Jamila Medley, executive director of PACA

VERNON OAKES: Good morning, everybody, this is Vernon Oakes. Welcome to Everything Co-Op. You know, I just get excited when I get to talk co-op. And today I get to talk co-op with Jamila Medley from Philadelphia, or from New York, who lives in Philadelphia. Good morning, Jamila.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Good morning, Vernon. How are you?

VERNON OAKES: I am great. And you?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Doing good. Doing really well, thanks.

VERNON OAKES: Great, great, great, great. By the way, you do not have to wrap my Christmas present this year, okay? Don’t worry about that.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Oh, thanks for letting me know.

VERNON OAKES: All right. So, what is the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, thePhiladelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, otherwise known as PACA, is a co-op of co-ops. We have membership from co-ops across different sectors and industries, and we are also a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve the lives of people living in and around the Philadelphia area by supporting and helping to promote the cooperative principles, by supporting democratically organized workplaces, and helping to grow a cooperative economy in our region.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. If you have organizations that are founded in the cooperative principles and democratically controlled, how is that going to help people in the region?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, what we believe is that a lot of communities that we’re working with in particular, we center and prioritize working with marginalized communities, those that have traditionally been left out of the mainstream economy; communities of color, immigrant and refugee communities, poor working class folks, returning community members who were formerly incarcerated, and thinking about the ways in which folks can leverage the resources that they have and identify needs that they have in their community and then come together to really think about what they could do with those resources with some technical assistance, with being able to raise money for more folks in their community, and thinking about let’s address this problem by creating a new business, by creating a cooperative where we’re at least thinking about how do we practice ways of cooperation within entities that might already exist.
So, thinking about how do we democratize workplaces and organizations so that people get to show up more fully as they are and that their full value as human beings and the dignity that they bring as well as their talents can be represented and experienced and felt in our organizations. And I think that really helps to transform individuals personally, right? The ways in which we create and sustain relationships with one another. And ultimately the communities that we live, work and play in.

VERNON OAKES: All right. Marginalized communities, get them to pool their resources, pool their talents, and figure out what the needs are in the community, and then match those to — start a business, a cooperative business where they can pull everything together and also get other resources and solve some community problem through this vehicle called a business, a cooperative business. Did I kind of get that? That’s what you do?

JAMILA MEDLEY: That’s what we do.

VERNON OAKES: So, let me ask you the question I normally ask last, I’m going to ask you right now, do you like what you do?

JAMILA MEDLEY: I love what I do. I feel so fortunate to be doing this work, to have connected to something that feels like a passion and is deeply rooted in the work that I’ve longed for, I think. Figuring out a way. I have a back on in nonprofit administration, and when I came to co-op I think one of the things that I really distinguished between workingin a nonprofit that provides charity and services to working in the cooperative sector is that I’m helping people help themselves. And making that leap and transition for me has been really transformative for me personally in how I think about engaging and being of service to folks in my community. And I get to live that life every day. It’s great.

VERNON OAKES: So you like getting up in the morning and going to work?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, here’s the thing. I also get to work from home most of the time. So, I don’t have far to go to get my work done.

VERNON OAKES: Get up and go to work. Okay, get started. Okay. Got it. Fantastic. So you talked about, you were in the nonprofit world, nonprofit administration. Give us a little background of your education and your experience before you got into the co-op world. And how did you learn about this world?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Sure. So, I got, let’s see, my first job coming into the nonprofit sector was actually a community foundation in Connecticut while I was in college. And it was there that I was first exposed to the world of philanthropy and how individuals could use their money to support organizations that were helping to fulfill needs. And at that point I kind of committed myself to that line of work as what I wanted to do with my career. And so, I’ve worked in organizations that have supported efforts around cancer research, around homelessness, drug and alcohol recovery programs, and a number of other things. I guess like, when was that? 2010, 2011, I decided that I wanted to go to grad school and I started an organizational development program at the University of Pennsylvania and completed that master’s program, and I really was just like what am I going to do next. And that’s when I stumbled upon a job opening at Mariposa Food Co-Op in West Philadelphia. And one of the prior roles that I had —

VERNON OAKES: Wait, wait. Let me get this straight. So, in your master’s degree, was it organizational —

JAMILA MEDLEY: Development, yeah.

