I have been developing my own worker-owned cooperative for the last 60 days

I've been developing my own worker-owned cooperative for the last 60 days, and it's been a total blast. I'm excited to share my journey, key takeaways, mistakes that I learned from, and other tips that might be helpful to you if you're thinking about starting your own worker-owned cooperative. Hey guys, it's Vivek from Mindome once again. I'm excited to dive into this video. In the last video in this series, I sort of gave you all an update of how I got to worker-owned cooperative and sort of the initial meeting. But in the last 60 days as a team, we've covered a lot of ground, and I'm excited to update you on, on the steps in the process that we've gone on. So if you're thinking about starting your own worker-owned cooperative, I know the process can be challenging to navigate and to learn all the information necessary. So hopefully this video will be helpful in your process of learning and figuring out the initial steps of, you know, organizing some people and then, you know, trying to build a business from there. So our cooperative basically started on January 26th, about 2 months ago, and it launched with an event, online event via Zoom during these COVID times. But before that event, we had 2 major goals that we tried to accomplish from this Zoom call. And that was one, to try to share the vision that we wanted to create for the world. And two, get people excited by that vision that they would potentially join us to help build this vision and bring it to life as a cooperative. It took a bit of time of planning and preparation to make an accessible event. Like I mentioned in my previous video, we had over 90 tickets RSVP'd and we had almost 50 people who actually attended the call. All that took a lot of effort and a lot of research and prepping. The first thing I would say, just before you organize an event, if you're trying to do something really big— if it's a smaller worker-owned cooperative, a big launch event is not as required, but for the project I was thinking about, I wanted it to be pretty big, so it was important to bring a large group of people together. A lot of prep for that and researching. Even if you're doing something small, you're going to have to do some research and understand what you're getting yourself into. So just doing a bunch of Googling and YouTube videos and things like this hopefully will be helpful. Additionally, I had a solid team that was, you know, early on in the process wanted to help and was excited by this concept, and they were helping alongside me to create this event. And then lastly, I was— had done a decent amount of work and effort to market that event, to think about how to get the word out, and it wouldn't just be my friends and family, but hopefully much more than that. So those are some of the key pieces to make sure that the event was successful, on top of knowing what the goal of the event was, which I mentioned. What about you guys? What questions or concerns do you have? Leave a comment below, I'll make sure to read them, reply, or maybe create create a new video related to that question. The next key part of the journey has been follow-up. So you have this event, you bring some people to this event, you need to follow up with those folks and, you know, strike while the iron is hot. And so that was a key step in the process. You know, we had a good attendance, people were enthusiastic over that call, but I knew I had to follow up quickly, we had to follow up quickly to to make sure the folks that did come to the event remained engaged and active. So, you know, included a follow-up email, in that email surveying who actually wanted to stay involved and be part of this working group. So I created a little Google Form, we created a form for that. We also created a Doodle, doodle.com, for scheduling that call to figure out what time was convenient to as many people as possible. It wasn't perfect, but we did the best we could to try to make it as convenient for as many people as possible. Another thing about follow-up is, you know, not pulling too hard on trying to, for people to join your cooperative. I mean, you definitely need to share information and get people excited, but at some point people need to come towards your project based on their own volition, their own desire. Not because you're sort of dragging them. Because at some point otherwise, you know, they won't stay passionate about the project and what you're trying to create. And so for what we were doing, that's definitely been the case. We definitely put opportunities for people to get excited to join and learn about what we're working on and be part of the team. But I certainly tried to avoid pulling too hard on any of my friends, family, or anybody in general joining the cooperative. Unless they really could have showed some effort to be part of the team. And for us, I think this has created an environment where people are genuinely excited about what we're building, about the process of developing it, and instead of me sort of shouldering a lot of the work, as a worker cooperative should, the work has sort of slowly been spread out throughout the team. So the next key thing is the team. So you've had an event, you followed up, now you have a little small team that's excited to actually build whatever you're thinking about building. That team is key. And figuring out how to work together is super important. You don't need to have a super large team, depending on the size of the project, it can be 2 people, 3 people, 8 people, 10, whatever that number is. It doesn't have to be enormous. There's plenty of founders of even normal companies are just 1 person or 2 people. So, you know, worker-owned cooperative, while it's different in some ways, at the end of the day it's very much like a traditional business and it doesn't need a ton of folks. But whoever is there, it's important to figure out how to work well together, to work cooperatively. And that requires a lot of different skills. It requires trusting one another, it requires transparency, it requires, you know, being, you you know, letting go and trusting the process, and also figuring out how to connect and work together and organize yourself, which brings me to the next key takeaway, which is organizing yourself. So you have a team, like how do you actually work together? The mechanics of working together. So for us, we leaned on a bunch of different things to help bring us together and help us work slowly but surely towards our goal. Things like using technology like Zoom to meet, using cooperative principles like consensus to make decisions, thinking about team roles like minute takers and facilitators. So while we're in meetings, we had somebody tracking what's going on and also someone who's facilitating actually the meeting moving forward. These are a bunch of things that we pulled from other cooperatives, what they were doing, from research that we did online, from cooperative organizations. That help with training