Dystopia or Dazzle: The Choice is Ours

Five years ago, in “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break,” we predicted the crisis that we now face at the crosshairs of ad-based technology, extractive financial motives, and tech leaders with unchecked power and no accountability. “When shareholder return trumps collective well-being, democracy itself is threatened. The reality is that business models breed behavior, and at scale, that behavior can lead to far-reaching, sometimes destructive outcomes.” At Zebras Unite, we believe that the most urgent human rights project of our time is reimagining the world of business. That is and remains our north star.

Back in 2020, just as the pandemic began, we faced a fork in the road about how we could proceed, and we outlined two paths in “Pivot to People.” One was what we call a “reactive” strategy. This included critical efforts like reforming policy to support tech worker rights and working with tech companies from the inside, with an orientation toward shifting technology to support individual and democratic well-being.

We took a chance and chose the other path, the “proactive” strategy. We reasoned that so long as corporations remain beholden to investors and operate inside of extractive ownership models and governance frameworks that consolidate power at the top, they will have no other choice, really, but to make decisions that harm people and the planet.

(Look no further than the complexity of converting Patagonia to a steward-owned company, truly a watershed story of the past year.) In contrast, we noted that “in the proactive strategy, founders, corporate leadership, and forward-thinking investors agree to build a new path. [We] agree to create something new and share power and profits.”

At Zebras Unite, what we created was a hybrid, international, multi-stakeholder, democratically governed cooperative that exists to catalyze community, capital, and culture for people building businesses that are better for the world. We have grown to 15 team members from seven countries, 25 chapters on six continents, nearly 300 member-owners, and another 9,000 in our online community. Reflecting on the nearly five years it’s taken to get here, we fervently believe that two deceptively simple and astonishingly powerful interventions — ownership and governance — are the cornerstones of building a more just and inclusive economy.

Just imagine the different outcomes that might be unfolding now at Twitter were it worker-owned, or a public utility. Contemplate what financial ruin might have been avoided with more governance accountability, transparency, and oversight at FTX.

As the year closes, we wanted to share an update on some of our accomplishments since launching our co-op, the most important lessons we’ve learned, and a sneak peek of what’s to come in 2023. Today, we are also thrilled to announce our anchor learning partner in continuing this journey, Omidyar Network. Read on to learn more about our work to build the community, capital, and culture for the next economy.

Community

Zebras Unite would not exist without the dazzling, brilliant, and creative people who have carried the spirit of this movement over the last five years, from our Doulas to our chapter leaders, our members to our staff. The strength of this diverse and global community has allowed us to build Zebras Unite into a cooperative, and we are continuously striving to ensure that the co-op’s legacy of mutualism and reciprocity only grows over time so that our community thrives well into the future.

We believe that everyone has an equal right to imagine and create the future. As our cooperative grows and evolves, the ways to imagine and create together come in many different stripes. HERE’S how we’re striving to nurture, support, and expand our inspiring Zebra community.

How might we build a diverse, distributed, world class team? So many new faces have joined our team, each bringing extraordinary wisdom and experience. We are maturing as an organization and have attracted a truly kick-ass group of people in the Dazzle District and core Membership that are actively growing and stewarding this movement to truly dizzying heights. We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to our ever-expanding team and to join us for an end-of-year Solstice Mixer on Thursday, December 15 at 9:00 AM PT and 7:00 PM PT.

How might we create an international, intersectional, distributed co-operative? — The short answer is in partnership, with solidarity and every all at once:

• Partnerships: we’ve welcomed 40+ partners to deliver on the educational and capital appetite of zebra organizations seeking alternative offerings, including Delta Airlines, Greaterthan, nRhthym, Seedrs, UpEffect, Lift Economy, AusserGewöhnlich Berlin, The Sociocracy Consulting Group, Hylo and many more. Join us as a partner if you’re reimagining the world of business through culture, community or capital.
• Solidarity Fund: inspired by the principles of Zakat, a morally obligated Islamic practice that dissuades hoarding to redistribute wealth and eradicate poverty, Zebras Unite Co-op launched its Zebra Solidarity Fund by setting aside 2.5% of all gross revenues for co-op member led projects centered on economic justice, underwriting scholarships and experiments serving the solidarity economy. We’ve awarded four grants between June and August to members building the zebra way and eight financial aid packages to date that have enabled diverse voices to join the Co-Op .
• Chapters Program: Our 25 Chapters around the world held over 60 events and activities in the past year, both virtual and in-real-life, ranging from easy meet-and-greets, like Tokyo Chapter’s recurring Zebras Cafe series, to workshops, research efforts, and international convenings. Their efforts help us map out the Zebras ecosystem on a global scale and gather valuable knowledge on challenges and opportunities. Their passion and vision of a Zebra-centric economy has driven initiatives such as building Zebra business directories and gathering their local communities in social activities like a book tour, hackathons, and picnics.

Ready to get involved? Join our online community, learn more here and reach out to membership@zebrasunite.com for more information about joining as a member.

