Tools for Coop Developers

Resources for Coop Developers

Concept Paper: Asset Building through Cooperative Business Ownership: Defining and Measuring Cooperative Economic Wealth

Author(s): 
Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Year: 
2008
Many cooperative studies scholars and co-op practitioners believe that successful cooperative businesses create wealth and help their members accumulate wealth and/or assets. Individual asset building or wealth accumulation is assumed to be an outcome from cooperative ownership, in addition to individual and community benefits such as job creation, education and training, income generation, affordable quality products, social capital development, and economic stability.

How Economic Democracy Impacts Workers, Firms, and Communities

Author(s): 
Laura Hanson Schlachter, Olga Prushinskaya
Year: 
2021
 

How Economic Democracy Impacts Workers, Firms, and Communities  presents findings from a national survey of 1,147 workers in 82 worker cooperatives and follow-up interviews with 15 participants—the first national survey of its kind. This novel data, collected in 2017, allows us to explore the impact of workplace democracy on individuals, firms, and communities across the United States. It also provides important opportunities for future research about how worker cooperatives can promote resilience and racial equity in this moment.

Sustainable Economic Democracy: Worker Cooperatives for the 21st Century

Author(s): 
Nicholas Luviene, Amy Stitely, Lorlene Hoyt
Year: 
2010
This guide explores the worker cooperative network as a neighborhood, municipal and regional strategy for generating wealth. It presents two examples: the well-established Mondragon Complex in Spain and the nascent Evergreen Cooperative Initiative in Cleveland Ohio. Drawing from these two cases the authors then put forth a general framework for building a scalable cooperative network in post-industrial American cities.

Building a Platform for Economic Democracy: A Cooperative Development Strategy for the Bronx

Author(s): 
Nicholas Iuviene
Year: 
2013
Cooperative development efforts over the last 25 years have been largely inspired by, and modeled on, the Mondragon experience in the Basque region of Spain. None of these efforts has achieved nearly the success of Mondragon, which stabilized and dramatically developed a regional economy through the creation and growth of a diverse set of industrial worker and supportive secondary cooperatives. US efforts in cooperative development have typically replicated some aspects of the Mondragon model but ignored others.

United States Federation of Worker Co-operatives

Author(s): 
Aaron Dawson, Ann Favreau and Sandra Gorman
Year: 
2009
We will be using the US Federation of Worker Co-operatives (USFWC) as the example to examine the larger question of “authority versus liberty”; of which authority can be defined as a federation where co-operatives are members of a larger organization and therefore limiting individuals control over certain aspects and decisions; and of which liberty can be defined as the autonomy of individual co-operatives and their members to control their fate.

Creating Jobs through Cooperative Development

Author(s): 
Nancy Conover, Frieda Molina, Karin Morris
Year: 
1993
This study highlights economic development cooperatives in California in an attempt to analyze the factors most influential in creating and sustaining ventures that are both economically viable and member-governed. It documents the goals of the founders and the members of California cooperatives in the service sector, and determines the extent to whcih the goals have been realized.