Name: Start.coop

Year Founded: 2018

Number of Co-ops Incorporated with your Center’s Assistance: 17

Sector(s) Served: Any form of cooperatives who is looking to achieve scale regional or national scale. Worker cooperatives, platform cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and producer cooperatives.

Region(s) Your Center Serves: Entire US

What is your center’s greatest accomplishment over the last five years, or the thing that you are most proud of?
In our short history we have graduating 17 amazing companies with shared ownership at the heart of their mission, and we also just published our “lean co-op” curriculum to enable more entrepreneurs to build scalable cooperatives.

How has CW supported your work?
The professional development and networking opportunities in CW have been invaluable for us in improving our services and collaborating with regional centers to support startup food co-ops.

What is the most unique co-op your center has assisted?
Obran cooperative which is a POC led cooperative holding company that buys out and converts existing companies, bringing workers under the larger conglomerate.

How has the pandemic affected your work?
We shifted from 75% virtual to 100% virtual!

Anything else you want to share?
We love getting referrals from other CW members. Since our focus is in supporting cooperatives who can scale, we are always looking for recommendations by other co-op developers of which teams should apply to our cohort. Similarly, because we can only invest in 6-8 teams each year, we re-direct over 70 companies to other CW members every year.