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The plan

The Beanchain

The Beanchain is our plan to end poverty in America by changing the culture and the economy that keep producing it.

The three stages Stage one, in photos

We’re all in this together

A cooperative is democracy at work in the plainest sense. The people doing the work make the decisions about it and share in what it earns. It is not a new idea, an exotic one, or even a rare one. They are all over the world, which is why the research we point to is British and French and the largest working example is Spanish.

America has strikingly few, and working out why is part of the job here. So we are making them easier to start, building a network that lets them grow without anybody having to sell out, and asking other businesses to come in with us. Enough of them and the ordinary American idea of a job starts to move, and with it how we think about the economy and about each other. We want it to be normal to care about the people you work with. Nobody gets there alone, which is the entire point.

  1. 01 Running now

    Start the Beanchain

    Start a shop, and make it easy for the next one

    Run a real coffee shop, hand it to the people working in it, and write down every part of how so that nobody has to work it out alone twice. The tools we needed and could not buy got built along the way, and they are out in the world now: a way of running a workplace, a way of disagreeing, a way of running the back office, and a way of feeding somebody without making them ask.

    Easy is the whole objective. A conversion that only a founder with unusual patience can pull off proves nothing. This one has to be dull enough that an ordinary business owner looks at it and thinks yes, fine, I could do that.

    See our projects
    Written down, so the next one is easier.
  2. 02 Not built yet

    The Beanchain Network

    Scale without becoming a corporation

    Grow in Cells. A Cell is several drive-throughs and a couple of larger stores, run together as one cooperative by the people who work in them. The Cells sit around the Beanchain Network, a nonprofit that does what no Cell could afford alone: IT, legal, marketing, the whole back office. Each Cell keeps its own identity, its own rules and its own practices, and signs up only to a short list of commitments held in common.

    Cells do a job for the body and also live their own lives, which is roughly the arrangement. A franchise sends money from the shop to the middle forever in exchange for a brand. The Network takes on work for the Cells instead, so they can grow the way a big corporation does without becoming one, and the money and the power stay in the Cells. Scale is not the enemy. Ownership moving to the center is.

    Why Cells, not franchises
    The Network: Cells around a nonprofit that does the shared work. The money and the power stay in the Cells.A Cell: several drive-throughs and a couple of larger stores, run as one cooperative.
  3. 03 Not built yet

    The Cooperate Network

    Invite other businesses to build on the proof

    Open the shared services to businesses that are not Beanchain and never will be, and invite them to build on what the Cells prove. They move towards being cooperatives, companies owned by their employees through an ESOP, or other businesses centered on the people who work in them and the community around them. A corporation gets cheap legal, serious marketing and proper IT because it is enormous. A few thousand small businesses that treat their workers well can have the same advantages, without any of them being swallowed to get them.

    Stage two is what makes the invitation worth taking: an owner can look at the Cells and see the arrangement working before changing anything of their own. Members would commit to being owned by their workers or their community, or to getting there, and to reaching a living wage in a reasonable time. Their dues would pay for the shared services and help new cooperatives get started. The money and the power stay where they belong, in each business and the town around it, and nobody at the top collects the difference.

    What the network would ask of a business
    Other businesses on the same shared services, each moving towards worker or community ownership. Beanchain is one of them, not the head of it.

Stage one, so far

From a cart to a coffee shop

Stage one is the only one you can visit, so here it is. 17 photographs from the cart to the second birthday, in the order they were taken.

  1. A cart first

    Before there was a shop there was a cart, set up out front while the space behind it was still being built. The lettering on it says since 2021, which is when the company started.

    The Bean Chain coffee cart under a white pop-up canopy on the sidewalk outside the plaza, two people at the espresso machine, and ladders visible through the glass beside it.
    Out front, with the build-out going on behind the glass.
    Two people smiling behind the Bean Chain cart at an outdoor market, under a canopy, beside a brightly painted bear sculpture.
    At a market later that month.

  2. Building it

    On March 13 the unit was a shell of metal studs. The sign came in a box three days later and was on the building that afternoon. By May the green banquettes were in, and the library was a row of empty shelves waiting for books.

