Seed Commons

“There’s what the capital can do, and then there’s what humans can do once they have the material conditions to show up for each other. And that is what is truly life-changing.” —Andrea Golden, PODER Emma In the Emma-Erwin Neighborhood outside of Asheville, NC, Seed Commons member PODER Emma is organizing with area residents to fight displacement and build an integrated cooperative economy instead. Using non-extractive capital from our national investment fund, they are converting mobile home parks into resident-owned communities and creating worker cooperatives in construction, bookkeeping, translation, childcare, manufacturing, and more. And when Hurricane Helene devastated the area, all this resilient, bottom-up community infrastructure was on the front lines of the grassroots recovery effort. Learn more at https://lnkd.in/eHXwB-iG

Thrilled to be included in the ImpactAssets 50 2025, recognizing impact investment fund managers on the cutting edge of using investment to drive progress towards clear social and environmental impact goals. More info here: https://lnkd.in/ecbBfzXx

We are thrilled to be able to continue to work with the amazing team of people at Kataly Foundation to drive more non-extractive investment into cooperatives across the country! ??

When the owner of New Orleans' Pagoda Cafe made the decision to sell her business in the middle of the pandemic, Seed Commons member Cooperation New Orleans helped the restaurant's workers buy the cafe themselves and convert it to a worker cooperative. Interested in workplace democracy in the restaurant industry? Stay tuned for some exciting news soon....

"For us, joining Seed Commons was a complete game changer, because it allowed us to take the power of imagination and organization, and then match it with access to capital. And that completely changes what a community can dream about. And what a community can actually build." —Andrea Golden, PODER Emma

In Denver, Colorado, 9to5 helped residents organize to fight for and win the right to buy their mobile home parks if they were put up for sale. But that right wouldn't be real unless residents also have access to the money needed to actually make that purchase. Seed Commons, working with a team of organizations including the Right to the City Alliance—a member of our cooperative for non-extractive finance—was able to help the residents of the park Capital City, in the rapidly gentrifying Westwood neighborhood, fight displacement by creating Montevista Communidad, the first resident-owned mobile home park in the city.

Early in our history, we realized that we couldn’t scale our model of non-extractive finance if we were making all decisions about lending out of a central office somewhere far away from the communities we wanted to work with. A traditional lender can do this—they use a checklist of things like credit scores and bank account balances to assess how worthy of credit a borrower. Not only are these measures abstract, they are also fundamentally flawed: they can exclude too many people who haven’t been born into the kind of economic and racial privilege that make perfect credit scores and significant personal assets more likely. Our model for finance works at the speed of trust instead.?Seed Commons provides cooperative businesses with the financial support they need, but Seed Commons is itself a cooperative—we are governed by our member local loan funds.

Looking for a job in non-extractive finance and worker cooperative development? Here's two open positions with two of our member organizations, one on each coast: The Working World (NYC), Associate Project Manager https://buff.ly/41VGf34 LA Co-op Lab (Los Angeles), Loan Steward https://buff.ly/4fADiZc

When The Wine Source, a 34-year old neighborhood favorite, was put on the market by its longtime owner early in 2024, the 9,500 sq. ft. shop's workers were worried about what that might mean for them. But Seed Commons member the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy had a track record of successful conversions to worker-ownership, including three businesses within blocks of the Wine Source, and stepped in to help when the workers reached out. With BRED's help, the workers were able by September to negotiate with the exiting owner and take over the shop themselves as a worker cooperative “We found we were all coming to work with the same kind of mission and vision, and we had all been brought to this place and felt that this place was offering something different to the community and its customers and its employees. We wanted to preserve that." —Caitlin O’Connor, Wine Source worker-owner Read more about how Seed Commons is helping power Baltimore's growing worker cooperative ecosystem here: https://buff.ly/3zJFEGk

16 years ago today, the workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago occupied their factory, demanding fair treatment from a corporate owner which had closed the plant with no warning in the middle of the great financial crisis. That occupation—making headlines around the world—would ultimately lead to the workers taking control themselves, with a new worker-owned factory, the New Era Windows Cooperative. Seed Commons' history of non-extractive finance for worker power in the US starts with our fight to get the workers of New Era the capital they needed to build the future they deserved, and we've continued to support the cooperative as it has grown and developed.