Hi there! I'm Ricardo, the Director of Economic Democracy at the Sustainable Economies Law Center and below you'll find some of my favorite, go-to resources for worker cooperatives, democratic organizations, and worker self-directed nonprofits. I update this once or twice a year, so if you find any broken links or would like to suggest another resource to post on this page, just email me at [email protected]. Thanks!

Looking for direct legal support?

The Law Center created this list of attorneys, accountants, and technical assistance providers to give you a place to start your search for a lawyer to help with your project. We aren’t vouching for or recommending these people, we just know that they service small scale food businesses, cooperatives, shared housing, nonprofits, and social enterprises. Shop around for the right fit!

Not ready for ongoing representation or unable to afford an attorney right now? Come to the Resilient Communities Legal Cafe where we provide direct legal advice on issues like cooperative business ownership, employment law, financing your coop, and more! We host multiple Legal Cafes per month in Oakland and Berkeley, so hopefully you'll be able to find one that fits your schedule. You can find our Legal Cafe calendar here and find out what types of legal advice we do give by clicking here.

Since there's a lot of stuff below, click the following links to drop down to the place you want:

• Do-It-Yourself legal resources for all types of cooperative enterprises

• DIY resources & training for worker cooperatives

• Resources for converting existing businesses to democratic, employee ownership

• Resources for cooperative development

• Resources on transitioning nonprofits to worker self-directed organizations

• Subscribe to email updates about worker cooperatives resources, trainings, & events

My recommendations for Do-It-Yourself legal resources for all types of cooperative enterprises:

Have a legal question but not quite ready to read a full legal guide? Then try our free, downloadable Bite-Sized Legal Guides for issues like How To Make Decisions in a Cooperative, How To Run a Co-Op Child Care Arrangement, How to Incorporate as an LLC or Partnership, and many more!

If you want to do online research on the legal issues the worker-owned cooperatives have to navigate, including template bylaws and cartoon operating agreements, who is an employee and who isn't, how to capitalize worker coops in non-extractive ways, and our legal guide to cooperative conversions, then check out Co-opLaw.org. We're constantly growing our online resource pages on Co-opLaw.org, to provide more legal information, best practices, and supporting tools for cooperatively owned businesses and organizations. Try searching your legal questions there as a starting point for any of your cooperatively related legal questions.

Starting a food justice enterprise? Look through our free, comprehensive Legal Eats handbook that covers California-specific legal topics for small and medium sized food enterprises, including restaurants, farms, and grocery stores. You can also watch our Legal Eats workshop online!

If you want to know about the different options for non-extractive financing your food, cooperative, or farm enterprise enterprise, then I would suggest perusing our Grassroots Finance Guide for California Farmers! Even though it says "Farmers," most of the strategies in the guide can be used by any cooperative enterprise!

My recommendations for DIY resources & training for worker cooperatives:

If you're looking for our comprehensive legal manual for starting and operating a worker-owned cooperative, Think Outside the Boss: How to Create a Worker-Owned Business, you can download it for free on our website here. We regularly put on workshops and teach-ins specifically for cooperative entrepreneurs, existing business owners, and economic development professionals to help folks understand the concepts in our Think Outside the Boss manual. Please visit our events calendar to see if any are coming up! You can also watch our Think Outside the Boss workshop online!

If you're a start-up cooperative, the Democracy at Work Institute hosts a monthly webinar for groups and people at the very early stages of their worker cooperative project on the first Friday of each month. You can register here.

If you're looking to connect with the national hub for worker cooperatives, the professionals who serve them, and the organizations that support them, visit the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives' resource page. The USFWC, along with its affiliated organization, the Democracy at Work Institute, maintains a large library of model and working documents from and for worker cooperatives, as well as academic and practitioner research.

For one time or ongoing technical support, try reaching out to the resources of the USFWC Co-op Clinic, formerly the Democracy at Work Network (DAWN). The Co-op Clinic has a network of peer advisors, all with strong social and professional ties, who provide technical assistance services to worker cooperatives. The Co-op Clinic aims to meet the demand for technical assistance and development advice with high-quality services and to increase worker cooperative technical assistance capacity from inside the movement.

