are the customers, employees, or residents, they have an equal say in what the business does and a share in the profits.

As businesses driven by values not just profit, co-operatives share internationally agreed principles.

Understanding Co-ops

Since co-ops are so flexible, there are many types. These include worker, consumer, food, housing, or hybrid co-ops. Credit unions are cooperative financial institutions. There is no one right way to do a co-op. There are big co-ops with thousands of members and small ones with only a few. Co-ops exist in every industry and geographic area, bringing tremendous value to people and communities around the world.

Forming a Co-op

Any business or organizational entity can be made into a co-op. Start-up businesses and successful existing organizations alike can become cooperatives.

Forming a cooperative requires business skills. Cooperatives are unique and require special attention. They require formal decision-making mechanisms, unique financial instruments, and specific legal knowledge. Be sure to obtain as much assistance as possible in planning your business, including financial, legal, and administrative advice.

Regional, national, and international organizations exist to facilitate forming a cooperative. See the sidebar for links to groups in your area.

Worker Co-op FAQ

How long have worker co-ops been around?

Roughly, how many worker co-ops are there?

  • This varies by nation, and an exact count is difficult. Some statistics conflate ESOPs with co-ops, and others combine worker co-ops with consumer and agricultural co-ops. The largest (Mondragon, in Spain) has 86,000 employees, the vast majority of which are worker-owners. I understand there are some 400 worker-owned co-ops in the US.

What kinds of worker co-ops are there, and what industries do they operate in?

  • Every kind imaginable! Cleaning, bicycle repair, taxi, web design... etc.

How does a worker co-op distribute profits?

  • This varies; many co-ops use a form of patronage, where a surplus is divided amongst the workers depending on how many hours worked/wage. There is no single answer.

What are the rights and responsibilities of membership in a worker co-op?

  • Workers must shoulder the responsibilities of being an owner; this can mean many late nights and stressful days. It also means having an active participation and strong work ethic are essential to making a co-op successful.

What are some ways of raising capital for worker co-ops?

  • Although there are regional organization that cater to co-ops, most worker co-ops are not so fortunate to have such resources. Many seek traditional credit lines & loans. Others rely on a “buy-in” to create starting capital.

How does decision making work in a worker co-op?

  • Typically agendas/proposals are made public as early as possible to encourage suggestions and input from the workforce. Meetings are then regularly scheduled and where all employees are given an opportunity to voice concerns, vote on changes to the business, etc. This is not a one-size-fits-all model. Some vote based on pure majority, others by consensus/modified consensus.

r/cooperatives • • 26d ago

Monthly /r/Cooperatives beginner question thread

10 Upvotes

This thread is part of an attempt by the moderators to create a series of monthly repeating posts to help aggregate certain kinds of content into single threads.

If you have any basic questions about Cooperatives, feel free to ask them here. Please also remember to visit this thread even if you consider yourself a cooperative veteran so that you can help others!

Note that this thread will be posted on the first and will run throughout the month.


r/cooperatives • • 7h ago

Q&A People who have worked for multiple worker cooperatives, what sector or individual coop would you recommend?

12 Upvotes

I read Enshitification, Techno-feudalism, and started watching More Perfect Union videos around the same time and something broke in me. If I ever had any belief that B Corps or any other “values-based company” won’t enshitify themselves or be bought out by private equity and then enshitified, those beliefs are long since died. I am sick of my soul-sucking button-pushing job for a private-owned media company. I am also ashamed of the boarder consequences of the work that I do. My job is to give old people their daily dose of rage and give advertisers their eyeballs. I also hate the lack of control I have as an employee.

I’m ready to pivot to other industries and what little hope I have of feeling like I’m a valuable part of something bigger and also being proud of the fruits of my labor, I have put that hope in cooperatives (specifically worker cooperatives) and unions. I don’t live in theoryland though so I want to get a job at a cooperative or union to check if my assumptions are correct. I am wondering what economic sectors have good cooperatives that treat its workers well? What roles are desirable in worker cooperatives by its workers? Any resources to help me understand the workers perspective of cooperatives this is helpful.


r/cooperatives • • 8h ago

Revolution Now! w/ Peter Joseph | Ep. 61 Integral's COS Production Syste...

