How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

The post Helping UK cooperatives thrive appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About This Episode

In 2010, The American Bar Association named Janelle Orsi a Legal Rebel, for being an attorney who is remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation. We agree- Janelle is a rebel with a cause, transforming the way we think about leadership in this shifting economy. From participatory leadership to salary transparency, Janelle is leading by example to expand our definition of leadership. In this episode, Janelle shares examples of how her organization’s leadership practices create opportunities for every level of staff to be engaged in contributing to the organization.

About Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Janelle’s cartoons include Awkward Conversations with Babies, The Next Sharing Economy, Economy Sandwich, Share Spray, The Beatles Economy, The Legal Roots of Resilience, Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future, Transactional Law Practice for a Sharing Economy, Governance is Life, and Citylicious.

Janelle is an advocate for a more open, inclusive, and accessible legal profession, and you can see her 10-minute presentation on transforming the legal profession here. Janelle supervises two legal apprentices — co-workers who are becoming lawyers without going to law school. Janelle and her apprentices are blogging about the process at LikeLincoln.org. 

In 2014, Janelle was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining a robust cohort of social entrepreneurs who are recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.  In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”

In her words…

“I’ve come to realize, if we cultivate the right conditions, we can end up with communities and organizations where, a lot of people, or even all the people, feel that they have power and agency to just shape the world around them.” “I have a lot of hope and optimism for what I think we can do in this world. I think a lot of my role as a leader has just been to help impart that same enthusiasm. I do that. I really hone my skills as a communicator and I do a lot of speaking, I draw a lot of cartoons, I do a lot of writing in ways that I hope inspire other people. What ends up happening is that when other people are inspired, they’re highly intrinsically motivated to get involved. That’s my form of leadership, it’s spurring a lot of voluntary and intrinsically motivated participation in this work as opposed to coercive. I almost never want somebody to do something if they don’t feel intrinsically motivated to do it. For me, my style is to create the vision and communicate it in a way that people are going to want to and feel really driven to get involved in.” “I think we need to start young and just get everybody used to having more power in agency. I think most people walk around their cities or their neighborhoods and they watch things happen. They see, ‘Oh, that building got bought up by a big developer,’ or, ‘That building’s being torn down.’ They watch things happen and it just sort of washes over us, but we don’t always necessarily feel like we have the power or opportunity to change things or shape the world around us. To the extent that we can start practicing that in small ways and creating opportunities for people everywhere to practicing that in small ways, it’ll, I think, ultimately lead to people doing it in bigger ways and having a bigger impact.” “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘there are too many nonprofits,’ or ‘there’s too much redundancy.’ You know, we don’t need more nonprofits, but in a way, I think that we do, because every organization or every program within an organization is a space in which people are able to have a lot of agency and power and to take things on and to achieve a lot. And the degree of social change that we need, if we really are gonna make it through this next 10 years, we have the UN predicting that 2030 is the year in which basically climate change is gonna be irreversible. These are huge problems to take on and of course, the inequality’s been getting worse. Racism’s been getting worse. We’re on a trajectory where things are getting worse, and so to really turn things around, it’s gonna take a lot. A lot of people really focusing on making that change.” “I think the nonprofit sector will grow and that it should grow and that there should be a diversity of organizations working in the same sector. A lot of people say, ‘don’t just duplicate efforts’. But I think we should duplicate efforts. We need a lot of people doing the same kind of work, but doing it in their unique communities, in their unique ways, trying innovative things. And so I think a plurality and diversity and multiplicity of nonprofits emerging in coming years I think will be important. And I think the highly participatory leadership structure is gonna be really critical to that in order to create that leaderful society.” “I just think the passion and the dedication and the intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is perhaps the most valuable resource that we have for social change. That it’s the workers themselves and the drive and the motivation that we bring. That’s what’s really going to make change. And then in order to tap into that drive and into that motivation, we have to be thinking about our organizational structures and our organizational culture. So it could really come down to that. Maybe this is my way of saying that nonprofits that aren’t really thinking deeply about their structure and their culture right now are missing an opportunity to tap into that incredibly valuable resource.” 

