For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

The post Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nithin Coca: For Socorro Aguirre Cruz, a home care worker in Staten Island, New York, with nearly 50 years of cleaning experience, many of the challenges faced by gig workers today have been part of her life for decades. Work has been precarious for her long before the emergence of massive, venture capitalist-funded gig platforms that began disrupting — and in some cases destroying — a number of industries.

“It was hard to find work, especially not speaking English,” Cruz says. “I was badly paid for a lot of work, and sometimes I didn’t get paid at all. They took advantage of my situation as an immigrant here.”

As the gig economy grows, more and more stories of worker exploitation are coming to the fore. And as reports of shady labor practices at Uber, Lyft, Taskrabbit, Postmates, and Amazon Mechanical Turk show, these issues run rampant across all sectors of the gig economy. In the home services industry, the platform Handy has made a name for itself, connecting people with pre-screened professional cleaners, fixers, and other professionals. Within three years of its founding, however, the company already faced lawsuits for allegedly underpaying workers and making them pay severe fees for minor transgressions.

To counter poor labor practices, gig workers and entrepreneurs are now taking matters into their own hands by launching their own digital platforms for various services. Called “platform cooperatives,” these businesses bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance, to the digital world.

This June, Cruz and five others formed Brightly Cleaning, a worker-owned cooperative, with support from two social service organizations based in New York City, New York: The La Colmena Staten Island Community Job Center and the Center for Family Life. Brightly Cleaning soon became one of the first members of the new platform cooperative Up & Go.

Socorro Aguirre Cruz, worker-owner of Brightly Cleaning of Staten Island. Photo courtesy of The Center for Family Life

“We’re getting a lot of jobs,” Cruz says. “This work means we can grow more as a co-op, and help other co-ops grow too. It’s like a tree that keeps extending its branches.”

While platform cooperatives have the potential to stand against the tide of exploitative, venture-backed companies, funding is a challenge. For venture capitalists, there’s no incentive to invest in businesses that will not eventually be sold to other investors for a return. For most banks, making loans to new technology businesses is too risky.

But Up & Go and an array of other emerging platform cooperatives are finding innovative, diverse solutions to become financially-viable businesses in the long term. Together, they are charting the way forward for the creation of a far more equitable digital business sector; one that could restore the promise of a sharing economy based on the true sharing of wealth and power — and not the exploitation of workers for profit.

Grants from Foundations 

Up & Go received multiple grants — one from the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit based in New York City, New York, that focuses on fighting poverty, and another from the citizenship initiatives program of the multinational British Bank Barclays. The impetus for launching Up & Go came from our understanding of the marketing challenges facing worker coops – along with the Robin Hood Foundation’s research and focus on the impact of the digital gig economy on low-income workers, says Sylvia Morse, Up & Go’s project coordinator.

“What are the opportunities to create platforms that are more worker focused? That was how the idea was born,” Morse says. The Robin Hood Foundation, which is known for its innovative methods in tackling poverty in the New York City area, was willing to invest in a project like a platform cooperative.

“We were of the opinion that the folks that benefit the least in the world from being ‘on demand’ are the ones that Robin Hood wants to help the most — those sitting on the bottom rung of the economic ladder,” Steven Lee, managing director for income security at the Robin Hood Foundation, says. “[We] came up with this [idea] of creating a tech platform that would source work from consumers around New York City and match those consumers with the low-income worker population.”

Up & Go is jointly owned by three cooperatives that receive 95 percent of the payment from every booking — a far higher figure than any privately owned platform. The remaining five percent goes towards the development and management of the platform.

“We believe that with this initial investment and with the model of having a portion of the booking going back into the platform, and with the worker-owned businesses making an investment, Up & Go can be financially sustainable,” Morse says. The key focus now will be making sure more consumers are aware of the platform, refining the user experience, and bringing more worker-owned cooperatives onboard, she says.

