Financial

At age 60, when many of her friends are considering retirement, Josefina Luna is chair of the board of CERO Cooperative Inc. CERO is a five-member worker-owned cooperative on a mission to encourage composting and create jobs in the hard-up Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Boston. It's a small but unusually diverse team: Of the five worker-owners, two are African-American, two are Latinas, and one is white. They communicate in English and Spanish.

This learning and training tool has been developed for member education and board training about basic worker cooperative finance. It consists of a document and a set of linked spreadsheets that allow users to explore the relationship between the primary financial statements that are used for business reporting and decision-making.

This pro forma template is intended to aid cooperative entrepreneurs (and the developers who serve them) in making a preliminary financial assessment of their worker cooperative startup.  Many worker cooperative startups are learning business finances for the first time. This tool offers a framework to think about their business and some labor-saving, pre-built Excel formulas.

For financial institutions looking to create deep and lasting impact, worker cooperatives are a powerful tool for economic and community development. They reduce inequality by allowing a greater segment of the population to build assets through business ownership. They combat poverty by providing access to employment for marginalized populations. And they strengthen local economies by rooting businesses in their communities.