Questions Answered on this Episode

• What is shareable leadership?
• Why do you think it is beneficial in the nonprofit sector?
• What issues or opportunities do you see in traditional structures of leadership?
• Cooperatives and shared economy models are seeing a surge in popularity. In many ways, cooperatives, in particular, are creating new economic opportunities for people who may have been previously counted out. How do we invest in those leaders and groups to prepare them as their organizations grow?
• How would you describe your leadership style?
• What has been the overall response to the concept of shareable leadership?
• Are there specific conditions under which the model will thrive or fail?
• What response does “shareable leadership” get from funders? Have they embraced the concept?
• Our current political climate has birthed leaders that haven’t followed the typical trajectory but felt the need to lead in order to create something better. Do you have any predictions about leadership structures and what we may see in the next 5 or 10 years?

The post Janelle Orsi on transforming the way we think about leadership appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ruby Irene Pratka: Call it “An Inconvenient Truth” for the market economy. In “The Third Industrial Revolution,” American economic and social theorist, business school professor, and policy adviser Jeremy Rifkin lays out a bleak vision of a near-future world devastated by climate change, mass extinctions, slow economic growth, and rising levels of extremism and inequality. “This is no longer imminent; it’s at the door and in the house,” Rifkin says, giving a lecture to an audience of several dozen people at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, New York, before launching into a Q&A session. “If it were fully explained, our human family would be terrified.”

Over the course of the filmed lecture, Rifkin charts a course out of the quagmire. For Rifkin, creating a more sustainable world within the next two generations is necessary for humankind’s continued survival. This sustainable world, he says, will depend on increasing interconnectedness between people, places, and objects. Youth engagement, the Internet of things, renewable energy, and the sharing economy will play pivotal roles. Together, they will create a network of data hubs in buildings and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, generating data that can be mined by app developers to create useful, shared tools. The end result, Rifkin says, will be a “distributed nervous system that will allow everyone on the planet at low cost to engage directly with each other.”

This model “works best when it’s collaborative and open, and more and more people join the network and contribute our talent,” he says, referring to already-existing examples of open-source knowledge-sharing networks, such as Wikipedia and Massive Open Online Courses. Widening the network would open the door for a “vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism,” he says. “You already spend part of your day in the market economy, and part of it in the sharing economy with car sharing and Wikipedia.” The sharing economy, he says, “as murky as it is now, is the first real new economic system since capitalism and socialism… I don’t think capitalism will disappear, but it will find value by developing a relationship with the sharing economy.”

He posits that the shift in perspective created by the sharing economy — from a focus on owning property to a focus on accessing goods, services, and experiences — will lead to a renewed awareness of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and a more sustained response to the troubles the planet is facing.

“We have one generation to lay down biosphere consciousness,” Rifkin says. “No other generation has had this weight, one generation called upon to save the species. We need to join together in the virtual and physical world to make this happen.”

Fittingly, the feature-length documentary itself, distributed by Vice Media, has been made available for free on YouTube. Watch it here.

Header image is a screenshot from the film

The post ‘The Third Industrial Revolution’ explores how sharing creates a sustainable world appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Perhaps you remember the scenes, during the Occupy movement in 2011, of hundreds or thousands of people making decisions together in parks and squares. They used strange hand signals, unwritten rules, and a “people’s mic” that amplified speakers’ voices through repetition by the crowd. This ecstatic democracy was short-lived. At the movement’s epicenter in New York City, these general assemblies faded away after police cleared the encampment that November. But in Wellington, New Zealand, a group of activists from the local Occupy group gave their assemblies an afterlife in an app. Now, they face the challenge of making it succeed in an online economy that remains far from an Occupy-style utopia.

Loomio, as their creation is called, has already enabled thousands of groups to deliberate, debate, and make decisions online. It translates the jargon and hand signals of direct democracy into an intuitive pie chart of opinions and a comment thread. True to its democratic ideals, the company is a worker cooperative, owned by the people who develop the software.

Loomio’s values have won it a devoted user base. But they’ve also meant that the usual rules for starting a tech company don’t apply. The most common method for building a big online platform is to raise a lot of money quickly, achieve ubiquity, and then sell the company in a buyout or an initial public offering in the stock market. To get that quick money early on, founders pass considerable ownership and control to investors, who then cash out when the company gets sold.