Given the rapid growth of gig work, finding alternatives to business as usual models that focus solely on the bottom line is becoming essential to protect workers. Earlier this year, the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, based in Oxford, England, released the Online Labour Index. The Index showed that the online gig economy grew by 26 percent globally in 2016. It shows no signs of slowing down. [Disclosure: I was interviewed about my experiences as a freelancer for the Institute’s study.]

A snapshot of the global gig work marketplace, by the Oxford Internet Institute

Data from Intuit, based in Mountain View, California, and Emergent Research, located in Lafayette, California, expects a doubling of on-demand workers in the U.S. by 2021. While gig work offers a number of benefits, including flexible work hours and diverse income streams, it can also lead to exploitation. Low wages, unsteady work, and lack of benefits are just a few of the many documented impacts of gig work and the rise of on-demand platforms. Platform cooperatives seek to counter this trend by putting power, ownership, and profits in the hands of workers.

The concept of platform cooperatives has been around since at least 2014. It takes inspiration from the cooperative sector, which has played a key role in the global economy for decades. Like traditional worker cooperatives, platform cooperatives follow a core set of democratic and collective values. Member-owners of Up & Go like Cruz vote on major decisions and share in the profits.

This kind of shared ownership and profits is what makes funding a sometimes insurmountable hurdle for platform cooperatives. “Tech investors still expect outsized control and return for what they perceive to be as the risk,” says Jason Weiner, an attorney specializing in sharing economy law, social and regenerative enterprise, employee-ownership and cooperatives. “A platform co-op could look at least as risky, and offer less liquidity, so investors tend to balk on the terms that platform co-ops are offering.”

The very thing that makes platform cooperatives attractive to workers — shared control and ownership — is a turnoff to many investors. “The capital required to launch a platform co-op is as much as a traditional lean tech startup,” Weiner says. “There is a mismatch between supply of capital and demand of capital.”

Cooperative Banks and Credit Unions

Take La’zooz, an Israeli ride-hailing platform cooperative that got ample media coverage as an ethical alternative to large, venture-funded ride-hailing giants. Like many early-stage platform cooperatives, La’zooz was unable to access funding to get off the ground.

“No funds [meant] no real capacity to push development and to build a product that could be an alternative to giant startups backed with millions/billions of dollars by VCs,” says Eitan Katchka, co-founder of La’zooz, who is currently working for Commuterz, an Israel-based mobility platform.

When Uber entered the market, it was hailed for disrupting the taxi industry. But before its entrance, the taxi industry sought a profit out of necessity. If it failed to make money, it would go bankrupt. But as Vox reported this year, Uber has never made a profit in its history. Why? Because it’s able to burn through billions of venture capital dollars in a quest to grow as fast as possible. Because platform cooperatives lack this kind of funding, experts point to a need for other institutions to step in.

“We have yet to see a significant, institutional financing in this new wave of platform cooperative ideas,” says Nathan Schneider, a scholar in residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. “That absence is glaring.”

Schneider says cooperative banks and credit unions — the institutions that invest in traditional cooperatives — could be potential sources of credit for platform cooperatives. “People who have been interested in cooperative development and investment see cooperatives as small businesses in local communities,” Schneider says. “They tend to be not oriented into investing in the tech industry, which requires a specific tool set.” Schneider says he hopes that as awareness of platform cooperatives grows, this barrier can be overcome.

“It’s great that there are a diversity of projects trying to address financing … some more traditional, some more exploring new territory,” says Schneider. “The way we created [early cooperative] economies was from the grassroots and we have to reinvent what that looks like online.”

One funding model that is already showing promise for platform cooperatives is crowdfunding. Before the advent of crowdfunding websites, traditional cooperatives like cooperative grocery stores, cafes, and bakeries, often sought financial support from community members. “Platform co-ops could be the key that unlocks crowdfunding model,” Schneider says. “So far, in non-cooperative spaces, [equity crowdfunding] has been slow to get moving.”

