In this vlog, Vivek (of Mindtome) shares his personal journey of discovering and launching a worker‑owned cooperative. He begins by reflecting on wealth inequality (using Jeff Bezos as a catalyst) and an early idea of a profit‑to‑charity business, then pivots to the cooperative model after researching scholars like Professor Richard Wolff, TED talks, and examples such as Newman's Own. Vivek outlines the major benefits he sees in worker co‑ops—democratic governance, equal pay, and product‑centric focus—and identifies three key hurdles: gathering a committed group, creating democratic yet non‑bureaucratic governance, and securing financing without traditional investors. He describes concrete steps he took: assembling an event page around a sustainable‑product store concept, attracting over 90 RSVPs and 40+ attendees, and holding two (soon three) cooperative meetings. He highlights valuable resources (the institute.coop PDF, local and national nonprofit support organizations, and global co‑op founders) and stresses the importance of proactive research and outreach. The video concludes with practical advice for viewers to organize their own events, reach out to support networks, and embrace the learning‑by‑doing approach, while encouraging subscriptions, comments, and sharing.
Chapters
I'm starting a co-op. I'm excited to share and have you join me in this journey of starting a worker-owned cooperative. If you're like me and been thinking about starting a co-op for a while, hopefully this video and the series of videos will be helpful and answer questions and concerns, and you can see the ups and downs of starting a co-op. And stick around till the end because I share a little bit about how the first couple meetings have gone, so hopefully that'll be helpful too. Hey guys, it's Vivek from Mindtome once again. Excited to be back to do another video, this time a very personal one on starting a worker-owned cooperative. I've been thinking about a worker-owned co-op for a while now, started in around May 2020, almost a year ago now. And at first it wasn't a worker-owned co-op, it was just a traditional business idea. But as I started doing more and more research, I discovered the concept of worker-owned cooperatives and fell in love with it. So I think to make it more clear how I got to the concept of worker-owned cooperatives, I need to go back to the beginning. So for me, it started off with this idea of thinking about Jeff Bezos' worth. At the time, he was worth like $115-120 billion, and I was like, oh man, that's like a ton of money. Just what would happen to the world if all that money went to charities. And it was just, just an idea. I was just thinking about it and I was playing around with a few things and I thought I actually had a solution to maybe addressing that, like, you know, having a business that sold stuff and then most of the profits would go to charities. And I really started digging into that ecosystem and seeing what was possible, what was impossible. I even did a a blog piece, really in-depth analysis of the company Newman's Own, who's basically been doing that model for almost 40 years now. So, um, as I was doing more and more research, I stumbled onto the concept of worker-owned co-ops. I'm not quite certain where I fell into the whole worker cooperative, uh, learning process, but it was probably somewhere between learning from Professor Richard Wolff, some TED Talks, a friend of mine, Olivia, who's sharing a lot about worker-owned co-ops, and a few other sources. And I started realizing so many major benefits of worker co-ops that it got me so excited. Stuff like more democratic workplaces, more equal pay, product focus over financial focus. And when I started seeing all these pieces, I was amazed and incredibly excited. While worker-owned co-ops are definitely different than my original idea of having a business that sold some things and most of the profits going to charities, I felt actually a worker-owned cooperative in some ways was more powerful than that idea. And for a couple reasons. A, you know, this focus on the workers. In today's world, there's such a huge divide between the rich and the middle class, or middle class and poor, and the rich. And so very directly worker-owned cooperatives addresses that issue. Additionally, what's very powerful is there's an entire ecosystem of organizations across the globe, both in the US and outside the US, that have been doing worker-owned cooperatives for hundreds of years. So versus this idea of having a business that sells some stuff and then use the profits to help charities, that while there's a couple examples of that, it's a very new innovative sort of concept that not too many people have explored, and if they have, they haven't been very successful at it. So while there's definitely a lot of co-ops in the US and abroad, finding clear information on how to start a worker co-op was definitely challenging. I had to dig through lots of different sites and watch different videos. There was some high-level material, but not really detailed steps how to do it. And so for me, this is a real challenging point. If you want to find information on how to start a traditional startup, there's