Becoming Human: Mapping & Taking Inventory of Massachusetts Cooperative Ecosystems

By James Macdonald, Gina Magin, Kaylee Malkowski, Katherine Miller, Liam Templemen 

Overview
This report is intended as a guide to the Inventory of the Cooperative Ecosystem in Massachusetts. 

Both this guide and the inventory were prepared by students in the course Anthropology 341, Building Solidarity Economies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the Spring of 2022. The guide was prepared in collaboration with the Coalition of Worker Ownership and Power (COWOP). This is the first of three reports/resources created in collaboration with COWOP. The five co-authors of this report, as part of what we referred to as the “inventory pod”, gathered and aggregated existing resources, and contacted organizations when additional information was desired or needed. The pre-existing resources that we drew on included those produced by the ICA Group and Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network, and Hendrix Berry, as well as the work of Jess Slattery who began a related compilation for COWOP in 2021.

We then added, compiled, and curated the collected information into publicly accessible spreadsheets. 

We intend this information to support conversations and build relationships in the cooperative movement in Massachusetts, as well as provide useful information for those interested in learning more about worker cooperatives in Massachusetts and beyond. The report itself is a snapshot of the cooperative ecosystem in Massachusetts; it engages one moment in time. The associated inventory, however, is a living, breathing document that will continue to grow as more cooperative businesses and organizations emerge, and as the information in the inventory is adjusted and made more complete. The Appendix includes a form that you can use to submit new information, alterations,  and suggestions for the inventory, as well as contact information for general inquiries. 

The report is divided up into sections that mirror the inventory categories: 

• Worker-owned Cooperatives
• Other Cooperatively Run Enterprises 
• Funders and Capital
• Development and Technical Assistance
• Associations and Networks
• Education, Media, and Resources. 

These categories are permeable and many of the organizations listed belong in multiple categories. For example, the TESA Collective (Toolbox for Education and Social Action) provides development and technical assistance to worker-owned cooperatives, produces education and resources, and is itself a worker-owned cooperative. This report also centers and is largely delimited to worker-owned cooperatives in Massachusetts. This limitation is helpful in that it works to highlight the growing concentration of energies and efforts towards worker-owned cooperatives in the state. At the same time, it largely excludes other cooperative and ethical forms of business, households/homes, purchasing, finance, consumption, and so on. Our intention is that this work contributes to the many efforts and movements that are crossing and transgressing political boundaries to build cooperative, autonomous and enlivened communities that advance solidarity economies and put people and planet over profit. 

This document is a static snapshot of a movement in the making. The inventory, we hope, will contribute to this movement by both reflecting the current state of things, and opening possibilities. This inventory will be managed and access kept open by COWOP and BSE. We endeavor to track worker cooperative happenings, and regularly update and expand the inventory so we can have dynamic, open access resources for your conversations, cooperative development, organizing, and power building. 

We need your help to keep this inventory as accurate and up-to-date as possible. 

You can find the full report here.

You can find the inventory here.

For any additions, corrections, suggestions, or other potential edits to the inventory, please fill out this form. 

For further conversation or questions, contact cooperativeinventoryma@_gwb_

Each edition of  Becoming Human will feature an article, reflection, interview, poetry, or other types of expression that engage with a creative community or municipal effort. These will include original features that discuss a local initiative and also stories about efforts in other parts of the world that we might learn from. The growing narratives, relations, and power from which other worlds are being assembled, maybe, can help reorient our hope and desire—and resignation—away from the death drive of white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalist modernity, and towards an open, uncharted horizon of radical egalitarianism and towards the reality that other worlds are in the making or already here. For the full introduction to Becoming Human that appeared in its inaugural column, look here.  For a listing a previous columns, look here.

Acknowledgements: This column is in dialogue and solidarity with numerous collaborators and comrades including Vin Lyon-Callo, Meredith Degyansky, Penn Loh, Stephen Healy, students in Anthropology 340 – Other Economies are Possible, Anthropology 341 Building Solidarity Economies, Anthropology 597CC Community, Commons, Communism, and the pluriverse of world-making and world-defending efforts, movements, and projects in Massachusetts and around the worlds.