.png)
Unite The Power, with COWOP
- 16 hours ago
- 7 min read
Solidarity is built; coalitions are forged; needs surface and are met through action.
The movement towards a solidarity economy, or toward economic democracy, or toward systems of dollar, cents, and (re)distribution of resources that serve the working class, is a global one—not as marginal as the business-as-usual economy would have us believe—and has deep historical roots in the United States. Generations of Black economy builders found ways to work with, alongside, and against governments to support themselves and their communities through cooperation and cooperative infrastructures. Cooperatives are resilient economic structures, and have helped Black workers build wealth across the country. Scholars Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Dr. Caroline Hossein remind us of this in their publications dedicated to Black cooperators, whose legacies pave a welcoming path. Editorial Manager Alula Hunsen spoke with members of the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power, and writes an essay on the power of their ability to coalesce community insight with power-building strategies to work statewide on building an economy that serves us.
The Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power, or COWOP, heeds the call of Black and multicultural cooperators the world over in its work supporting economic development that serves local economy-building, and worker empowerment, across the Commonwealth. Launched in 2019 with support from the Center for Economic Democracy, the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power enables a statewide ecosystem of cooperators: grassroots groups, organized labor and workers centers, worker- and member-owners of cooperative business enterprises, coordinators who build relationships across organizations, and researchers who take on the wonky communicative work of drafting policy, who all come together to support economies that benefit us.
By organizing inside and outside of Massachusetts state government, COWOP has struggled meaningfully towards enlivening our economy, supporting community wealth-building. In 2025, their work lived up to the United Nation General Assembly declaration that the year be the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC), because “Cooperatives Build a Better World.” The United Nations General Assembly outlined four key outcomes to work towards during the IYC: 1) Governments creating an enabling environment for cooperatives; 2) Cooperatives promoting public awareness, developing new leaders, and leveraging cooperation; 3) Institutions and development agencies promoting cooperatives through education, strengthening capacities, and facilitating collaboration; and 4) The public understanding the cooperative identity and supporting cooperative initiatives. COWOP worked to enable each of these outcomes in Massachusetts, and has been building decision-making infrastructure to expand on the vision laid out by the IYC and to build not just cooperative businesses, but cooperative culture.
AT THE STATE HOUSE
The Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power has proposed a variety of initiatives at the level of policy and government infrastructure to ensure that Massachusetts cooperators receive legal, technical, and structural support from the State House (striving under UN IYC outcome #1). COWOP has fought to enact three key pieces of policy, in funding and legislation: re-establishing, advising, and funding the Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership (MassCEO); drafting and fighting to pass the Opportunity to Own Bill; and greater funding for the Small Business Technical Assistance (SBTA) program. Over the past year, much effort has been put forth to support the first two of these agenda items (MassCEO and Opportunity to Own).
Darnell Adams, a member of COWOP and of the advisory board for the Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership (MassCEO) who came into cooperative organizing through food systems work with the Dorchester Food Co-Op, penned an opinion piece with Massachusetts State Representative Carmine Gentile in 2024 advocating for stronger state support of cooperatives and employee ownership of businesses in general. Adams became chair of the advisory board last year, when MassCEO kicked off a strong year of statewide education (supporting UN IYC outcome #3). In an interview this month, Adams shared that, “last year was the beginning of us doing outreach; we held symposia all over the state where we taught folks what employee ownership is and what the center is doing, before asking, ‘how can we support you?’ We also held panels to answer questions for people who were co-op curious, or had really specific questions about what kinds of supports there are.” Adams continues to work with the advisory board as MassCEO pushes for more funding from the state and a permanent budget. Their work has been limited by a statewide hiring freeze; from Adams, “it’s difficult to think about not only what you're doing now, but what the future looks like when funding's not secure, but that's where we are.” Still, COWOP is hopeful; Adams shared that once a budget is secured, MassCEO plans for “the majority of the money we get to fund direct consulting and [technical] support for businesses that are looking to transition to employee ownership and for already existing employee-owned businesses that are seeking support to thrive.” As a result of advocacy by cooperators, MassCEO is already in the beginning stages of this work, launching a program this spring to cover the costs of converting conventionally-owned businesses into employee ownership.
