Evergreen Cooperative Model

= created to make it virtually impossible for coops to demutualize

Interview

Gar Alperovitz:

" The Evergreen Cooperative Corporation was created to be the keeper of the community building vision and to make it virtually impossible for coops within the corporation to demutualize. What is the power in this highly robust structure of the worker co-op?

We need not only to democratize ownership but also build community. Most co-ops attempt to do the first but they are not necessarily trying to build a larger community vision, and very few have as their goal to stabilize a community. Co-ops in general are good but the crises we are facing are far deeper.

What makes the Evergreen Cooperative model unique is it is not just about worker ownership, it is also about reconstituting a larger community. That is a critical principle as far as I am concerned.

Because community building is embedded in its structure, the individual cooperatives under the ECC umbrella have the leverage to ask for special purchasing and other procurement support from the surrounding anchor institutions, governments, and philanthropists. Traditional co-ops, although important and useful, don’t have that larger community benefiting implication inherent in their structure, so they don’t have that claim to make.

• Can you talk a bit about how Evergreen came into being?

We at the Democracy Collaborative take the view that the various forms of decentralized ownership—ESOPs, co-ops, land trusts, etc.—all share the principle that the ownership of wealth should benefit larger numbers in some way. This is an important principle. It is our belief that the leaders of these organizations need to recognize that they share this principle and together should support larger applications of it.

In 2006 we got the Aspen Institute interested in this idea and together we brought the national heads of all these silos together for a meeting with the goal of creating some sort of advocacy group or, minimally, an information-sharing group. But after the meeting everyone went back into his or her silos.

So then we thought maybe something like this could happen at the local level in some community where the linkages might be more apparent and easier to develop. And the question was where?

We initially tried to develop a model using an anchor and a community-owned structure at the University of Maryland where the Democracy Collaborative is housed but did not succeed in getting a sufficiently high level of interest from the administration. So I had contacts in Ohio and called John Logue, who was at the time head of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, and the rest is history.

A great deal of the credit has to go to the extraordinary capacity of Ted Howard who made Evergreen happen. We had the theories and ideas and the advocacy but with the help of the Cleveland Foundation Ted took it all and made it real.

• What challenges does Evergreen face?

Startups are hard to do and you have to develop good solid business planning and management. I also think it will be very important to continue to develop allies for Evergreen, the future direction will depend on both political and business allies. In Cleveland you already have support from the business community, from local bankers.

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• You say that the Evergreen model is powerful but cannot address many of the bigger systemic issues.

We want to develop and refine Evergreen but as a piece of a larger puzzle.You can’t build policy one case at time. If you are really interested in democracy or dealing with climate change you have to deal with systemic issues and community is only one of them, although it is a very important one.

We have to address what do you do about bigger industry, how do you project a real debate and a sophisticated understanding of where we want to go in this context? So while a lot of what we are doing at the Democracy Collaborative is to help iterate Evergreen-type models we are also interested in large systemic issues, larger-scale theory and discussions and models, and in introducing them into the dialog in America." (http://www.capitalinstitute.org/conversation/braintrust/gar-alperovitz)