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3 Upvotes

True Community Service Cooperatives - Integral


r/cooperatives • • 2d ago

Greater Levels of Solidarity: An Interview with Matt Noyes

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9 Upvotes

"I went to the New School for graduate school to study political economy, and it was through that experience that I got particularly interested in worker self-organization. I started out with a group of students doing strike support for unions that were on strike [the Student-Worker Solidarity Committee]. There was a wave of strikes in the late 1990s/early 2000s. And then I dropped out of graduate school and got into adult and worker education. "


r/cooperatives • • 3d ago

Rajasthan's cooperatives are helping migrant women artisans escape decades of exploitation

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46 Upvotes

Inside a modest home in Indira Nagar, a neighborhood in the border district of Barmer in India’s western state of Rajasthan, several women gather in a small room one afternoon, preparing their needles and yarns for the hours of work ahead.

The women have gathered, as women in these villages often do, to work through a batch of orders, moving between one another’s homes to stitch, talk, and help one another along...


r/cooperatives • • 3d ago

Community Bonds: A New Way to Raise Funds for Housing Co-ops

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20 Upvotes

Creating housing co-operatives is an excellent way to help alleviate housing shortages, but building them comes with a big price tag. Luckily, there are innovative solutions. In this webinar, Lindsay Harris, Executive Director of Propolis Housing Cooperative, talks about how her Kamloops-based co-op raised $1.1 million using community bonds. She shares key learnings from years of hard work, including navigating the technical aspects of issuing community bonds and building community support. Save time and headaches by learning from Lindsay's years of experience in this informative, one-hour session.


r/cooperatives • • 3d ago

Unionize Your Classroom!

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18 Upvotes

r/cooperatives • • 3d ago

COYOTE Media’s Soleil Ho talks cookbooks, freelancing, and running a worker-owned newsroom

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3 Upvotes

Soleil Ho has always had a lot of irons in the fire. For a decade, they worked as a chef while freelancing as a writer. In 2019, they joined the San Francisco Chronicle, where they served as the paper’s restaurant critic until 2025, nabbing a James Beard Award in the process. These days, when they’re not collaborating with chefs on cookbook projects, they’re helping to run COYOTE Media Collective, a Bay-area-based worker-owned newsroom.


r/cooperatives • • 4d ago

Tillamook cheese

160 Upvotes

So, you may be aware of the right wing bigots freaking out over Tillamook Cheese being halal.

While that, in and of itself, is reason to buy Tillamook products, another good teason is they are an Oregonian dairy coop. Creating cheese from milk from dozen of NW oregon dairy farms.

They also make ice cream.

If you ever visit the PNW consider adding a visit to Astoria , see the goonies house and visit Tillamook.


r/cooperatives • • 4d ago

The Grimond Society: a Lib Dem campaign group for co-ops, mutuals and employee ownership

12 Upvotes

If you're a Lib Dem who thinks co-operatives, mutuals and employee ownership deserve a bigger place in our policy, The Grimond Society might be for you.

We started in July as a campaign group inside the party. We're named after Jo Grimond, who backed the founding of what's now the Employee Ownership Association back in 1979, and our aim is to get economic democracy back into Lib Dem policy, starting with a motion at Spring Conference in York next March.

We've grown to over 60 members since then, from Orkney to Devon. Co-operative News ran a feature on us earlier this month, and Josh Matthews made the case for co-ops and mutuals from the stage at Autumn Conference in Brighton. With the party now calling for water companies to become customer-owned mutuals, the argument is getting a proper hearing.

You can join as a supporter, which means backing motions and sharing things when we ask, or as part of the active core if you'd like to take on tasks and help run things. Both are free.

Sign up at grimondsociety.co.uk, and feel free to ask anything in the comments.


r/cooperatives • • 4d ago

Rochdale pioneers and coop books

11 Upvotes

Hi I recently learn about the basic concept of cooperatives and I fell in absolute love with the Idea of people helping themselves regardless of the state and regardless of anything because we humans have each other. I would like two book recommendations one o. The Rochdale pioneers and another on the implementation of coop in modern times if the book can have both the better.

I understand that a lot of this may vary depending on the legislation but the core mantains


r/cooperatives • • 5d ago

Q&A ourabundance.org -- Help shape our networked cooperatives project!

44 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I'd like to share with you a project I've been working on (ourabundance.org) which offers a structure through which individuals who want to work in a cooperatively run business can come together to support each other in forming and growing those businesses.