VERNON OAKES: Organizational development. You didn’t learn about go up there?

JAMILA MEDLEY: No. Not at all.

VERNON OAKES: So it’s a job opening that you say oh, there’s a job, let me go see what this is about. And it was at a food co-op?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. And it was at the food co-op. And I had a friend who worked there, so I got in touch with her to kind of learn more about what it was. I grew up in Brooklyn, the New York, and my understanding of co-ops was really around the housing co-op model and was also very limited just in the sense of knowing that all these people were living in a housing co-op were owning where they lived together. But that was the extent of my understanding of co-ops until I started working at the food co-op. And I was hired to be their membership coordinator. And so, it was my job to recruit and retain people as members of the co-op, but I didn’t really know a lot. And actually, at the same time PACA was just coming onboard and was evolving into an organization and was being run by a group of volunteers. And so, I offered to start volunteering on their steering committee so that I could learn about co-ops, hopefully to do my job more effectively at Mariposa Food Co-Op, and I’ve been involved with PACA ever since.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. So, 2010, 2011, you’re at University of Pennsylvania working on your master’s in organizational development. You get your degree and you go find a job, you see a job opening in Philadelphia?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. Membership coordinator. Okay. So, was this particular food co-op, did the members only control the business or was it a worker cooperative were the employees own and control the business?

JAMILA MEDLEY: So, Mariposa Food Co-Op is a consumer-owned food co-op. And historically it’s also been a site for deep democratic practice and some level of autonomy for its staff. So while I was there, Mariposa Food Co-Op also had a staff collective. So, we strove to operate the business democratically as workers. Some of the workers were also owners, because you could join the co-op as a worker, but it’s formally a consumer-owned co-op.

VERNON OAKES: So, in this case, the consumer-owned co-ops are the people that shop there, they are the shopping folks, then they own shares of stocks. They’re members and owners and they control the business?

JAMILA MEDLEY: That’s right.

VERNON OAKES: And so, food co-ops is one of them, most have been consumer co-ops but some of them are worker co-ops, and then there are some others that are both. The consumers own a portion of the business and the employees own a portion of the business. So it’s a hybrid.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Right. And I think there are some interesting efforts right now to kind of figure out how to make that balance happen. As you mentioned, traditionally, food co-ops our consumer-owned. But I think, and thinking about the values and principles of the co-op movement and democracy somewhat being invented in how cooperatives function, imagining how to extend those practices and those principles and values beyond the owners to also the workers I think has been a critical opportunity that folks are really starting to investigate more seriously how to create that balance.

VERNON OAKES: So, how long did you work as a membership coordinator at the Mariposa Food Cooperative?

JAMILA MEDLEY: I was in that role for about one year, and then I transitioned into being the membership and marketing manager, and combined the membership, marketing, outreach, and education into one department and ran that department. And by then I also moved into a role somewhat like a co-general management structure that we had in place.Mariposa Food Co-Op also at that time had an operations committee that was the staff collective’s way of being able to have some autonomy and control of how the workplace operated and how the grocery store operated, was by having several of its members work as co-general managers together in the store. So we did that for a while, too.

VERNON OAKES: Okay, so, you’re bright, you’re fresh out of your master’s program, having some experience in the nonprofit world, and you get a job at Mariposa Food Cooperative in Philadelphia. And on your webpage it says West Philly. Okay. And the membership coordinator for a year and then you start doing marketing and you also mentioned training, which is the fifth principle of cooperatives, is training both the people inside the co-op and the folks outside to know what a co-op is and what it’s all about. And then you became a co-general manager, working together. Okay, so you’re moving on up in the world?