Equity Crowdfunding 

Some platform cooperatives are turning to equity crowdfunding , which combines shared ownership with crowdfunding. One of the first examples of a platform cooperative using the equity crowdfunding model is Resonate, a music-streaming service based in Ireland that is in beta, but currently accepting new members to join and test the service.

“We are not ready for mass consumption, but once we get through that process of really getting things much more stable and user friendly, then we’ll be able to do more aggressive marketing campaigns,” says Peter Harris, the founder of Resonate.

Resonate co-founder Peter Harris. Image courtesy of Resonate

Harris has high hopes for Resonate. The service benefits musicians and labels — who get more revenue for songs than on existing corporate platforms like Apple Music and Spotify — as well as listeners, who can own a song after a certain number of plays. Resonate’s model means that it is co-owned by musicians, labels, and listeners. All get voting rights and a share of future dividends.

Resonate was the first project for Seedbloom, self-described as a “a seeding, equity crowdfunding, and governance platform for co-ops and ethically driven enterprises.” Victor Matekole, the founder of Seedbloom, comes from a corporate background, where he saw first-hand the problems of exploitative financing.

“Seedbloom really came out of a strong desire to fix our economy,” Matekole says. “Platform cooperatives were something that I came through by working with Resonate, and I saw it a solution for… how to direct capital out of the financial world and towards projects that are oriented towards financial and social justice.”

Seedbloom and Resonate launched their equity crowdfunding campaign in 2016. While the campaign only reached 20 percent of its goal of raising 50,000 euros, it was enough to launch the platform. Today, Resonate is live, and for five euros, users can become a member of the cooperative, with full voting rights. Once the app is out of beta mode, they also earn dividends. Two hours of listening a day for a month would cost around approximately two to four euros, with nearly all of that going to musicians themselves.

Snapshot of artists on Resonate

One of the standout — and financially viable — platform cooperatives out there is Stocksy United, a stock photo platform cooperative based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, founded by Bruce Livingstone and Brianna Wettlaufer [Stocky is a sponsor of Shareable]. Photographers may seem like they have little in common with home care workers, but they share similar challenges. Photographers are also dependent on companies like Getty Images for work, and often face challenges in getting paid.

That’s why in 2012, Livingstone and Wettlaufer decided to form Stocksy. Unlike other platform cooperatives, Stocksy received a start-up loan for one million dollars from one of its founders. What followed shows the potential of a well-designed platform cooperative.

“With that money we were able to employee key staff to have the building blocks for a strong tech company, from senior marketing to backend systems development,” says Nuno Silva, Stocksy’s vice president of product and one of its founding members. “Within eight months of being in business we were cash positive and in the black, already in the process of paying back the loan.”

In fact, by mid 2016, Stocky’s members were able to pay off the loan entirely. Today, Stocksy has nearly 1,000 contributing artists, and an annual revenue of $10.7 million in 2016. The platform cooperative model is what made it all possible.

“A platform co-op provides the foundation to run an ethical, sustainable business that’s made stronger by its member-shareholders,” says Silva. “It’s a model we hope more entrepreneurs will consider as an option and as a means to benefit the many and not just a select few.”

But not all platform cooperatives can get a large loan from a member, access foundational grants, or turn to equity crowdfunding options. That’s why many in the community are looking at alternative methods for raising capital that could spur even more growth in platform cooperatives.

Blockchain and Alternative Currencies

One model that people are exploring is the use of blockchain and alternate currencies. The blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions between parties transparently. One of the most well-known of the blockchain-based currencies is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just one of many virtual currencies in existence.

Blockchain, as a technology, has many functions and can be used in many diverse ways. Resonate, for example, plans to use a blockchain to keep track of how often songs are streamed as a way to openly distribute revenues and assign ownership of songs to listeners. But the real potential lies in how this technology can be encoded with cooperative values, creating the potential for digital, cooperative currencies.