If you're supporting, thinking about, or are a cooperatively owned farm, check out the Greenhorn's guidebook, Cooperative Farming: Frameworks for Farming Together.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and looking to connect with the worker coop community there, see the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives website and attend one of their upcoming events. NoBAWC (pronounced "No Boss") is a grassroots organization of democratic workplaces dedicated to building workplace democracy in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Find out how to get involved, when their next General Membership Meeting, or upcoming NoBAWC events are on their website, nobawc.org!

For introductory materials on cooperatives and the solidarity economy, check out the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network Webinar Series on cooperatives!

My recommendations for converting existing businesses to democratic, employee ownership resources:

Here's our fairly comprehensive Legal Guide to Cooperative Conversions.This guide gives a legal roadmap for business owners interested in cooperative conversion, aka transitioning their businesses to democratic employee-ownership. It was prepared as part of a project to increase worker-ownership for low- to moderate-income workers. We were aiming to provide an overview of the legal steps involved for selling owners to convert their businesses to employee-ownership. We have provided a few models of how to convert a business, the issues raised in valuing a business, and related financing, governance and employment law considerations. Finally, we closed with a few case studies that illustrate the points we raised in the guide. I hope you find it useful!

My two go-to organizations with publicly available materials on converting existing businesses to worker cooperatives are Project Equity and the Democracy at Work Institute (not to be confused with Richard Wolff's organization, "Democracy at Work"). For lots of good resources and referral info, visit the Democracy at Work Institute's resources page on Becoming Employee Owned and for a high-level but very useful toolkit for business owners interested in converting to worker cooperatives, check out DAWI's Becoming Employee Owned handout here.

Also, visit Project Equity's website for more info and to schedule a consultation with them about converting your business to a worker cooperative. One great free resource from Project Equity is their "CASE STUDIES: BUSINESS CONVERSIONS TO WORKER COOPERATIVES - Insights and Readiness Factors for Owners and Employees."

My recommendations for resources for cooperative development:

A great intro to the where we're at as a field with worker coop development is Hilary Abell's Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale (Project Equity). This white paper that aims to help build the field of U.S. worker co-op development by providing a current view of the cooperative landscape and by analyzing factors that inhibit or promote cooperative development.

To understand how to enter or refine cooperative development strategies, check out DAWI's "Development Frameworks" webinar. Worker Cooperative Development can mean different things to different people, encompassing a broad range of activities, and also a range of philosophies and underlying principles. This self-assessment tool helps worker cooperative developers clarify their model, and its assumptions, and consider whether they are organized in a way to achieve the impacts they desire.

Visit Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) to watch, listen, and read news, analysis, and engage in open forums on grassroots organizing to build and finance worker- and community-owned, democratically run, solidarity-based, ecologically sustainable enterprises and organizations. Here are two of my favorite articles:

• My go-to article on Arizmendi Bakery’s replication strategy, The Replication of Arizmendi Bakery: A Model of the Democratic Worker Cooperative Movement.

• GEO’s Worker Cooperative Development Models (pdf version here and online version here) provides case studies on cooperative development strategies used in the United States.

For introductory materials on cooperatives and the solidarity economy, check out the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network Webinar Series on cooperatives!

My recommendations for resources on transitioning organizations to worker self-directed nonprofits:

Here are some resources that my coworkers in our Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits program put together to support nonprofits to better embody the more just, democratic, and sustainable world they are working toward:

• Recorded webinar: “Worker Self Directed Nonprofits: Implementing Workplace Democracy in Nonprofit Organizations"

• Peer network: Join our Google Group and/or our Facebook Group to participate in an informal peer network for active and aspiring worker self-directed nonprofit practitioners. Connect with others, ask questions, and share resources about nonprofit workplace democracy.

• WSDN: TV for Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits: ”WSDN” sounds so much like the name of a TV station that we couldn’t resist: We started a news show featuring short clips discussing various facets of worker self-direction. Check out our playlist below!

SELC has also created resources for democratic organizations to replicate and use as inspiration. Find our Peer Review Questionnaire, the accompanying Self Assessment Questionnaire, and our internal Operational Policies here.

Interested in our theory of change for worker cooperatives? Check it out here!

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