JAMILA MEDLEY: It was some fast movement, but it was a critical time of growth for the Mariposa Food Co-Op, which had recently expanded when I first started working there, and had become open to the public for the first time in its 40 year history at that time. So, there was a lot of new opportunities to grow and learn and figuring out how to meet the needs of the community that was being served. So, I got to play a number of different roles in that.

VERNON OAKES: So, we’re going to take our first break, and when we come back I want to do a little bit more talking in general as we’ve been talking, but I’d like to go and focus on some of the folks that are members of your cooperated. Okay?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Okay, sounds good.

VERNON OAKES: We’ll be right back. Please don’t touch that dial.

ANNOUNCER: Washington DC’s news talk. 1450 AM WOL and 95.9 FM.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes and the program is Everything Cooperative. And WOL is a great partner for this partner, just as you just heard. Information is power, their motto. And the National Cooperative Bank is supporting this particular program to give you information. Now, just getting the information, there is no power in that. Really, there’s no power. You got to put some action to it. And we have on the phone with us today Ms. Jamila Medley from the Philadelphia area at the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, and we’re going to talk for the rest of this hour about what kind of actions you can take. And that’s where you get your power. Jamila, welcome back.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, thank you. Hello again.

VERNON OAKES: Hey. So, in general, you are a cooperative among cooperatives. So how does that form and how does that work at the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance?

JAMILA MEDLEY: So, Philadelphia has a long and rich history of cooperatives here in the city. And some folks who have been involved in those co-ops, food co-ops, energy co-ops, daycare co-ops, came together to imagine, really, what would it be like for different co-op sectors and-or different co-op businesses were able to work more collaboratively together to promote the co-op business model and to really try and see how we can leverage the resources and the structures and opportunities and challenges we have independently, what could happen if we began to imagine cooperating amongst ourselves? Right? And that was kind of the idea around the creation of PACA. And if so, each of those co-ops, amongst the volunteer group who formalized PACA, it was important to figure out how to keep our co-ops in the area centered in our work through the organization. And so, the co-op structure was created to support that. So, our co-ops paid dues annually to be a part of PACA. They also nominate members to our board and elect those board members each year as well. In our engagement with them, our members really helps us understand what the needs are of the co-op themselves, but also what the needs of their communities are as well. In our member co-ops, particularly the older ones, have really been supportive of the work that PACA has been able to do to help start new cooperatives in our region. And so, a lot of principle six, cooperation amongst cooperatives, is happening in the Philadelphia area, in part because we have this commitment from our member co-ops to grow our co-op economy and to be a place where we can help serve their needs as well.

VERNON OAKES: So, we talked about principle number five. That’s the education, training, and information, which was the main principle that I liked when I first got introduced to co-ops. And note number six is cooperation among co-ops. And we’ve talked about consumer co-ops and we talk about worker cooperatives, but there’s two other types I’d like to get in here, and that’s the purchasing co-op, and that’s where groups of folks would come together — a lot of farmers and now artists are beginning to use this way of purchasing collectively whatever they need. And I want to tell you, Jamila, there’s a group in DC, CPA, Consumer Purchasing Alliance, and they’re beginning to branch out to other cities and Philly is close enough by, I think. I know they’re down there in Richmond.

But they are helping churches and nonprofits, government entities every now and then, but they have different people, it is interesting how churches were getting ripped off for things like garbage collection. And so, they provide several services and products for all of these people and it’s saved them a lot of money. So that might be something you want to look into. And I can get you the information if you want to talk to the people here about doing that. Because when I look at you have all these different co-ops and it seems like there might be a place for the co-ops and nonprofits where you could purchase, it maybe you already, do you have a purchasing co-op there?