“In this different kind of economy we have to rethink what is money, what is the relationship of money, and how it is used as a form of exchange,” says Boyd Cohen, joint professor at the EADA Business School and the Universitat de Vic in Barcelona, Spain. “Cryptocurrency changes a lot of things in these equations, and opens up opportunities for new business models and ways of thinking about platform co-ops.”

In fact, 2017 has seen a massive spike in the amount of funds raised by what are called Initial Coin Offerings. While, the Initial Coin Offering market is incredibly speculative and prone to the same types of financial abuses as traditional markets, some advocates see potential in redirecting this technology.

“It’s important that people from the blockchain community work with people in the sharing and co-op movement, so that the things we are designing have the values of the co-op movement hard-coded into its DNA,” says Jamie Burke, the founder of Outlier Ventures, a London, United Kingdom-based investment firm with deep knowledge of cryptocurrencies.

Burke and Cohen are working with three start-ups to launch a meta platform cooperative token in the coming months. The idea behind creating a platform cooperative-specific currency or token is that it would create self-reinforcing ecosystems of financial and technical resources for emerging platform cooperatives.

One organization exemplifying this kind of self-reinforcing system is Purpose Ventures, based in Berlin, Germany. The group has created a fund that invests only in what it calls “steward-owned companies,” a term that includes, but is not exclusive to platform cooperatives. The organization doesn’t take ownership of its investments, which are all evergreen and focused on long-term, sustainable growth instead of short-term capital accumulation.

“We are totally interested in also investing in them and helping [platform co-ops],” says Armin Steuernagel, co-founder of Purpose Ventures. “We’ve invested in several platforms that are thinking of going in that direction.”

Similarly, next year Seedbloom is planning to launch 6fund, named after the six cooperative principles. 6fund is aimed at supplementing Seedbloom’s existing equity crowdfunding model by providing platform cooperatives access to long-term, sustainable capital sources.

“How can we take some of the funding that comes through, and take portions of that money and constantly circulate it through new projects,” says Seedbloom’s Matekole. “There is a desire and need for a vehicle in which large cooperatives can actually invest and spread risk of investment across projects.”

Seedbloom hopes to make 6Fund a viable product for pension funds and other institutions to invest in, tapping into an even greater capital resources for platform cooperatives.

“You’re not going to see the crazy returns like the high-tech startups,” says Matekole. “But what I hope that we see from platform co-ops are investments that are stable, and in the end … more ethical.”

Support from Unions

Unions are also increasingly playing an important role in supporting platform cooperatives, since labor rights are essential to both. In California, United Health Workers West — a 150,000-member strong union — helped nurses launch the NursesCan Cooperative, a platform cooperative for licensed vocational nurses to provide on-demand care options for health care providers.

While United Healthcare Workers West did not directly invest in the cooperative, it did play an important role in helping provide legal support and building connections with potential employers. United Healthcare Workers West hopes this model is replicated around the U.S.

NursesCan Cooperative’s members. Photo courtesy of UHW-West

“There are deep and powerful connection between democratic workplaces and what unions organize around,” says Ra Criscitiello, research coordinator at United Healthcare Workers West. “I hope that both unions and workers co-ops can start to see the value in partnering more.”

The platform cooperative movement has grown in leaps and bounds in the past few years. The network and support that aspiring platform cooperatives have today is greater than ever before. In the meantime, venture capitalist money is not as plentiful as it was just a few years ago, which could stem the tide of venture-backed start-ups, creating an opening for platform cooperatives to enter the market.

While there still aren’t many functional platform cooperative alternatives to various gig economy platforms, change is in the air. Up & Go, Resonate, Stocksy, and NursesCan show that platform cooperatives are making their way into many sectors of the economy, from home care to health care.

Cruz and her colleagues at Brightly Cleaning Cooperative hope that the opportunities they’ve gotten by joining Up & Go can help other gig workers facing exploitative practices. “We are so lucky to be part of Up & Go,” Cruz says. “It’s a backbone that supports us and protects us. We really want to provide this opportunity to other workers as well.”

Header image of Up & Go’s launch event courtesy of The Center for Family Life.

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