Partial view of mural by Donald Lee "Aldox" Alexander. Source: Black People with Plants

I'm part of two cooperatives—one dealing with food (specifically, grocery shopping) and another with technology (specifically, social media).

Park Slope Food Coop (Brooklyn, NY)

The first is the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC), which I joined approximately 3 years ago. Members join by paying two upfront costs: an investing fee ($100) which is returned if you leave the Coop, and a smaller one-time non-refundable payment. All members—except those who have applied for and been granted a work exemption—are required to work a two and a half hour long shift every six weeks. These shifts cover a wide range of necessary functions at the Coop: stocking, taking inventory, packaging specific food stuffs (e.g. cheese or grains), checkout, line manager, various cleaning duties, lifting boxes, repairs, etc.

Outside a small number of paid staff that handle high-level coordination, no one is compensated monetarily for their labor. Instead, working members get to shop at the Coop, which is able to sell products at a reduced price compared to a typical retail grocery store, with savings approaching as much as 50% for some items. The discounted prices are achieved primarily by the fact that there are virtually no labor costs associated with usual grocery staff, and so the Coop passes those savings on to its members.

The governance structure at PSFC is via a monthly gathering of members called the General Meeting (GM). A section of the GM agenda is dedicated to discussing and potentially voting on proposals put forth by individual members. Proposals may go through a process of modification via amendments before it is actually voted on. In general, all proposals only need a simple majority of the present members to pass, unless the proposal is a change to the Coop's bylaws, in which two thirds are needed. The Coop has an official newspaper in which members may also write letters to the editor on all things related to the Coop, including expressing support of—or opposition to—any upcoming proposal.

Social.coop (the Internet)

The second cooperative I'm part of is Social.coop, which I joined very recently. While I have a lot yet to learn about its governing structure as a new member, there are several straightforward details about how it operates.

Members pay fixed monthly or yearly dues raised on the Open Collective fundraising platform. The funds are used to finance various initiatives, including but not limited to:

There is a working group for finance, tech, legal, and community. Loomio is used for facilitating discussion and voting on various proposals affecting how Social.coop runs, and members have the ability to submit proposals themselves. There is also an amendment process that can be utilized.

The primary upsell of being a Social.coop member is being part of a well-operated and well-moderated Mastodon instance that federates with other instances to be part of a broader social media network. While I could join some other instance without having to pay anythingThis was the case before I migrated my old account to Social.coop., I admired and wanted to support the democratic experiment Social.coop is engaged in within the larger decentralized, decorporatized social media landscape known as the Fediverse. My membership also gives me free meet.coop access for video conferencing (and maybe some other perks I'm not aware of yet).

Here are some of my first "toots"Mastodon vernacular for a single post, similar to a "tweet" on Twitter. on Social.coop's Mastodon instance:

A shared cooperative identity

The interesting thing about PSFC and Social.coop is that while they exist in seemingly non-overlapping spheres, both are cooperatives in the strict sense of the word. As referenced in my second toot, there is an organization called the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA, est. 1895) that, among its functions, sets the internationally recognized definition of a cooperative. They even administer the .coop TLD that Social.coop uses. On ICA's site, it reads:

Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, cooperative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.

Sure enough, both PSFC and Social.coop adhere to the same principles undergirding the cooperative identity.

PSFC has been around for half a century, and is one of the oldest and largest food cooperatives in the United States, with well over 15,000 members at time of writing. Social.coop is much younger, founded in 2017 in the aftermath of the #BuyTwitter campaign; according to instances.social, it has almost 1,900 users.By comparison, the largest Mastodon instance—operated by the non-profit Mastodon gGmbH—boasts over 1.8 million users! From my vantage point as both spectator and participant, both are success stories.

Looking forward to engaging more with my cooperative communities as time goes on. Cooperation is a very old idea, much older than the ICA. Yet its general applicability to even very novel domains like social media speaks to its staying power, and inspires us to be more imaginative about where the cooperative framework can be applied.

I'm a believer.