JAMILA MEDLEY: We don’t. Not one that we’re aware of or that we’re working with. I think that one of our groups is trying to imagine how that works. We work with a number of urban farmers in a coalition called Soil Generation. And I know that they’ve been navigating this question around how can these independent farms be thinking about sharing resources and consolidating resources to support some of their administrative needs. So that model is something that is being explored that I think we’ll dig a little bit more into in 2019.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. Now, there’s another. The fourth major type of co-ops is, some people call it a producing co-op or I call it a marketing co-op, and that’s on the other end of the farmers and artists. You get one group that’s buying stuff and you get like farmers who produce things and artists who produce things, and then you have another group, another company that that sells and markets it. And like in farming, they may take cabbage and make coleslaw. They may add some value to it. And then they sent it out and we have Land O Lakes and Cabot creamery. There’s a group in Pittsburgh of mostly, I think, black ladies, mostly ladies and I think African-Americans, called Bujima, that’s artists. And they produce their bags and would stuff and jewelry and then they have a storefront where they sell it. So there’s four different types of co-ops. And looking on your webpage about cooperatives, and it says co-ops in Philadelphia, you have a long list of co-ops.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yes. I mentioned, co-ops have been in Philly for a long time. I think it’s one of the advantages that we have, is having this rich history and so many co-ops around to support our work.

VERNON OAKES: 53 credit unions. And then a credit union is a form of a consumer co-op, like housing co-ops are. And you have 53 in the Philadelphia area?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. And we’ve been fortunate to have a couple of them over the course of PACA’s existence to work with us. And I think figuring out how to do more work with our credit unions is one of the questions that stays on the table for us, to imagine how we support them and identifying more closely with the cooperative movement, and figuring out which ones are interested in that kind of strategy, development, and finding new opportunities to connect with community members by being more affiliated with the co-op movement.

VERNON OAKES: Fantastic. Okay. So, I want to change a little bit to talk about, you said you’re having startups and this cooperation among co-ops to look at startups. And I think I heard you mention, or at least it’s on your webpage, about 20 book clubs. What is that?

JAMILA MEDLEY: So, the 20 book clubs 20 cooperative businesses program, PACA ran between 2016 and 2017. It was really inspired by Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s book, Collective Courage,and research that she’s been doing about the history of African-American cooperatives in the United States. And one of her findings was that, of the historical co-ops in many of the groups that she talked to and researched, they all formed study circles as a significant element to being able to start a co-op. So, this idea of learning what is a co-op, learning more about the industry or sector that you’re wanting to start a business in, learning about how you want to work together and what kinds of strategies you want to use to make decisions. When you’re working democratically with others, a lot of dynamics and relationships show up. So, the study circles provide a space for people to kind of navigate those things. And so, through the 20 book club 20 cooperative businesses program, PACA was able to recruit 20 different groups of people who are interested in forming a co-op or at least studying on the possibility of forming a co-op around the business idea that they have. And we ended up working with about 200 people in the region over six months, providing support for their study circles.

And then after the six months of study, about half of those groups determined that yeah, we want to move forward. We’re thinking more concretely come more seriously about forming a new cooperative business. And so, PACA was able to partner with Elysian Fields, now known as Wanda Well and Culture Works Greater Philadelphia them introduce some intensive business strategy development, coaching, and training with some of those groups. And we went on to see that a few of those groups, I think we’ve launched two new co-ops out of this project.

VERNON OAKES: Fantastic.

JAMILA MEDLEY: And we’ve created a pipeline of new cooperatives in various stages of development that we continue to work with. So it’s been phenomenal. It was a phenomenal process and we’re still taking away our learning lessons from it, but also really recognizing the role of principle five around education and training and how important it is for supporting predevelopment opportunities for groups coming together to form co-ops.

VERNON OAKES: We’re going to take our second break and we’ll come back and take up from here about these circles. The doctor Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s book is called Collective Courage, a History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. And it’s a powerful book. The other thing she said was that whenever co-ops start having trouble they would go back to their circles and they would go back to the study, which I found interesting. We’ll be right back.

