What Would It Take to 10x a Co-op Accelerator?
In my role as Executive Director of Start.coop, I am inspired every day by the impactful work solving some of the biggest issues of time including climate, housing, childcare, elder care, etc. The best part of my work is meeting entrepreneurs from across North America (and the rest of the world) who are building cooperatively owned businesses. These social impact entrepreneurs share our passion to change systems, build more inclusive economic engines, and shift who has power in our economy.
Since 2018, over 500 entrepreneurs have applied to the Start.coop accelerator. We have supported 38 cooperatives across North America, including the largest gig worker owned co-op in the country, and the largest worker owned holding company in the country.
The hardest emotional work is saying no to the 450 entrepreneurs who we couldn’t take on due to our internal staff capacity. Due to the deeply hands-on nature of our accelerator, for every 1 cooperative we accept into the Accelerator, we have to send rejection letters to 7 other founders.
While we have a robust interview process, there is no doubt we are leaving behind cooperatives who could transform their economies, strengthen worker voice, and bring more wealth to Black and Latinx communities. We have over 1200+ entrepreneurs who have enrolled in our Lean Coop class, many of whom live in countries with fewer resources. However our accelerator program is only designed to serve 6–12 cooperatives at a time. There’s so many more businesses we want to work with. How might we bring our curriculum to the 450–1000+ entrepreneurs we currently can’t support today?
What would Scaled Co-op Development Look Like?
Funders love to ask “how do you get to scale”? We are ready to replicate, however frankly, the challenge is there are so few orgs that fund cooperative development. The only consistent funding happens through the Rural Cooperative Development Grant, which unsurprisingly serves mostly rural white communities, and is where co-op development generally happens 1 at a time.
As part of our mission to expand wealth and power in Black and Latinx communities, we intentionally prioritize applications by founders of color or bringing wealth to communities of color. But that focus brings its own funding restrictions. In our work we support co-op entrepreneurs to SCALE. And now we have hit the point where we need funding to SCALE our own organization
So how might we expand cooperative development to more people? Here’s our vision!
Introducing the Lean Co-op Path: 10x-ing curriculum access
We plan to make cooperative entrepreneurship an easier first choice by building a learning journey called the Lean Co-op Path. The Lean Co-op Path eases the cooperative journey by allowing entrepreneurs to access content when they need it, not based on our staff’s availability.
The Path is an asynchronous online curriculum, mapping the cooperative journey, from the very first entrepreneurial spark of how to solve a community problem, all the way through a cooperative’s first annual meeting.
Modules can be accessed asynchronously by a solo entrepreneur, through a peer cohort, or via high touch consulting. The Path curriculum’s three main tenets are: Growth & Traction, Governance & Ownership, and Financing.
Why it matters:
- Increase access: We currently receive 5–8 applicants for every 1 seat, with over 1000 entrepreneurs enrolled in our basic 6 module Lean Co-op course. We now would like to provide that community of entrepreneurs access to our entire curriculum.
- Deepen learning: We can shift cohort learning experiences from presenting work to discussing the work entrepreneurs have done for each module.
- Expand cooperative ownership to new sectors: By decreasing the costs to run each program, we can partner with sector based orgs, to bring new founders into cooperative ownership.
Funding needs:
We are seeking $106,000 to develop 16 new co-op education modules. Each module will be taught by co-op experts and operators and will be inclusive of tools and resources to both educate and expedite the co-op entrepreneurs learning journey from ideation to launch. Each high quality fully produced module costs, budgeting approximately $6,625 for content development, learning activity, music, graphic design, and video editing.
We’ve already started writing the first scripts based on all the lessons we’ve learned working with founders over the last five years. Interested in partnering to bring cooperative entrepreneurship to 10x more communities? Let’s get this party started, send us a note hello@start.coop.