But this won’t work for a mission-driven co-op. Cooperatives have to remain under the control of their members, not their investors, and mission can’t take a back seat to profits. As cooperative culture spreads into the tech world—a trend some of us have called “platform cooperativism”—Loomio is part of a new wave of entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to finance a more democratic, values-centered online economy.

In recent months, Loomio has raised nearly half a million dollars without giving up control. To understand how, I spoke with Ben Knight, one of the company’s founders.

Nathan Schneider: Since it emerged out of the Occupy experience, how far has Loomio come?

Ben Knight: When we got a prototype up and running in 2012, it was immediately clear that it’s not just activists who need to make decisions together. Over the last four years, Loomio has been used by thousands of change-makers, businesses, governments, city councils, and community groups. It has been used by companies and boards of directors for rapid collaboration, as well as by activist networks to democratically organize large-scale protests. It has been used by governments to engage citizens in collaborative policy-making, right down to families using it to make decisions about how to care for elderly relatives.

People have used Loomio to make more than 40,000 decisions in more than 100 countries, and our international community has translated the software into 35 languages already.

Schneider: So you’ve got a platform being used around the world. Why has financing been so hard?

Knight: The main challenge we set for ourselves was finding a way of funding Loomio to scale that was strongly aligned with our social mission. We’ve felt from the beginning that traditional venture capital is not a good fit for an organization that puts its social mission first. Initially, it was difficult to find models to follow because the default financing mechanisms are built on the assumption that most companies will fail. So investors see the possibility of near-infinite return as a necessary prerequisite for investment.

Schneider: The knee-jerk question of the techno-optimist: Did you try crowdfunding?

Knight: We ran two successful crowdfunding campaigns in the earliest stages of Loomio’s development. The first was a tiny campaign in the first couple of months, when Loomio was literally just an idea. Once we had a prototype up and running, we ran a more substantial campaign to fund the transition from a proof-of-concept to a solid web tool that could scale. We raised enough to fund a year of development, from more than 1,600 people all over the world.

Relying purely on the generosity of our personal networks, however, didn’t feel like a sustainable way forward. We felt we owed it to all the people who had put their trust in us to find a way to pick up the pace without burning out.

Schneider: Last time I saw you in the United States, you were looking for foundation support. How did that go for you?

Knight: We’ve had support from inspiring folks like the Shuttleworth Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Namaste Foundation. But the more conversations we had with people who had been there before, the more apparent it became that the 501(c)3 structure just isn’t built for the type of scale involved in a high-growth software company.

Given that enabling behavioral change at a global scale is such a core part of our social mission, we knew we needed to find a financing mechanism that was aligned with the ability to move quickly and grow appropriately.

Schneider: What came next? What led you toward another approach?

Knight: This realization about alignment led us to reaffirm our roots as a social enterprise—“social” meaning that we put our social mission first, and “enterprise” meaning that we take an enterprising approach to financial independence to drive positive impact.

We settled on a mechanism called “redeemable preference shares,” which was exactly what we were looking for—a way of providing a fair return to investors while also protecting our social mission. Within two months, we had raised $450,000 from a small group of investors. Our lead investor is Sopoong Ventures, a social venture fund based in Seoul. The name Sopoong is an acronym for “the social power of networked groups,” and the fund is a perfect partner driven by the same vision and values as we are. Our investors have been an amazing addition to our team, providing much more than just money.

Schneider: What are redeemable preference shares, and what makes them such a good fit?

Knight: Redeemable preference shares are a fairly conventional financing instrument, but aren’t widely used in the startup world. “Redeemable” means that the shares are not traded externally. Instead, the shares are eventually purchased (“redeemed”) by the company with an agreed-on return, after an agreed-on period of time, provided the company is producing sufficient surplus. In our case, setting up the investment mechanism meant creating a new class of impact-investor shares. These shares sit alongside the worker-member shares in the cooperative, which are non-financial governance shares. The interests of the company and the interests of investors line up.

Schneider: Where’s the accountability? Who holds what risk?