ANNOUNCER: Washington DC’s news talk. 1450 AM WOL and 95.9 FM.

VERNON OAKES: Vernon Oaks. The program is Everything Cooperated. And we have Ms. Jamil a medley from the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance on the phone with us. She is an exciting, beautiful, intelligent, young black lady. And the National Cooperative Bank is sponsoring this program and its mission is to support and be an advocate for Americans cooperatives and their members, especially in low income communities, by providing innovative financial and related services. And they do a great job of that. What did you start to say, Jamila?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Oh, I’m sorry. I was saying oh, I get to be young. Thank you.

VERNON OAKES: Well, to me you are.

JAMILA MEDLEY: I understand. That’s great.

VERNON OAKES: You didn’t comment on the beautiful and intelligent part either, I see. Okay.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, I know those things. We’re good.

VERNON OAKES: Got it. Who loves her work. Neat.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah.

VERNON OAKES: Because she can help people every day, solve community problems. Dame Pauline Green, who was the president of the International Cooperative Alliance, said on the program that co-ops help people to come out of poverty with dignity. And I really like that. Folks that are in marginalized communities that you’ve already talked about can really get the skill that they need. You can start at 20 groups of people, about 200 of them, so that tells me there’s about 10 people per group. You work with them for six months. And they constantly learn. And I got that 10 businesses were looking to form and to have already formed. And so, that gets to the question that Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard talked about in her book, was that co-op businesses are much more successful than normal, what’s that thing? Capitalistic businesses. So, have you found that to be the case?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, as I mentioned, the groups are newly launched this year. I think what we’re learning and what some of the data tells us particularly is that we know that traditional business, I think something like 50 percent of traditional businesses fail within the first 4 to 5 years of operating. And we know that with cooperatively owned businesses, and maybe even more specifically worker owned businesses, that once they’re able to get past that 4 to 5 year mark that our businesses are much more sustainable, productive, and happier places to work for the people who are there and the folks who are owning them.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. You make me want to verify the stats I’m getting ready to say, but I think I got them out of Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s book, that said that after five years 10 percent of normal businesses, those businesses that start out with a person and some money, are in existence after five years. But in co-op businesses, 90 percent are still in business after five years. And the reason for it is the training that you just talked about. I also think that by going through the training, half of them weren’t going to start half of the people, or so, if it’s on average. So, they self-select not to go into business for whatever reasons, and perhaps all kinds of reasons, and then the ones that do start, because they have this training and they learn how to work together and pool their resources and so forth, and they like their work, like you said, they have input in it and so they like what they’re doing, and so they’re much more successful.

JAMILA MEDLEY: And I think there’s also an element of succession planning that’s available in the co-op structure so that just because one person leaves it doesn’t mean that the business is going to collapse, because they don’t just have one owner. And I think that education and training piece is also really critical. And these are sometimes where co-ops can get tripped up, is in being able to figure out what’s the baseline sense of knowledge and skill sharing that needs to happen within a cooperative business for it to function well, so that if or when someone does leave, there is enough understanding about how to operate the business and enough understanding of the internal dynamics and infrastructure of the business that the other owners can keep the business going.

VERNON OAKES: Okay. Now, I understand, looking at your webpage, that you have a workshop called Leadership Development Workshops that’s available to everybody. What is that program?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. So, in 2016, PACA launched its Cooperative Leadership Institute. And it was originally designed to support our employees at cooperatives across the region. And it was a cohort-based program that took place over six months that involved a bunch of leadership training and skills training. And we went through that cohort. In subsequent years, what we recognized was that, one, even though we have a number of co-ops here, the pipeline for repeating that row Graham as a cohort model wasn’t well developed enough. So we needed to take some time. But what we did have was bunch of materials and curriculum that was available to talk about how to support people who were working in democratic workplaces or people who were interested in more participative leadership styles and practices, that we had this curriculum available.