and guiding teams like ourselves on the process of creating a cooperative. So we pulled a lot of research and information together, tried to keep us focused and keep us working slowly but surely towards our goal. And two other small things that I think were important to our meetings and helping us have successful meetings were: A, we really focused a lot on trying to make sure everybody was heard. During the meeting, we would check in with people that are a little bit quieter and wanted to hear their voice. I think for a worker-owned cooperative, that's super important, especially early on, that, you know, it's easy for one or two individuals to sort of monopolize a conversation, but sometimes we have to pull information out of folks that are generally just a little bit quieter. So that's important. Another thing that we did that I think has been very helpful is we've kept doing icebreakers. Icebreakers are some silly activity sometimes, but actually really lighten the mood of a group. If you're a group like myself, I'm often very serious, but an icebreaker can make the environment of the group very early in the meeting a little bit more relaxed. And while it takes a little bit of time, maybe 5-10 minutes to get through an icebreaker, from the rest of the meeting onwards, people are a little bit more relaxed and they also get to know people beyond just the work side of things. So I think those things are also helpful to help keep the dynamic of the team healthy and also feeling good about what we're building. So now we have a good solid meeting running, we're, we're getting to know each other and being able to work efficiently together. Another key piece that's helped us along the process in the last 60 days and even before is support from other organizations. So here in New York City, there's a group called ICA Group. There's also another one called New York City Collective of Worker-Owned Cooperatives. Both groups are nonprofits that are based out of the city and provide helpful tools for worker-owned cooperatives like ours to achieve our goal of trying to build a worker-owned cooperative. But they're in many cities across the, the US and different regions, so I highly recommend researching those type of orgs in your local town. Or country and seeing how they can help you. For me, ICA Group, for example, has made time every week or every other week to have a call with me, to answer emails and questions and concerns that I had, so that we stay focused and stay focused towards the goal that we're trying to achieve. And if I have any concerns, I know I can ask them and they can guide me towards the right direction of building a worker-owned cooperative. In addition, I've reached out to fellow entrepreneurs, fellow worker-owned cooperatives across the globe, and those folks have been extremely helpful and usually would be helpful if you reach out to them. That's one of the key principles of worker-owned cooperatives. So I would highly recommend even your initial research or along the way reaching out to those type of folks and asking questions and getting their input on things that they did, mistakes that they learned from, stuff like that. Before I get into the learnings of some of the mistakes that we've made over the last 60 days, I think it's important to also discuss some of the skills that are, I think, key to making a worker-owned cooperative successful. So I mentioned this before, but passion, you know, everyone who comes to the project should be passionate about it. We're all owners in the business. It's not a job. At some point You know, you'll definitely get paid for the work you're doing, but initially it's not a job. You're owners of this thing. So passion is super important early on. Trust. Trusting the process, trusting one another, trying to remove your ego from things. You know, we can get really excited about something and feel very passionate about it, but sometimes that's not the right direction. So sort of like having the ability to let go and seeing what else is out there is really, really important. I would also mention focus. You know, coming to meetings, knowing what you're trying to get out of those meetings, you know, thinking about where you're trying to work towards and making sure that every meeting, every week, you're getting a little bit closer and closer to that. Super important. And lastly, I would say, is transparency. You know, If you're going to trust people that you don't know and they're going to hopefully trust you, transparency is required. If you are hiding something or if they're hiding something from you, people can tell that and they can feel that. And so that's going to create an environment, especially if you don't know each other, where people are going to feel uncomfortable. And in a worker-owned cooperative, you know, people can feel vulnerable at times. So transparency is a key piece of that as well. Couple things that I've learned from the process that I think I wish I did a little bit better in retrospect was firstly, post-meeting follow-up. So, you know, we had this big event on Jan 26th, super successful, but some of the follow-up after that meeting could have been a little bit more smoothly organized and prepared for. Additionally, we had a good attendance to that call and a lot of people RSVP'd. We could have set up some things for people to stay engaged in the group between the first meeting and scheduling the second meeting, which takes a bit of time. So those two things were super, super important. And I think the last thing that we could have improved on is understanding how consensus works, why consensus is important, how you use it on making decisions. And we had a little bit of a fumble at some point early on in our process. We recovered from it, but I think consensus is an important component of worker-owned cooperatives. Understanding how to make decisions via consensus yourself and as a team is super important. Those are some of the small learning lessons. Nothing huge, major impact to how things have gone thus far, but I think areas where we could have improved if I look back in retrospect and certainly would like to share with all of you. What do you think, guys? Is there some stuff that I missed that maybe you're interested in me going in more detail about? Please leave a comment below. Definitely will be excited to read your questions and concerns, and maybe there'll be opportunity for me to create another video, like I said, to address particular things that people are interested in learning about. Well, I hope this video has been helpful. If it has been, please consider giving us a thumbs up. Also, if you have any questions, comments, we're trying to build a community around worker-owned cooperatives. Worker-owned cooperatives are about cooperation, so if you have any feedback, definitely leave a comment below, share it with a friend that might be interested in the topic, and definitely subscribe to the channel if you're interested in learning more about this stuff. Thanks again, and have a great day.