Knight: In terms of accountability, we work closely with our investors as trusted advisors. We take their input seriously, and if they ever feel we’re getting off track, with our business or our social impact focus, then we’ll engage in deliberation to come to a shared understanding. But the bottom-line decision-making sits with the cooperative. And our investors are comfortable entering into a collaborative relationship on those terms.

This trust comes from a strong sense of alignment with a shared social mission, and from the shared risk in the development of Loomio. There has been a huge amount of unpaid time on the part of the founders and workers, so they’re carrying risk just like our investors do. Clearly, the founders aren’t aiming to get rich quick and walk away, so it feels much healthier than the strained founder-investor relationships you sometimes see in the conventional startup world.

Schneider: How long will this arrangement keep Loomio going and growing?

Knight: We’re rapidly building a robust organization to make the transition from a bootstrapping, startup phase into a proactive, growth phase. Another major focus for this year is making it as easy as possible for people to use Loomio alongside the other tools they use in their work. Our goal is to get to the point where making group decisions online is as easy and natural as checking your email. We will be raising another round of impact investment later this year.

Schneider: Is your strategy replicable? How can others get in on it?

Knight: We now know it’s possible to raise capital in a way that doesn’t compromise a company’s social mission. Redeemable preference shares provide a well-tested and flexible framework, and there are other models that can be used to achieve a similar purpose.

Schneider: When were you most tempted to give in and take the big VC money?

Knight: Along the way, people steeped in the Silicon Valley venture-capital mindset told us that we were crazy even to be attempting to find ethical investment. They told us no one cares about social impact that much.

Our experience is that this just isn’t true. The main lesson for us was the importance of sticking to our values and finding that there truly are plenty of values-driven people and organizations that want their money to be doing positive things in the world.

The post How a worker-owned tech startup found investors—and kept its values appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Enspiral Space is Enspiral’s co-working facility in Wellington, New Zealand. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Anna Bergren Miller  describes the inner workings of Enspiral, one of our favourite, P2P-based, social entrepreneurial networks. This article was originally published at Shareable.

While it seems clear that New Zealand-based social enterprise network Enspiral is doing exciting things in the social impact space, it can be difficult, at first, to understand what exactly Enspiral is. It is easier to begin with what Enspiral is not. Enspiral is not an incubator or an accelerator. It is not a training program, nor is it an advisory service. The website’s FAQ page, which describes Enspiral as “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” offers both a promise and a warning to would-be Enspiralites. “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground,” it suggests. “But you’ll need to find your own way, and there’s no program or official support.”

Enspiral’s hard-to-pin-downness is in part a product of its decentralized organizational structure, which is sometimes described as an open value network. The avoidance of power hierarchies is at the heart of the network’s mission. “From the beginning, the first idea was more people working on stuff that matters,” said founder Joshua Vial. “But it was also this idea about decentralized organizations—that there’s a real possibility, with technology now, for different management structures.”

Enspiral Members answer the question: What is Enspiral?

Vial launched Enspiral in 2010, several years after quitting his job at a web development company to split his time between volunteering and contract work. He began meeting people who, like him, were interested in social and environmental issues, but who—unlike him—didn’t have a steady source of income. “So I thought, if I can help other people get higher-paid contract work, maybe we can do interesting things together,” he recalled. He reoriented his consulting business to a collective focused on helping socially-minded professionals find work. “I started saying yes to every contract that came my way, and scrambling to find people,” he said. “We were just looking for like-minded folks.”

In four years, Enspiral evolved from a vision of “more people working on stuff that matters” to a global network of socially-minded individuals and enterprises. (Courtesy Enspiral)

From the start, Enspiral eschewed salaries and emphasized a marketplace model of resource distribution. “There are people with skills and there are different projects, but they’ve got clear budgets and clear deliverables,” explained Vial. “We allocate people to projects in different ways. That’s the key mechanic to getting things done.”

Around 2012, as the company continued to grow, Enspiral hired an administrative staff, which they called a “support crew.” But within a year, it became apparent that “it really didn’t work for us at all,” said Vial. “We started to get divergent experiences from the support crew and the contractors, and it felt like we were just under-resourcing a management team. We were doing things like you would at a normal organization.” So the administrative staff did something that is unlikely to happen at a “normal organization:” they fired themselves.