And so, in the summer of 2017, we began thinking about how to adapt that curriculum to a two hour workshop format. And we really also formatted and framed the curriculum around emotional intelligence and how leaders can gain and practice skills around self-awareness so that they could be better managers and leaders. And not just for people that have formal titles, but we can lead across very different positions within an organization. So what does that mean? And how do we build awareness about ourselves and how to do that within our organizations? And so, cooperative businesses, I think, in our region, at least, many of them are trying to imagine how to practice leadership in these ways, and we think that other sectors could also benefit from practicing leadership in these ways.And so, we ended up partnering again with culture works of greater Philadelphia to offer this workshop series and did four or five workshops in the fall of 2017 and then did another five earlier this year.

VERNON OAKES: So, are you also trying to get people in the pipeline for management in these different collapse so they can learn leadership skills and then also about a cooperative?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. When I think about who attended these workshops, they were people who were CEOs and executive directors. They were also front-line workers and social workers. They were organizers and activists. So, people coming from a lot of different backgrounds and levels of experience in the workplace. So I don’t think that the training was exclusively designated as formal management training. But the topics that we covered were things around strategic leadership and situational leadership, learning to be adaptive in your leadership style, thinking about conflict management, thinking about how leadership and power intersect. So, really these relationship-based constructs and concepts with and how we practice leadership is where we focused in the reinvented model of the Cooperative Leadership Institute that we offered this year.

VERNON OAKES: Fantastic. Okay, so you’re creating co-ops, creating educational programs there for leadership. So, what are you doing to sort of strengthen the co-op that are already in existence?

JAMILA MEDLEY: So, some of the things that we are offering to our existing co-ops, we will come in and do workshops or trainings with them and their staff. Sometimes some leadership things. Sometimes we might come in and help to mediate conflicts or be available to talk through some of those kinds of challenges. A lot of our work with our existing co-ops, particularly the older ones, we’re really trying to imagine what the value preposition is or how to transition the value proposition for more mature co-ops. Because in many ways, the work that PACA does, our capacity is really geared towards startups and folks at the early stage of development. And so, with our more mature co-ops, I think they’re interest in support of PACA is really centered around our capacity to grow the co-op economy and that we can be a conduit for serving their interest in doing that. And I think another area that we’ve been working with that’s in our food co-op sector in particular is PACA convenes our food co-ops in the region.

There are about six or seven of them, a few that are well established and older and a number of startups. We convene them about every other month for the last three or four years, and in doing that we’re offering them the opportunities to talk about ways that they could share resources. A lot of the older food co-ops are able to provide support to the startups. And over the last year or so we’ve really moved the conversation towards talking about in food systems and how that shows up in work with our food co-ops. So we’re looking forward to doing more of that kind of work, which I think is going to be really helpful for our more mature food co-ops that are primarily in multiracial and multiclass communities. And they’re really trying to figure out how to better practice and serve, practice our values and principles and more widely serve the representation that the community actually has.

VERNON OAKES: Do all use co-metrics at all to do your financial come in the food co-ops particularly, the financial measures so they can compare?

JAMILA MEDLEY: I’m not sure what our food co-ops are doing in that area and we haven’t been that engaged with them in that work. I don’t know.

VERNON OAKES: I’m excited about what I see co-metrics doing, at least what I hear that they’re doing, and I just wanted to see on the ground, how well is that conceived.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, I will bring that up. We’ll be meeting in January again. I might be able to answer later in find out what an opportunity might be in that.

