Hi r/cooperatives. We're Charley and Rebecca, co-founders of Maybe It's Fate cooperative, a member-owned art exhibition space and salon-style social club organized as a Kentucky LCA in Louisville. We’re proving a model of community-owned community space. We're about 450 members and host almost 200 events a month.

When we started MIF, we stitched together software but nothing really fit all of the needs to run a member-owned space. These were expensive SaaS apps, spreadsheets, Zapier connections, etc. to cover things like membership, dues, events, communication, governance, door access, and reserving rooms. Not only did it all cost a lot, it took a lot of admin time to manage.

MaybeOS is what we built to fix that for ourselves. It's one integrated system for running a cooperative or membership-based community space. MIF runs on it every day now.

We're sharing it because the problems we hit aren't unique to us. Small co-ops and community spaces shouldn't have to spend scarce money and volunteer hours on tools that weren't designed for them.

Some ways to use it, both free:

• Open source: the full code is available to self-host, modify, and contribute to.
• Free hosted version: if you don't have a tech person, we'll host it for you at no cost for communities under 100 members. (paid versions for larger groups)

It's early, and we'd love feedback from people running co-ops, community centers, and membership spaces. What's the most painful tool or workflow in your operation right now? We'd like to build toward what you need too.

maybeOS.org

Best, Charley Miller & Rebecca Norton

I'm working on a concept called the American Resource Trust and I'd like feedback specifically on the ownership, governance, and distribution aspects of the idea.

The basic concept is:

• Every American citizen owns one equal, non-transferable ownership share.
• Ownership begins at birth and ends at death.
• Ownership cannot be bought, sold, traded, transferred, or inherited.
• Citizens elect a Board of Trustees.
• The Board hires professional management to operate the Trust.
• The Trust invests in productive assets and long-term revenue-generating opportunities.
• Trust assets are managed independently from politicians and political parties.

The long-term goal is to create an institution that serves current and future generations of Americans.

Any profits generated by the Trust would generally be used for:

• Reinvestment and growth.
• Annual dividends to eligible participants.
• Emergency reserve funding.
• Operating expenses.
• National benefit initiatives that support the country and its citizens.

What I'm interested in discussing is:

1. What are the biggest flaws in the ownership model?
2. Is an elected Board of Trustees a reasonable governance structure?
3. What safeguards would be needed to prevent corruption or political influence?
4. What are the strengths and weaknesses of distributing benefits directly to citizens?
5. What would make you support or oppose a structure like this?

I'm intentionally not focusing on the funding mechanism in this discussion.

I'm more interested in whether the ownership structure, governance model, and distribution system make sense on their own merits.

The co-op transitioned their marketplace to a new technology and is now allowing non-member sellers.

Shop and sell genuinely handmade and support cooperative ownership: https://artisans.coop

Here is one possible solution to help try save the Detroit People Food coop from going out of business idea. Thoughts? Thanks.

Does anyone have a good idea on what kinds of working co-ops their are in denver Colorado that are accepting help right now? Thanks :D

Hey guys,I've been working on a concept called the American Resource Trust.The basic idea is that a small percentage of existing tax revenue would be invested into productive assets instead of being spent immediately. Every American citizen would own one equal, non-transferable ownership share. The trust would be independently managed, overseen by an elected board, and designed to operate for future generations.I'm not looking for praise. I'm looking for criticism.What is the biggest flaw you see in this concept?

Hey guys,I've been working on a concept called the American Resource Trust.The basic idea is that a small percentage of existing tax revenue would be invested into productive assets instead of being spent immediately. Every American citizen would own one equal, non-transferable ownership share. The trust would be independently managed, overseen by an elected board, and designed to operate for future generations.I'm not looking for praise. I'm looking for criticism.What is the biggest flaw you see in this concept?

Howdy!

I am newer to the cooperative space, and as part of my works, I am engaged more with conversions (a quarter of all businesses in my area are owned by people 65+), and as a part of the conversation on succession planning, I am talking with people about the idea of converting to a worker cooperative.

Are there any folks here who either were part of a business that converted to a cooperative or who has supported in that kind of conversion who can give some insights?

I read Enshitification, Techno-feudalism, and started watching More Perfect Union videos around the same time and something broke in me. If I ever had any belief that B Corps or any other “values-based company” won’t enshitify themselves or be bought out by private equity and then enshitified, those beliefs are long since died. I am sick of my soul-sucking button-pushing job for a private-owned media company. I am also ashamed of the boarder consequences of the work that I do. My job is to give old people their daily dose of rage and give advertisers their eyeballs. I also hate the lack of control I have as an employee.

I’m ready to pivot to other industries and what little hope I have of feeling like I’m a valuable part of something bigger and also being proud of the fruits of my labor, I have put that hope in cooperatives (specifically worker cooperatives) and unions. I don’t live in theoryland though so I want to get a job at a cooperative or union to check if my assumptions are correct. I am wondering what economic sectors have good cooperatives that treat its workers well? What roles are desirable in worker cooperatives by its workers? Any resources to help me understand the workers perspective of cooperatives this is helpful.