The Enspiral network includes over 150 contributors and friends from around the world. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Today, the hub of the Enspiral network is Enspiral Foundation, which Vial pictures “as the campfire we all sit around to have a collective discussion.” Enspiral regularly hosts public gatherings, like afternoon teas at Enspiral Space, its co-working office. Individuals interested in participating on a more regular basis can become an Enspiral Contributor by paying an annual fee to cover core operating costs. (The Foundation subsidies people who want to be involved but cannot afford to pay.) The next level of commitment is membership. Enspiral Members are usually involved in the group for at least a year before being invited, and are expected to participate in collective decision-making, and to attend retreats and other in-person events.

Individuals can choose among multiple levels of engagement. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral, though legally a limited liability company, acts as a cooperative. Every Enspiral Member owns one share in the organization. Shares cannot be sold, and the company does not pay dividends. “It’s your citizenship card in the collective, pretty much. Our Members are the ultimate locus of power in the group,” explained Vial. Enspiral Members make administrative decisions and budget collectively, with help from several open-source software programs. These include Loomio, a collective decision-making platform, and Cobudget, both of which were developed within the Enspiral network.

Enspiral Members participate in collaborative decision-making and budgeting. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral Ventures are companies that have voluntary revenue sharing and mutual support agreements with Enspiral Foundation. The agreements are flexible, and may be changed with one month’s notice from either party. Enspiral Ventures do not have any decision-making power in Enspiral Foundation beyond allocating the part of the budget they contributed through the collective funding process. “But because the Members are pretty much starting and running the companies, they’re doing it as a way of putting some of their effort and money into support for our whole mission of Enspiral,” said Vial. “It’s much less about, ‘Let’s go find sponsors we’re not that close to to give us money, because they want to get brand recognition,'” he explained. “It’s much more a collective of companies saying, ‘We’re all dependent upon one another. If we can make this central organization strong, then we’ll all get benefits from a richer community.'”

Enspiral Members commit to attending online meetings and in-person events, including retreats. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral’s financial model is simple: pay what you want. The organization experimented with equity-sharing, but Enspiral Foundation recently returned the shares. “We didn’t want to have the different dynamic of companies being bound together because they had no money to start with, and then they gave equity instead,” said Vial. “As opposed to other Ventures, which, because they were cash-rich, just contributed cash the whole time, and then can walk away with one month’s notice.”

As a result, Enspiral Ventures’ contributions vary by company. Enspiral Services, Vial’s original company, collects up to 20% of the revenue generated by each independent contractor under its umbrella. It then gives one-quarter of these contributions to the Foundation, using the remaining 15% to cover internal expenses and fund Services projects. Contractors can change the percentage they contribute to Enspiral Services on a contract-by-contract basis, and Enspiral Services, like all Enspiral Ventures, can renegotiate their contract with Enspiral Foundation at will. “It’s like, if you’re giving the Foundation too much money, then change your contract and tell us what you want to pay,” said Vial. “It becomes a prompt for conversation if some people contribute a lot and others don’t. It also gives you really good visibility over the value people put on the network.”

Enspiral Foundation is funded by voluntary contributions from Enspiral Ventures. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Dubious by the standards of conventional business practice, Enspiral’s funding strategy is working. Vial estimates that company brings in about NZ$10,000 each month through Enspiral Foundation, plus another NZ$10-12,000 from Enspiral Services. As the company expands, and as the Ventures secure larger contracts, a logical next step is direct funding of new social enterprises. “I think we’ll start to have enough financial strength to really invest in stuff rather than bootstrapping it,” said Vial. “Because a lot of us are tired of that approach. It’s hard work, especially when you do it over and over again.”

This sign appeared in Enspiral’s kitchen, a reminder that learning to say “no” is as important as saying “yes” in a collaborative workplace. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Not every company can be Enspiral, notes Vial. It would be hard to apply the Enspiral approach to existing organizations. “It’s just too different,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey everyone, you’re not getting salaried any more.'” And getting an Enspiral-type endeavor off the ground takes a certain amount of both patience and faith. Vial has heard from a number of groups worldwide interested in emulating Enspiral, but as yet none have come to fruition. In most cases, interest fizzled out after Vial made it clear that he could offer advice but not financial support.