VERNON OAKES: So, I see you had a 2018 co-op Summit and annual meeting in November. I missed it. I’d like to find out when it’s going to be next year, see if I can get up there. And I like that you have principle six sponsors with Cabot cheese or Cabot Creamery, and you have principle three sponsors, economic participation. How does that work? Because I’ve never seen principle three. Principle three is economic participation. Normally in the co-op you put some money in and when there’s a profit you get some money back come through dividends. But how do you envision this or imagine, I like to use that word several times. Principle three being used by the energy co-op, Wagner CPAs, and Ardent Credit Union. What did they do to get that?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. So, this year was our fourth co-op summit and annual meeting, and it’s an opportunity where we invite our co-op members as well as the general public and other folks who are supportive of co-ops to come together and really take a look at what’s been going on in our co-op sector for the last year. In our board elections are also held during that time. It’s also usually a time when we can strategize together about some next steps were PACA, but also to be able to provide some training and education about cooperatives in that setting.

VERNON OAKES: Well, let me stop you a minute, and will come right back with that, because we’re taking that final break. Time is almost up. We’ll be right back.

ANNOUNCER: Washington DC’s news talk. 1450 AM WOL and 95.9 FM.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oaks. The program is Everything Cooperative, and Jamila Medley is our guest today. She’s the executive director of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. And we’re having a great conversation. We get to talk co-ops. And you were talking about your annual meeting and some of the things that you’re doing. Could you pick up on that, Jamila, before we take a break?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah, sure. So, every year we invite other co-op organizations to help sponsor our event, and the ones that you mentioned have been supporters of this event and some others that PACA’s put on. And so, when we think about economic participation, I think it’s really the way in which we all are able to invest in growing our movement. Interestingly, PACA also has a principal six club and it’s our monthly sustaining donor program where an individual can donate to PACA on a monthly basis. And at the annual meeting one of our principle six club members talked about why she is a member of this program. And she talked about it as being a part of the way in which she is able to demonstrate economic participation. But to do it also as a means of accountability for how she shows up in support of the movement, right? And so that we can give our time, we can give our talent, and we can also give our money to make sure that the resources are available to do this work in our communities.

VERNON OAKES: Fantastic. Now, how many members do you have of PACA?

JAMILA MEDLEY: We currently have 21 member co-ops and about two or three that we are actively recruiting and will be joining on likely as new members early next year.

VERNON OAKES: How many co-ops are in Philly?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Well, we’ve been serving and collecting some data. We think that there are about 200 cooperatives in the Philadelphia region. About half of those would be credit unions and the others are going to be everything from food co-ops and housing co-ops to mutual insurance organizations. So, I think about 100. So we have a ways to go in reaching out to many more of them, but I think that our efforts so far have really helped us form a tightknit network of cooperatives primarily in the city of Philadelphia. And I think that’s one of the areas that we’re looking to grow, is to figure out what can we be doing to attract cooperatives and to support cooperative development beyond the city of Philadelphia. And so that’s the remaining question for us.

VERNON OAKES: Well, I just looked up the population and I see that Philadelphia has about 1.6 million people in Washington DC has about 700,000. So you’re a little bit more than twice our size, with 200 co-ops, I have no sense that Washington has 100 co-ops. About half of what you all do. So we have some growth. And I know we met in Baltimore where some people there are trying to get more co-ops and looking at what other people are doing around the world, but I’d like to see about trying to get you in some time to talk to some of the powerbrokers in DC to see what we can do here to get more co-ops. For all of the reasons you’ve already talked about.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Yeah. And I think another exciting opportunity that we’re seeing nationally and that’s also playing out in Philadelphia is seeing how our local municipalities can be supporting cooperative development as well. And so, we’re fortunate to have support from the city of Philadelphia and the Commerce Department, and doing some were particularly looking at legacy and minority owned businesses and thinking about some of these folks or business owners are ready for retirement, they want to move on to the next phase of their life, and they’re thinking about how can they sell their business or keep their business going after they move on. And so, we’re working with the city of Philadelphia and imagining what this project looks like around converting existing businesses to worker owned co-ops and getting existing business owners to sell their businesses to their workers, therefore moving workers to owners. And it’s a really exciting opportunity. And I think one of the other levels in which we’re thinking about is this a strategy that can support scaling co-ops in our cities and in other regions where they’re really needed while preserving businesses.

