Austin Robey, Worker-Owner/Co-founder of AmpledĪ cooperative is a collectively owned enterprise that serves the interests of its members. Instead, in this guide, I’m passing along the attitudes and beliefs that helped guide our process in the hope that they can be useful. If that’s what you are looking for, Democracy at Work Institute has a fairly comprehensive library of resources. What follows isn’t meant to provide a prescriptive technical checklist for creating a cooperative. In the book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, professor Nathan Schneider refers to co-ops as a “radical tradition.” In this same spirit of passing on ideas through inherited knowledge, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about starting a cooperative through this guide. They’re all around us, but can feel invisible. In many ways, cooperative ownership models predate investor-owned corporations.

Recognizable names like R.E.I., The Associated Press, and Land O’Lakes are all co-ops. It’s odd, because cooperatives aren’t new, unusual, or rare. There were a few dusty books on co-ops in the basement archives, but trust me-they weren’t much help. When I began researching how I might start one myself, I went to the Business & Career Center at the Brooklyn Public Library and found exactly zero books on starting cooperatives. Perhaps due to a residual Cold War-era aversion to anything resembling a critique of capitalism, alternatives to investor-owned corporations are barely taught in the vast majority of American business and law schools. Idealism aside, starting a cooperative business is not easy. Our hope is that by developing this model, it can be a seed for something transformative: ideally a new economic operating system for sustainable community support. By applying a cooperative business model to the web, we’re making a platform that’s owned and controlled by its community, instead of by investors. For the past two years, I’ve worked with a team to build Ampled, an artist and worker-owned web platform for direct community support of musicians.

How to run a cooperative