Nevertheless, “I think if you’re doing a professional services collective, or if people are doing a community of social enterprises, then it’s a really powerful model for organizing,” said Vial. He sees particular promise in the area of urban innovation. “I think a lot of what we’ve learned is directly relevant to them,” he said. “When I look at the ‘let’s change our cities’ sort of community, often they’re really strapped for cash, and they’ve got really marginal business models.” Bike shares and community gardens are great, said Vial, “but they’re either cash sinks or they just scrape by.”

What worked for Enspiral would work equally well for would-be urban reformers, he says: convincing highly-paid professional service workers (like lawyers, accountants, or programmers) to sign on to a collective based on contract work. “It was hard work, but it wasn’t really risky,” explained Vial. “And off the back of that, this really rich ecosystem and financial base emerged for funding the more marginal businesses.” He wants people interested in urban environmental and social justice to know that Enspiral is there for them. “We’d love to help them get up and running,” he said. “I think this could be a really significant way to leverage wider resource flows for people who want to change the city, and change the world.”

Anyone can get involved in Enspiral, either through virtual friendship or at in-person community events, like this women’s tea. (Courtesy Enspiral)

The post Enspiral: Changing the Way Social Entrepreneurs Do Business appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“With the emergence of peer production, we potentially have the hyper-exploitation of human cooperation, and generalized precarity, because the value creators, who are now often the users as well, are not getting any reward for their contributions. Worker and consumer coops, to the degree they only work for their own members, are, in my view, insufficient models to integrate the new social and environmental externalities. Thus we need new models like the open coops I call for, which includes multi-stakeholdership and the co-production of the value chain by everyone affected by a provisioning service.”

Michel Bauwens, my friend and associate at the P2P Foundation is interviewed by Shareable‘s Cat Johnson on Multi Stake Holder Coops. You can find the original article here.

While the growth of cooperatives in a wide variety of industries is promising, the bar for social transformation needs to be, and has been, raised. As P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens said in a recent email conversation, multi-stakeholder coops are “where the action is.”

A multi-stakeholder cooperative (MSC) is, as the name implies, a coop that’s governed by two or more stakeholder groups. These groups can include workers, producers, consumers, owners, volunteers and community supporters. The brilliance of MSCs, also known as solidarity cooperatives, is that the various stakeholder groups throughout an enterprise have a shared vision that prioritizes equality, sustainability, and social justice.

Shareable connected with Bauwens to learn more about MSCs, their potential for social and ecological transformation, and why, facing the the peak of the extractive economy, rethinking how cooperatives do business is critically important.

Shareable: MSCs are like super coops, where producers, consumers and more are all working together. Why is this model important? What’s the most interesting aspect of it?

Michel Bauwens: Many traditional coops are for-profits that work for their members, and end up accepting the competitive logic of the neoliberal marketplace. An example that comes to mind is that Mondragon hires Polish workers at low wages to preserve its own corporate interest. So, the democratic aspects of one person, one share, one vote are certainly important, but no longer sufficient.

For us, multi-stakeholdership is part of a four-fold proposal for open cooperatives, which would involve four simultaneous changes. First, open coops should be oriented towards the common good, in their own statutes, i.e. not for profit, but profit being used to achieve the particular social goal; second, all people affected by the activity should have a say, this is the specific multi-stakeholder aspect.

These two characteristics already exist in the solidarity coop movement, especially in the delivery of social care in northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna) and Quebec, as reported by John Restakis in his excellent book, Humanizing the Economy. There are two extra requirements we suggest. One is that the new coops must co-produce commons, whether immaterial or material. The Catalan Integral Cooperative is an example of a new type of coop that only produces shared knowledge in common pool resources but it is not yet global in orientation, as the name suggests. However, its project to create a global coalition of open coops through Fair.coop is a step in that direction. The Allianza Solidaria housing coop in Quito is an example of a coop producing physical commons, as it reclaims the polluted ravines in South Quito, giving it back to the community.

