Bustling into Clover in Harvard Sq. in the early evening of November 3rd and scanning the faces there, you probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Maybe, if you’d been looking for it, you would have noticed a rather expansive gaggle of people on the central downstairs table. You might have even bothered to ponder why the gaggle was  gathered so tightly despite the surrounding spare seats - but you probably wouldn’t have.
The members of the Boston Cooperative Investment Club do not immediately strike one as strange. Yet, if you talk to them, you realise that what they’re doing is quite extraordinary. The twenty or so people gathered round the table were all there as members, officers or interested parties of the BCIC, a club that raises money to invest in cooperatives and, as they say on their website, ‘organizations and associations that support cooperatives’.
And, in this small yet significant way, the Boston Cooperative Investment Club challenge the current structure of the economy, existing ‘to build capacity for a cooperative movement as a tool of transition to a democratic, just, and sustainable economy.’ Officially beginning in the spring of 2015, the BCIC has been nearly a year in the making, brewing in the minds and consciences of its members.
The club has grown over that time by word of mouth, with most of the members joining from local Boston cooperative networks. Many of the members have experience in housing or worker-owned cooperatives, and as such know first-hand about the struggle for capital in cooperatives that require investment. Members pay an annual fee of $20, and the Club raises investment funds through individual member donations of between $50-$200 on a rolling monthly basis. By pooling money over extended time periods, the club relieves the individual burden of raising minimum investment amounts.
BCIC made its first investment in June, when members voted unanimously to invest in the bilingual, multicultural, worker-owned waste hauling and recycling company CERO. “We asked ourselves what our values were,” said club facilitator Benny Wheat, “and everybody wanted to invest in a business that was rooted in community and shared our vision for a more just economy. CERO fit our values perfectly.”
The most recent meeting saw members unanimously vote to invest in the Margaret Moseley housing cooperative. Hoping to secure funds to invest in another property for their cooperative housing project, Margaret Moseley wanted to focus on the child friendly aspect of housing. But given the five to ten year investment scheme, the dialogue of the meeting focused on the longevity and sustainability of the group. In some ways still finding its feet, the group needs strong commitment and continued interest from its members over the next few years to ensure it can remain a source of long-term financial investment.
From the enthusiasm of those gathered at the meeting, it doesn’t seem that commitment is going to be an issue. Each member believed in the work they were doing with the BCIC. Mike is the Chief Visionary Officer of the Boston based cooperative Great Sky Solar, and it was his first time at the Club. For him the project, and his work with GSS, was less about the financial incentive of investing and more about trying –by any means necessary- to put a dent in the side of a capitalist system that is exploitative and systemically unjust. The members weren’t here to make a quick buck, but to disrupt the paradigm of privately funded and owned Silicon Valley start-ups.
The agenda then turned to deciding which cooperatives to begin exploring next. In between meetings, members of the Club research cooperatives to pitch to the group. The trouble was finding co-ops that are seeking investment. Sometimes, smaller co-ops are flying largely under the radar. In our own research for the Co-Design Studio at MIT, Sasha and I found a number of online resources that attempt to catalogue cooperatives. However, like any directory project, these are frequently incomplete or out of date, with stubs, dead-ends, definition conflations, and old domain names being a regular occurrence. There are some promising initiatives to solve this problem and gather better quality, more regularly updated information about the cooperative movement, such as the data commons cooperative. However, for now, we’ve developed a shared spreadsheet with  details of Boston area cooperatives. We shared our spreadsheet with BCIC, hoping to collaborate and develop more up-to-date information about the local cooperative community.
Thinking about what resources are available to help BCIC meet their goal of growing to make larger and more frequent investments, Sasha wondered about the possibility of a virtual investment system. With an easy interface, an online investment system would utilise growing trends in ‘small dollar democracy’ and bypass thresholds of engagement by allowing users to commit small amounts of money (and time) online. The question is whether this would erode the feeling of community and cooperation that binds the Club together. How would discussion and voting take place online? Perhaps through free software decision-making systems developed and maintained by cooperatives, such as Loom.io. How could the values of the group be replicated in the larger online sphere? The BCIC seemed to privilege face-to-face contact over public forums, including with the cooperatives seeking investment. An online platform would have to utilise and encourage the core values of the Club.
Becky Romatoski from BCIC also pointed out that the group have to follow the legal framework for investment clubs because they cannot turn into a mutual fund or other sort of investment vehicle. This is one of the reasons BCIC needs to meet and discuss their policies and partnerships. Whilst there are restrictions on investments across state borders, the other emphasis on a joint member locality arose from the members drive to participate and give back to their local community. The question then becomes how cooperatives navigate trade-offs between their core values, definitions of efficiency and the legal context they work within.
The Platform Cooperativism conference at the New School next week hopes to answer some of these questions regarding the legal and efficient mapping of cooperative values to the online sphere. With Civic’s own J. Nathan Matias as a participant, the event looks set to be a live-blogging extravaganza...
Wherever the BCIC head in the future, it’s fantastic to see the way cooperative economic alternatives are rising from the grassroots. The facilitation of dialogue and community support between cooperatives that the Club provides is in itself a worthy cause, and that’s without mentioning the financial reassurance they offer cooperative initiatives. They’re welcoming and friendly; feel free to find them online and keep an eye out for their monthly meetings. You might even be lucky enough to take part in their celebratory passing of the high-five…
cooperative; cooperativism; investment; Boston; Cambridge; Boston Cooperative Investment Clublocal communities