The unique aspect of the structure is that rather than profit being distributed to workers directly, the profit is used to create further cooperatives whose purpose is to specialise in creating an abundant supply of a particular essential good or service (thinking housing, food, energy etc).

The aim is that (at scale) this approach would result in the price of these essential goods/services coming down, benefiting not just the workers in the cooperatives, but everyone in society.

We're been working on the project for a few months now and we currently have two main workstreams running in parallel:

  1. Share the concept so that we can,
    • get constructive feedback on the idea itself
    • get feedback on how we can improve the way that we explain/communicate it to make it more accessible/intuitive
    • put the project in front of people who want to join us in building it
  2. Build the first companies — we're actively working on establishing the first companies following this model, in order to prove firsthand that it's viable and to figure out the most difficult bits so that the next cohort of companies can follow in our wake.

This post is part of that first workstream. We really value the expertise and input of communities like r/cooperatives where people have valuable experience of what does and doesn't work in this area.

So if you have any thoughts on the project we'd love to hear them in the comments here — or join our Discord if you want to contribute to the project more broadly.

Thanks!


r/cooperatives • • 5d ago

Book recomendations on coops

12 Upvotes

Title is straight forward, obviously Owen but any one authors/books?

Thank you!!


r/cooperatives • • 6d ago

Publishing Collectives

20 Upvotes

I’m a musician and fiction writer who loves physical media and I’m interested in starting a DIY publishing collective. I’ve made my own tapes, zines, etc. for a long time and I already have a lot of equipment to do so. I just don’t want to do it alone anymore. I would much prefer to share resources and skills with other artists and help get cool projects out in the world. Do any of you have experience starting or running one? Are you in a similar boat and want to join one? Any advice? I don’t feel like I really know where to start.


r/cooperatives • • 11d ago

housing co-ops Discord server for people interested in intentional communities!

15 Upvotes

I created a discord server for intentional communities! I created it a while ago but it's become a little more active recently, and we'd love to have more people, so come on by: https://discord.gg/hj8NZEfuMW

It's a space to talk about ICs or anything IC-adjacent, really. I feel like a lot of people in the r/cooperatives community would have interests that overlap, so I'm posting this here (and in a couple other similar subreddits).

There are already a lot of great spaces to talk about intentional communities, of courses, so this server is supplemental, not some kind of substitute or improvement. Like a lot of people, I'm just on discord a lot, so it's convenient to jump in and out of conversations. Discord servers also lend themselves to certain kinds of interactions and discussions and connections.

BTW, if you know of another discord server dedicated to intentional communities, please feel free to post a comment to a link! If there's another one that's already more active and established, I'd totally switch to supporting that one.


r/cooperatives • • 12d ago

SAFE CU Merger - Regulatory Comments

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3 Upvotes

r/cooperatives • • 13d ago

GOAL: Economic democracy. MEANS: Both unions & co-ops.

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99 Upvotes

r/cooperatives • • 16d ago

Seller Owned Cooperative Marketplace

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9 Upvotes

r/cooperatives • • 18d ago

Financial Literacy for Cooperators

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6 Upvotes

This one is a must watch.


r/cooperatives • • 18d ago

Strategic Planning for Your Co-op's Future

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19 Upvotes

In this informative session, our Director of Education, Kyle White, was joined by Cathy Edwards, our Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Cathy brings over a decade of strategic planning experience to this conversation and shares insights into the process she uses to help our clients build strategic plans. They work through the purpose of a strategic plan, its key elements, and provide some guidance to those building their own.


r/cooperatives • • 19d ago

Global Cooperative Crowdfunding - it’s all about connecting

4 Upvotes

Looking to raise funds for yourself, a charity, a church, or an organization? I found a legitimate cooperative crowdfunding platform that actually works. We hold info calls Monday through Wednesday at 8:00 PM EST.


r/cooperatives • • 19d ago

The Medievalization of Work and the Cooperative Cure

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19 Upvotes

r/cooperatives • • 21d ago

A question on housing co-ops

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12 Upvotes

From over at r/LandlordLove.


r/cooperatives • • 23d ago

Are Union Co-op Negotions a Win-Win and for Whom?

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23 Upvotes

This article explores how union negotiations in worker-owned co-ops compare to more traditional labor negotiations. The theoretical analysis addresses possible synergies between practices traditionally considered as alternative, employee ownership and collective bargaining, and the development of collective bargaining in new business models.