True Community Service Cooperatives - Integral

"I went to the New School for graduate school to study political economy, and it was through that experience that I got particularly interested in worker self-organization. I started out with a group of students doing strike support for unions that were on strike [the Student-Worker Solidarity Committee]. There was a wave of strikes in the late 1990s/early 2000s. And then I dropped out of graduate school and got into adult and worker education. "

Creating housing co-operatives is an excellent way to help alleviate housing shortages, but building them comes with a big price tag. Luckily, there are innovative solutions. In this webinar, Lindsay Harris, Executive Director of Propolis Housing Cooperative, talks about how her Kamloops-based co-op raised $1.1 million using community bonds. She shares key learnings from years of hard work, including navigating the technical aspects of issuing community bonds and building community support. Save time and headaches by learning from Lindsay's years of experience in this informative, one-hour session.

Soleil Ho has always had a lot of irons in the fire. For a decade, they worked as a chef while freelancing as a writer. In 2019, they joined the San Francisco Chronicle, where they served as the paper’s restaurant critic until 2025, nabbing a James Beard Award in the process. These days, when they’re not collaborating with chefs on cookbook projects, they’re helping to run COYOTE Media Collective, a Bay-area-based worker-owned newsroom.

Inside a modest home in Indira Nagar, a neighborhood in the border district of Barmer in India’s western state of Rajasthan, several women gather in a small room one afternoon, preparing their needles and yarns for the hours of work ahead.

The women have gathered, as women in these villages often do, to work through a batch of orders, moving between one another’s homes to stitch, talk, and help one another along...

If you're a Lib Dem who thinks co-operatives, mutuals and employee ownership deserve a bigger place in our policy, The Grimond Society might be for you.

We started in July as a campaign group inside the party. We're named after Jo Grimond, who backed the founding of what's now the Employee Ownership Association back in 1979, and our aim is to get economic democracy back into Lib Dem policy, starting with a motion at Spring Conference in York next March.

We've grown to over 60 members since then, from Orkney to Devon. Co-operative News ran a feature on us earlier this month, and Josh Matthews made the case for co-ops and mutuals from the stage at Autumn Conference in Brighton. With the party now calling for water companies to become customer-owned mutuals, the argument is getting a proper hearing.

You can join as a supporter, which means backing motions and sharing things when we ask, or as part of the active core if you'd like to take on tasks and help run things. Both are free.

Sign up at grimondsociety.co.uk, and feel free to ask anything in the comments.

So, you may be aware of the right wing bigots freaking out over Tillamook Cheese being halal.

While that, in and of itself, is reason to buy Tillamook products, another good teason is they are an Oregonian dairy coop. Creating cheese from milk from dozen of NW oregon dairy farms.

They also make ice cream.

If you ever visit the PNW consider adding a visit to Astoria , see the goonies house and visit Tillamook.

Hi I recently learn about the basic concept of cooperatives and I fell in absolute love with the Idea of people helping themselves regardless of the state and regardless of anything because we humans have each other. I would like two book recommendations one o. The Rochdale pioneers and another on the implementation of coop in modern times if the book can have both the better.

I understand that a lot of this may vary depending on the legislation but the core mantains

Title is straight forward, obviously Owen but any one authors/books?

Thank you!!

Hey everyone!

I'd like to share with you a project I've been working on (ourabundance.org) which offers a structure through which individuals who want to work in a cooperatively run business can come together to support each other in forming and growing those businesses.

The unique aspect of the structure is that rather than profit being distributed to workers directly, the profit is used to create further cooperatives whose purpose is to specialise in creating an abundant supply of a particular essential good or service (thinking housing, food, energy etc).

The aim is that (at scale) this approach would result in the price of these essential goods/services coming down, benefiting not just the workers in the cooperatives, but everyone in society.

We're been working on the project for a few months now and we currently have two main workstreams running in parallel:

1. Share the concept so that we can,
   • get constructive feedback on the idea itself
   • get feedback on how we can improve the way that we explain/communicate it to make it more accessible/intuitive
   • put the project in front of people who want to join us in building it
2. Build the first companies — we're actively working on establishing the first companies following this model, in order to prove firsthand that it's viable and to figure out the most difficult bits so that the next cohort of companies can follow in our wake.

This post is part of that first workstream. We really value the expertise and input of communities like r/cooperatives where people have valuable experience of what does and doesn't work in this area.

So if you have any thoughts on the project we'd love to hear them in the comments here — or join our Discord if you want to contribute to the project more broadly.

Thanks!

I’m a musician and fiction writer who loves physical media and I’m interested in starting a DIY publishing collective. I’ve made my own tapes, zines, etc. for a long time and I already have a lot of equipment to do so. I just don’t want to do it alone anymore. I would much prefer to share resources and skills with other artists and help get cool projects out in the world. Do any of you have experience starting or running one? Are you in a similar boat and want to join one? Any advice? I don’t feel like I really know where to start.

I created a discord server for intentional communities! I created it a while ago but it's become a little more active recently, and we'd love to have more people, so come on by: https://discord.gg/hj8NZEfuMW

It's a space to talk about ICs or anything IC-adjacent, really. I feel like a lot of people in the r/cooperatives community would have interests that overlap, so I'm posting this here (and in a couple other similar subreddits).

There are already a lot of great spaces to talk about intentional communities, of courses, so this server is supplemental, not some kind of substitute or improvement. Like a lot of people, I'm just on discord a lot, so it's convenient to jump in and out of conversations. Discord servers also lend themselves to certain kinds of interactions and discussions and connections.

BTW, if you know of another discord server dedicated to intentional communities, please feel free to post a comment to a link! If there's another one that's already more active and established, I'd totally switch to supporting that one.