    The empty unit during the build-out: metal stud walls, a bare floor, ladders, and a worker in the middle distance.
    March 13, 2023.
    Somebody crouching beside an open cardboard box in the parking lot, giving a thumbs up next to the new sign: the smiling bean sitting in a coffee cup.
    The sign arrives, March 16.
    Two people standing arm in arm under the new Beanchain Coffee sign on the front of the building.
    Up by the afternoon.
    Somebody lying full length along the new green tufted banquette in the otherwise empty shop, grinning at the camera.
    Testing the banquettes, May 2023.
    The corner that became the library: empty black bookshelves, a brown leather chesterfield, an upholstered armchair and a small wooden table.
    The library, before the books.

  3. Open

    The doors opened in July 2023. By October the booths were busy with people working and the workspace had its first desks. A line from Jean-Luc Picard ran along the wall, and the shop took a table to an event that month, in costume.

    The Beanchain Coffee sign on the front of the building under a gold and blue evening sky.
    The sign at dusk, August 2023.
    The shop in use: people working on laptops in the green booths, the counter and register in the foreground, and the Picard quote on the far wall.
    The booths, October 2023.
    A barista in a tweed vest pouring steamed milk into a blue ceramic mug beside the espresso machine.
    Behind the counter, October 2023.
    A quotation painted on the white wall above the green banquette, reading: Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. Jean-Luc Picard. Two people talk at a table below it.
    Picard on the wall, September 2023.
    White desks with blue office chairs and small potted plants, in the first version of the workspace.
    The first workspace desks, September 2023.
    Two people in costume, one in a teapot hat and one in a red pointed hat and black cape, beside a Bean Chain table of coffee cups and sweets at an outdoor event.
    Out at an event, October 2023.

  4. The mural

    By January 2024 the mural was on the wall. The ribbon pattern behind the headings on this site is drawn from it, and the site’s greens were measured from it, along with the foliage wall and the chairs.

    The Beanchain mural: flowing green ribbons around the smiling bean in its cup and the word Beanchain, above the green banquette.
    The mural, January 2024.

  5. A book anyone can write in

    The Community Book is a public journal anyone can write or draw in, and it lives in the shop. This is volume one.

    The Beanchain Community Book, volume one, hand lettered on a kraft cover, lying under glass beside a copy of Democracy at Work by Richard Wolff and a chessboard.
    Volume one, November 2024.
    A barista holding up a latte with a leaf poured into the foam, smiling.
    The same month, behind the counter.

  6. Two years

    The shop turned two in June 2025 and threw a 1970s party for it. Chloe did flash tattoos, and local vendors set up for the day.

    The smiling bean on the mural wearing a blue birthday party hat.
    The bean, in a birthday hat.

Our commitments

Commitments to serve people, not profits

Putting the people inside a business ahead of a return to somebody outside it is easy at eight people who all know each other. It is the kind of promise that goes quietly missing at forty, and at two hundred. Both of these will be inconvenient later, and publishing them now, while they still cost nothing, is what makes them worth anything.

Structures serve the people inside them

Not a few at the top. Every structure on this page, including the two that do not exist yet, is supposed to be answerable to the people doing the work in it. A network that ends up extracting from its shops has failed, however well it is performing.

Growth is not automatically good

A system should grow when growing serves the people in it, and not otherwise. There may come a point where the right move is to hold steady, or to get smaller, for the sake of the workers and the neighborhood and the place it sits in. Most businesses cannot say that out loud because somebody is expecting a return. We can, so it is on a public page where it can be quoted back at us.

Progress so far

This is an experiment: we are not there yet

The shop runs, the tools are built and in other people's hands, and the handover to worker ownership is underway rather than done. We are not a cooperative yet: that word arrives with the first members voted in, and the Worker Direction page sets out exactly where we stand against each of the Cooperative Principles. Stages two and three are a plan and a commitment, not a thing you can visit. We would rather you heard all of that from us than found it out, and then we would rather get back to the work.

  1. The shop runs Done
  2. The tools are built, and in other people’s hands Done
  3. The handover to worker ownership Underway
  4. The first members voted in, which makes us a cooperative Not yet
The handover in numbers, October 2026
See our projects How this shop is run The problem, with numbers

What you can do today

Buy a meal through PIF Board and somebody collects it from a local business today, with nothing to prove. That one needs no plan at all.

Run your own business differently. Everything we have worked out is free to take, and none of it requires becoming a cooperative first.

Or come in, use the free workspace, and buy a coffee. The shop paying for itself is what keeps any of the rest of this possible.

Buy a Pay It Forward meal Get the free tools Email us