Why a (dual) cooperative model? Well, beyond the obvious answer: Cooperatives speak to the goals of not just decentralizing power but centering workers, creating a feedback loop in business. We don’t want to start a business, but create an ecology. Instead of looking to anyone above for answers or permission, we look to ourselves and the people around us, in an ongoing act of integrity and creation of interdependence and really real sustainability, guiding us to create more regenerative systems of support. We can’t and won’t adhere to financial dependency, and strive to remove ourselves from the cycle of grant and foundation funding that leads to power dynamic struggles. Our goal is to caringly cultivate financial solvency and move beyond it in ethical ways.

We don’t want to just break down the wall; we want to demolish it completely. Old ways don’t work, and the systems around us have been crumbling at an exponential rate, exposing the ways in which “solutions” are often just band-aids, backwards, or outright malicious. Community care is not radical, it is necessary. “Business as usual” doesn’t and never has addressed this.

In Permaculture, or more respectfully, agroecology, an indigenous look at land care, it is encouraged to view a problem as a potential solution. To do this means to step back and look at the bigger picture, to see what is going on and where. To acknowledge and recognize systems, both invisible and obvious, and how to approach them. To view things holistically, not just as individual or separate parts. Applying all of this as an ongoing practice, we can change our approach to better address problems, a little at a time, step by step. All the while, observing and listening, so we can pivot and respond respectfully to our members, to our community, to our city, and to our environment.