COWOP also drafted and continues to support the Opportunity to Own bill (S.305 / H. 503): their goal is to make it easier for employees of a business to become owners of said business in the event of an ownership transition. Alex Papali, an organizer with COWOP, emphasized in conversation that this legislation is especially important in the midst of what he called a silver tsunami: nearly half of all businesses in Massachusetts are owned by people 55 and older, who will likely head into retirement and sell or, failing that, shutter their business in the near future. Opportunity to Own offers a few mechanisms to turn this wave into an advantage: first, the bill (if passed into law) would require business owners to inform employees that they were looking to sell their business, providing employees with an opportunity to organize, raise capital, and offer a bid to buy the business or match any outside bid, and convert it into cooperative ownership. Second, the bill provides a tax incentive for business owners, offering them a break from state capital gains tax incurred on income from the business’s sale if employees are the buyers. This bill seeks to make employee ownership a favorable path in business transition planning, and will facilitate community development from within.
The Opportunity to Own Bill has been covered favorably in the press, including in the Bay State Banner: publisher Ron Mitchell wrote in 2025 of the bill that, “The Massachusetts Legislature must do what it can to encourage the creation of co-ops, make sure Black and other employees of color get a fair share of that action and then support the scaling up of worker-owned businesses.” Still, the bill has not yet passed through the legislature; Papali outlined a path forward for COWOP:
We’ll take this year to talk further to stakeholders: owners, industry groups, lawyers, tax professionals, legislators, people who have converted their business from conventional ownership to worker ownership successfully. We’ll really take the time to understand any hesitations, any fears, any opposition, and ask folks, ‘what would it take for you to support this bill? What changes can we make?’ We could amend the language to incorporate any suggestions that stay true to our members’ interests in growing worker ownership across MA, and hopefully will end up with a bill that legislators will welcome next session as a great way to both support small business owners and grow a fairer and more resilient economy.
BUILDING AWARENESS, NARRATIVE POWER, AND COLLABORATION
COWOP works hard to spread its message of cooperation, landing op-eds in 2024 and favorable news coverage of their work in 2024 and 2025 (meeting UN IYC outcome #4); their Instagram page is filled with their own stories and media, including sometimes-corny memes and heart-warming short testimonials from worker-owners who have joined the coalition, sharing their name, likeness, and thoughts. Micky Metts, founder of Agaric.coop (a worker-owned technology cooperative that builds websites and platforms), shares that we should support Opportunity to Own and cooperative culture, “because services don’t get enshittified when the people who rely on them also democratically own and govern the enterprise,” speaking to the need for community governance and accountability across platforms and businesses serving us.
COWOP organizer Sarah Assefa brings this consciousness-raising ethos into systems analysis with a new initiative designed to re-orient business-to-business procurement. This new project, the Local, Community Owned Supply Chains Collaborative, emerges from what Assefa shared as, “principle six of the solidarity economy, cooperation between cooperatives. That’s really one of the value-adds of cooperatives as well, that we can have coordinated action amongst different institutions that are accountable to community.” Assefa said that this Collaborative has developed an App called ValueVendor that, “encourages institutions to assess how much of their money is going into the solidarity economy; a nonprofit, a business, a cooperative business, or government institution can upload their vendor report from QuickBooks and assess how much of [their] money is going to the solidarity economy, how much is actually going to minority owned businesses in Massachusetts.” The Local, Community Owned Supply Chains Collaborative supports organizations in holding themselves to their values, and is building mechanisms by which they can connect with cooperatives and other aligned businesses to not just spread awareness, but to lead to action by leveraging cooperation and connection (meeting UN IYC outcome #2).
CONCLUSION
What is most transformative about COWOP is how they approach their work: COWOP as a coalition surfaces community needs, develops processes to translate them into demands, policy, and action items, and enacts processes that leverage workers’ voices to build cooperative culture. This undergirds every part of their work: for instance, their legislative drafting process starts with members of COWOP and even outside community members coming to open meetings and sharing their needs and struggles, moving these concerns into working groups to determine how needs can be met through action, and collaboratively drafting bills to address what they’ve heard. COWOP also works alongside other organizations and coalitions outside of their own, including the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations and the Coalition for an Equitable Economy, to push policy that will realize shared goals of an economy that works for us.
Most recently, COWOP set up a participatory grant-making process that concluded in December 2025, called the Workers’ Funds Assembly, redirecting a $100,000 grant they were given to support worker-owners and allowing said worker-owners to not only make proposals for how to spend down the grant, but to also vote on how the monies should be distributed to directly support themselves and to provide opportunities for skill- and capacity-building.
To Sarah Assefa, the power behind cooperation on all levels is immense.
“In cooperatives, we practice being able to move together and we participate in the decisions that shape our lives, which is countercultural in a world where they want us thinking individually and divided and in competition with one another. I think the system wants us to stay without agency and without the power of unity. The fruits of Massachusetts worker co-ops are all around us; imagine what could happen when we cooperate more.”
Alula Hunsen (he/him) is an Editorial Manager at the Boston Ujima Project, working on narrative-building towards liberatory urban futures.