Capital

“The capital system is failing society in part because it is failing zebra companies: profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process repair existing social systems.” — “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break”

At the outset, we knew that the biggest barrier to zebra companies starting and succeeding was access to capital, a problem exhaustively documented both in our survey and by our friends at the Kauffman Foundation. Our work to mobilize more capital for more zebra entrepreneurs of all different stripes has three key components:

Educating entrepreneurs and investors on the different flavors of capital and terms that allow both sides of a financing event to achieve their goals; grow long term sustainable companies; and get rewarded for the risk they each take. Inside the Zebras Unite Co-Op, we are building out a suite of tools and services to help founders and investors navigate to each other, and have been delighted that over $3B in values-aligned capital has come forward to date, looking for zebras in which to invest. In 2023, we plan to offer a series of educational offerings around alternatives to venture capital; financing strategies; and aligning risk and return expectations with zebra values. Please sign up here to stay in the loop on these opportunities. If you are a founder, and are looking for access to capital for your zebra venture, please click here to learn more about co-op membership.

Supporting capital innovators, i.e. those entrepreneurs who are in the business of creating new financial products and services that make more capital available to entrepreneurs in historically underserved communities. Our very simple insight is that, rather than launching a Zebra Fund of our own, we can simply drive capital and support to managers of zebra-aligned funds, and create more impact more quickly. In the US, this insight informed the idea and design of the Inclusive Capital Collective (ICC), a growing network of over 250 Black, Indignous and Other People of Color (BIPOC) community fund managers and entrepreneur support organizations who are creating community wealth through a range of debt, equity, and real estate funds and projects. Zebras Unite is incubating the ICC as a co-operative, with over $2M in funding from the Surdna, Wells Fargo, and JPB foundations, and with the support of the Economic Development Administration of the United States.

For more on the work of the ICC, please read its compelling series of Black Papers on real estate, manufacturing and relationship-based lending as engines of community wealth, and these reflections from its Community Manager and founding CEO, Najaah Yasmine Daniels. For more information or to join the ICC, please sign up here.

Designing capital ecosystems that are responsive to founder and investor needs, as well as to the specific contexts where they operate. The ICC is the flagship of this program, in which we use a participatory, collaborative approach, we identify and implement systemic interventions that entrepreneurs, investors, and other private and public stakeholders can create together in specific geographies, industry sectors, and / or demographics.

For example, and not least informed by our own experience as an early stage cooperative that has a mixed revenue stream, we are working with the National Coop Bank, One Project, and our co-op members SecondMuse and Armillaria to design mechanisms for creating more capital opportunities that support collective ownership — be they early stage mutualistic ventures that are still finding a path to market; technology-enabled platform cooperatives that aren’t bankable; and / or more mature companies that are looking to pivot, or could be converted, to employee and community ownership. We are currently in the final stages of designing an initial platform and product for aggregating and deploying financial capital and other resources for collective ownership.

We are also developing additional projects in several other capital ecosystems, and anticipate launching design work on India’s Cultural Economy; in Islamic Finance; and for Germany’s purpose-driven startup scene. To stay in the loop about our Capital Ecosystem Design work, please sign up here.

Ready to get involved? We’re launching more capital products and collectives that support founders of a different stripe. Reach out to us at capital@zebrasunite.com to explore what we might do together.

Culture

As we got to work building our own co-op, we realized that, in the words of our friend Greg Brodsky of Start.Coop, most people don’t understand what a cooperative is or how it works. As a result “traditional” ownership models feel comparatively “easy” to navigate and implement. Not anymore! As we continue to mature our own cooperative ownership and governance structures, we have begun supporting others in our ecosystem who are as excited as we are to lean into this “co-opreneurship” journey. We have been humbled and thrilled to provide our evolving expertise to other zebra-aligned organizations on a variety of consulting projects, including:

• Informing large Foundations, family offices, and even some civic projects on “cooperativist”solutions to their knotty problems
• Supporting aligned groups on creating their own hybrid, multi-stakeholder co-ops
• Helping ecosystem building partners in getting “unstuck” on make-or-break governance issues and
• Learning alongside us about mobilizing community, capital, and culture for the economy we all deserve.

We’ve leaned into these questions (and more!), and have begun to answer them through experimentation and iteration as we aim to zebra-fy our internal culture and the business world at large — because Together We Are Stronger!

Here are a few examples of what answering those questions have looked like in 2022:

How might we build a cooperative culture of our own? — This summer we held our first member meeting, DazzleCamp, followed by our first (virtual!) board election in June. We now have a democratically elected board that represents our shareholder classes. Get to know these extraordinary leaders and representatives here. In addition, we continued the work of testing and iterating our own internal co-governance structures to a more mature matrix of Consensual, Consultative and Delegative Circles with zones of autonomy and collaboration grounded in Sociocratic and “Do-ocracy” principles, and grown to embody the Zebra flavor that is all our own. We’ll be sharing more about that in detail soon as we Experiment in Public!

How might we share our wisdom with others and learn from them in return? — With this hard-earned, real-life experience of building a cooperative, next economy company, we launched an Advisory Services practice at Zebras Unite. Our projects include co-creating and catalyzing the Philadelphia Media Founders Exchange; supporting a nascent data cooperative with the Baltimore City Intergenerational Initiative for Trauma and Youth; thinking deeply about community investment strategies with the Kresge Foundation; unsticking governance challenges at Green Valley Farm; and teaching an experimental Summer School of courses to our community. We’re thrilled to work closely with companies and organizations committed to deep, structural change.

Ready to get involved in asking and answering these questions with us? Reach out to advisory@zebrasunite.com and we’ll get to work!

In the words of Margaret Wheatley, “There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” As we look back on this five year journey, we’re reminded time and again that what binds Zebras together, regardless of culture, geography or entity type, is a deep and abiding commitment to collectively build a future economy that uplifts and enables businesses that are better for the world.

Wishing you a Dazzling season of rest and renewal,

Mara and the Dazzle District Team