Cooperative Development and Technical Assistance

Your co-op is learning how to function as a democracy. It’s harder than most of us imagined.

Taking the path less followed — you’re building or have built a worker-owned business. But most groups need support on implementing coop principles, including how a group of people shares power without burning out, splitting, or quietly sliding back into hierarchy.

Maybe your meetings run long and decide little. The same few voices carry every conversation. Conflict stalls everything, so you avoid it — until it erupts. Decisions get made, forgotten, or unmade. You're a democracy on paper, but it doesn't always feel like one in the room.

None of that means your co-op is broken. It means you're doing something most of us were never taught to do. Sharing power is a learned skill that can be built.

What we build together

• Governance that holds — decision-making models, domain mapping, bylaws and operating-agreement stewardship, clear working agreements.

• Facilitation skills — how to run meetings that move, surface every voice, and work through conflict instead of around it.

• A development roadmap — I locate your co-op on a proven map (group-development stages × the Four Corner Posts: Power, Information, People, Money), so growth is sequenced, not guessed.

• The human skills underneath — communication, principled disagreement, and shared decision-making — drawing on Nonviolent Communication, sociocracy, and proven cooperative-development frameworks.

Grounded in the work, not just the theory
I co-founded the Cooperative Agriculture Network (CAN), a worker co-op in Northern California's Emerald Triangle, where I'm a worker-owner doing cooperative and community development. So I don't develop co-ops from the outside — I build them from the inside, with others, and bring that lived practice to the co-ops I support.

Who this is for
Forming co-ops finding their footing, and established co-ops strengthening their governance to move through the phases of Forming, Storming, Norming and into Performing— functioning as the democracy they set out to be.

Let's talk
Grab a spot on my calendar and let’s have a conversation about where your co-op is and what would help it move forward.