VERNON OAKES: I’m thinking of a name of a gentleman I met out of Chicago that is working on manufacturing conversions. And he was talking about all of the manufacturing companies. Sweeney, I think is his name. All the manufacturing companies that go under just because they can’t sell or nobody in their family wants to buy it and then they’ll just close their doors. That means a whole community, the community lost those jobs. And those employees, they lost even more. You know what a recession is? It’s when your next-door neighbor loses their job. You know what a depression is? It’s when you lose your job. When these people lose their jobs because the business was closed, there is depression in your household. And the community loses that tax revenue, the purchasing power. So if you have a co-op and they own it then that money stays in the community per the profit stays in the community also. So yeah, for a whole host of reasons, this converting these businesses, and there’s all of these baby boomers that own businesses that are looking to retire, possibly. Okay. So, looking on your webpage, I say there’s just a lot of different co-ops. And 21 of them are members. Do you want to talk about any of those that you’re working with, just to give the members out there a sense of, when you’re saying you got 10 of them but you’re working with two that have already started?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Sure. I can talk a little bit about Bonfire Media Collective, which is a co-op that is a worker owned co-op, and they participated in the 2020 program. They were incubated by a nonprofit organization called the Media Mobilizing Project. And in part there was a need in the nonprofit organization that does media education and movement building work around social justice issues in particular, they had all these freelance media makers available to do work for them. And so, the nonprofit imagined an opportunity to support the creation of a co-op to both provide more stability for the workers and the freelancers that they were working with, but to also transition that work that wasn’t perhaps core to MMP’s mission in a particular kind of way.

And so, we’ve worked with them over the course of the last couple of years, providing them with technical assistance, supporting them with getting their financials ready, creating operating agreements, and some other projects, and they launched this summer. And we’re continuing to work with them through the financial cooperative and imagining that perhaps in the coming months they might be ready to get their first loan as a part of that financial cooperative, which is a peer lending network that’s across the nation and across the country that provides non-extractive lending to democratically organized businesses. And so, we’re really excited to see the projection of that, what has been like a two year journey working with a group of people that will culminate in the launch of a successful business and really being able to help them to continue their growth into the next year.

VERNON OAKES: Well, I started my business in 1993. It’s been 25 years now. And I tell people, you almost have to be crazy to start a business, particularly on your own, like I did. There’s so many things that you’ve got to do. And you’ve got all these balls bouncing and one of the major ones is getting business, but if you don’t have your systems in place then you can get the business and then mess up. Have all these balls bouncing and stuff and this is why I like co-ops, too, because you just took two years to start. I decided I was going to start when I got incorporated and started. Where if you had a group of people starting and you do all of this training and stuff, it’s such a much better probability of being successful and without all of the upset, worry, and stuff. And I wouldn’t think about a media, a media package, a media cooperative. Can you tell us about another one in the next minute or so?

JAMILA MEDLEY: Sure. We’re also looking to grow our work in working with immigrant communities. Some of that did start with us in the 2020 program. One group is PWA. They are another cooperative that we’ve helped to launch in the last year. And they’re a group of immigrant handymen that have come together to form a cooperative. And PACA has been one of several partners that have really been supporting them in being able to both develop the business acumen to do the internal work in supporting them in being able to build those internal structures, as you just suggested, that are so important to running a business. So we’ve been working with them as well over the last couple of years and have been excited to see their growth. And there’s a network, I think, of businesses and individuals and communities, particularly in the immigrant communities coming out of Central and South America that are here in Philadelphia, and we’re really excited to be figuring out over the course of the next year how to get better engagement with them.

VERNON OAKES: We got to run, I’m sorry. We got to get you back on. It’s great. Thank you so very, very much. And everybody out there, please have a great, great week and live cooperatively. Thanks, Jamila.

JAMILA MEDLEY: Thank you.