In the fall of 2022, Justine Porter quit her desk job at a nonprofit to pursue a passion for saving, restoring, and refurbishing wood furniture. In starting Found & Fixed Hudson Valley, she and her cofounder, Gabriel Jasmin, knew they didn’t want to go down the path of the traditional entrepreneurship model. Instead, they decided to structure their business as a worker-owned cooperative to create the foundation for a more equitable workplace for their future employees and provide them with a path to more equally share in the benefits and burdens of ownership.
“I really wanted to have other people join me as coconspirators and collaborators in the business,” says Porter, whose previous experience working in social-enterprise management for the think tank Democracy Collaborative led her and Jasmin to pursue a cooperative model. “I think businesses operate better when their employees have an ownership stake. I don't want to just hire someone to sand the furniture. I want someone who's in the weeds with me on the big strategic decisions.”
In contrast to traditional companies where ownership belongs to one or more investors, worker-owned cooperatives are jointly owned and democratically managed by the people who work for them. Worker-owners participate in the governance of the business through a democratic voting process where each owner receives one vote.
While many people may associate worker-owned cooperatives with hippie idealism and social upheaval of the `60s and `70s, the roots of worker-owned cooperatives stretch back to the Industrial Revolution, when unforgiving hours and unsafe working conditions led workers to begin collectively organizing to protect their rights. During the pandemic, the business model began to gain momentum again in the US as a solution to deepening racial and wealth inequalities. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, the number of worker cooperatives in the United States rose from 465 in 2019 to 612 in 2021, a growth of more than 30 percent.
According to DeeArah Wright, Project Steward at Co-op Hudson Valley, a local loan fund started in 2019 that provides financial support and technical assistance to worker-owned businesses, cooperative ownership in the Hudson Valley has developed an especially strong foothold in the agricultural sector—an industry whose low wages and poor working conditions have systemically disadvantaged Black and brown farm workers. “There's a lot bubbling in this region around developing a cooperative ecosystem that's becoming more cohesive around food distribution, food storage, production, and of course, farms,” Wright says.
Maggie Cheney, cofounder and coowner of Rock Steady Farm in Millerton, a multi-racial, queer- and trans- led cooperative vegetable farm and nonprofit, saw cooperative ownership as one of the only solutions to the financial difficulties of traditional, sole-proprietor family farming.
“I've been farming for my whole life. My dad's a farmer, and I've worked for numerous sole-proprietor farms, and I didn't see that model working,” Cheney says. “I feel like a lot of older farmers are struggling to pass their farms off to their children or grandchildren because of technology, and changing culture, and, quite frankly, farming not being economically viable in this country. To me, it was a great opportunity to figure out a different model that would be more of a sustainable option in this current time.”
Almost 10 years since Rock Steady’s founding, the farm now has five owners and a total team of around 12 that includes part-time and nonowner workers. In that time, Cheney says the farm’s democratic decision-making process has allowed its owners to more readily adapt to the pressures of the business and the needs of its workers, which have ranged from developing an equitable system for allocating dividends based on hours worked to dealing with the financial repercussions from damage by a tornado. “What's great about co-ops is you're not just one person thinking about everything. You've got, like, five people—their brains, their lived experience—troubleshooting those things, which I think makes for more resilient businesses.”
More than just spreading financial risk and the burden of decision-making around, however, cooperative ownership has the potential to give historically marginalized communities of workers meaningful control of their own labor. “Co-op work culture is more welcoming to marginalized groups because of the caps and balances on power dynamics, the feedback processes, and the transparency,” Cheney says. “We're in a multiracial space where all of us are marginalized because of our queer and trans identities, and I think having a structure that matches that ethos and that side of our work is really important.”
As part of its nonextractive mission, Co-op Hudson Valley primarily focuses on providing support to those who have historically been excluded from access to economic stability, including Black and brown families, women and nonbinary people, immigrants and indigenous communities, and low-income workers. Another aspect of its nonextractive approach is that businesses that receive loans from the organization are not required to start repaying them until they begin to turn a profit.
This spring, Co-op Hudson Valley awarded a $300,000 loan to Found & Fixed that will help Porter and Jasmin create additional jobs, raise brand awareness, and build out their new workshop and retail space in Highland, which opened in July. The loan also covered their initial ownership investments, which Porter says allowed them to significantly lower their buy-in cost for future worker-owners.
“We want to see a regional ecosystem of cooperative work and an interdependent system that is thriving. If a business is able to pay back their loan with us, that means that they've found a business model that is sustainable and supports their own economic empowerment,” says Wright. “If people are willing to be emergent and be patient with the process of what it means to have collaborative decision-making embedded in the ownership practice, then even with challenges, it can be great. There's a proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’”