so many blog pieces, so many influencers, so much videos on that concept. But for worker-owned cooperatives, it's really hard to find sources that you can count on and are clear to be able to share exactly the process of starting a worker-owned cooperative and, and how to be successful at it. Slowly but surely, I was able to start piecing together some information. As cooperatives stand for being cooperative, I was able to also talk to different founders and entrepreneurs across the globe. There's different organizations, nonprofits that support the education and teaching people how to start worker-owned cooperatives. And slowly I started getting a better idea how to start one. And in that process, I I realized that there was really 3 main challenges to starting a worker-owned cooperative. The first challenge is trying to get people to come together around an idea or around a problem to solve. So that was the first major hurdle. Second one was governance and trying to lead an organization that was democratic but not bureaucratic. And lastly, a worker-owned cooperative, as you may know, cannot get money from traditional investors, otherwise it'd be owned by investors, not by the workers. So in that situation, you have to figure out a different way to raise money. And that has been a challenging process to figure out how to do that. So after a bunch of months of research and putting different pieces together and talking to numerous people, I had a very strong idea of how to start a worker-owned co-op. I had a much stronger idea how to deal with those hurdles that I mentioned. And so me and a few friends got together and we put together a little event page focusing on the problem that we wanted to address, which is creating an online store and a physical store that sells products that are made sustainably. And, uh, with a little luck and a lot of effort, we got over 90 people to RSVP to our event. We had a really strong turnout for the first event, over 40 people showed up to it, and we've had really solid response since then. In retrospect, there's a lot of things I learned about this process. First off, institute.coop online is a great resource for information on how to start one. They have a PDF, I'll link that in the description below, of actually literally how to start a co-op. Additionally, I reached out to nonprofit organizations in my city, which is New York, but there's ones all over the country. I even reached out to one in the Northwest, I think. It was just a phone number I found and I reached out to them and they were very helpful. I also contacted a bunch of entrepreneurs both in the US and beyond who started working on co-ops and got their feedback. People were so helpful across the board. Always willing to spend some time, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or more, giving me input on how to start a worker-owned co-op. Because there's not as much blog content and video content out there for entrepreneurs interested in starting worker-owned co-ops, I definitely recommend spending a little bit of time doing that type of research, doing that type of reading to get yourself knowledgeable how to start one. Hopefully videos like this one will be helpful in your process of learning how to start one. Once you sort of get the process down, just go out there and try to organize your own worker-owned cooperative, whether it's creating an event that people randomly attend, whether it's something local and you try to get people to come to a local event. Just go out there and try to start one. Don't feel too nervous. Obviously, I've been making mistakes and having challenges trying to balance being democratic with also having a vision that I believe in. And so we've had, we've had 2 meetings. We're about to have our 3rd one later tonight. Hopefully we'll have a strong attendance to this one where people are interested in sharing their opinion. But thus far the meetings have been very engaging and people have been excited and sharing their feedback along the way. So, you know, that's it for now. I definitely will share my link to our worker-owned cooperative event page that might be helpful to you. And I once again would encourage you to try to learn the process as best as you can. I'll provide all the great resources that I found. I encourage you to contact local worker-owned cooperative support organizations in your city. They're very useful resource and oftentimes are paid by taxpayers, so you have that as a free resource for yourself. And just know that while this can be challenging to get it off the ground, if you can assemble the right type of people, enough people, hopefully in time a lot of the work will fall off your shoulders and onto other people, as any worker cooperative should. So that's it, guys. This is just the beginning of the journey. We're only about to start meeting number 3 in a couple hours. So if worker cooperatives are of interest to you, definitely stick around, check out the channel, subscribe to it. Also, if this was helpful or not helpful, please leave a comment below. But if it was, definitely please give us a thumbs up and share it with a friend. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