The final requirement is a global approach, to create counter-power for a global ethical economy consisting of cooperative alliances. An example of that is the approach of Las Indias. Their coop is oriented towards the global and they have the interesting concept of phylia, i.e. a global ecosystem that sustains a community and its commons. The pieces of the puzzle are beginning to get in place, but they have as yet to find their integration in one clear example.

What kind of potential for transformation do MSCs hold, on a personal level as well as on a community level?

The problem with the capitalist market and enterprise is that it excludes negative externalities, [both] social and environmental, from its field of vision. Worker- or consumer-owned cooperatives that operate in the competitive marketplace solve work democracy issues but not the issues of externalities. Following the competitive logic and the interests of their own members only, they eventually start behaving in very similar ways.

One of the ways to integrate externalities is to integrate all affected parties in a multi-stakeholder structure, including bold moves like perhaps inviting in “representatives of nature,” who make sure ecological concerns are heard. If we would add to this mix the requirement to co-create commons, then not only would such a structure avoid negative externalities, it would produce positive externalities beyond the interests of its own membership.

Where are MSCs taking off? Is there any place in particular where they are thriving?

The field of social care in Quebec is exemplary, and Margie Mendell tells us 98 percent of the new coops are solidarity coops. John Restakis has described the situation around Bologna. Key here is that the care services are funded as a public service by the state, guaranteeing universal access, but the crafting of the process is a co-production of all stakeholders, including the patient communities and their families. Patients have a quite different vision of what they need than process oriented industrial hospitals, resulting in soaring satisfaction rates.

In the commons transition plan that was crafted for the government in Ecuador…we introduced two radical new concepts: one is public-commons partnerships, which should replace extractive forms of public-private partnerships which exclude the participation of civil society; and the other is the commonification of public services, as was done for public water in Napoli, which is now called Aqua Beni Communi, with a Commissioner for the Commons in place within the City of Naples.

MSCs require an advanced level of organization and communication, but committing to this process could prove to be revolutionary in creating vital, thriving organizations and communities. What are the biggest challenges to creating a MSC and what’s the benefit of working through these challenges?

The key issue for me is the balance between efficiency and participation; what is to be avoided is the weakness of time-consuming deliberations that end up exhausting the membership. So there needs to be trust between the various stakeholders, but once agreement is reached on the right direction, [there is] autonomy for those who have to implement it.

MSCs are about more than people making money—they’re rooted in democratic process and require a shared vision by all involved. What, would you say, is the higher purpose of these organizations?

In the old system, we have competing entities and within these entities there is cooperation. In the new system it is the opposite—everyone cooperates around shared commons, but within this cooperation, there is room for competition between various entities that build service and product models around these shared resources. In the old model, only self-interest is recognized, externalities are expelled from consideration, and “what is legal is ethical.”

In the new model, a plurality of motivations is recognized, including room for self-interest if it aligns with the common goal; and externalities are integrated in the market model. In the old model, exchange value is created for profit, and the new model, use value is generated and any profit is used to achieve that social goal.

What is the big picture vision for this movement?

The big picture is a move away from extractive forms of capital, to generative forms of capital, as defined by Marjorie Kelly in her book Owning Our Future: the Emerging Ownership Revolution. The problem is that even worker coops, like Mondragon, may end up behaving in capitalist ways on the capitalist market, without solving the grave problems that the world is facing.

With the emergence of peer production, we potentially have the hyper-exploitation of human cooperation, and generalized precarity, because the value creators, who are now often the users as well, are not getting any reward for their contributions. Worker and consumer coops, to the degree they only work for their own members, are, in my view, insufficient models to integrate the new social and environmental externalities. Thus we need new models like the open coops I call for, which includes multi-stakeholdership and the co-production of the value chain by everyone affected by a provisioning service.

Is there anything you’d like to add? What else should we know about the multi-stakeholder cooperative movement?

The key question is: Are we creating positive externalities and taking responsibility for our negative externalities? Are we not harming the common, but rather adding value to it?

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Top photo by Esparta Palma (CC). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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