The plan
The Beanchain
We want to end poverty in America by changing the culture and the economy that keep producing it.
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.
- 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.
What we built - 02 Not built yet
The Beanchain Network
Scale without becoming a corporation
More Beanchains, each owned by the people working in it, sharing what one shop cannot afford alone through a nonprofit: IT, legal, marketing, the whole back office. Each shop keeps its own identity, its own rules and its own practices, and signs up only to a short list of commitments held in common.
A franchise sends money from the shop to the middle forever in exchange for a brand. This sends work to the middle so the shop can stay small, stay local and keep what it earns. Scale is not the enemy. Ownership moving to the centre is.
- 03 Not built yet
The Cooperate Network
A coalition of worker cooperatives
Open those shared services to businesses that are not Beanchain and never will be. 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.
Cellular rather than pyramidal. Cells do a job for the body and also live their own lives, which is roughly the arrangement: local autonomy, networked strength, nobody at the top collecting the difference.
Written down early on purpose
Two commitments that will be inconvenient later
Both of these are easy to hold at eight people who all know each other. They are the kind of thing that goes quietly missing at forty, and at two hundred. Publishing them now costs nothing, which is exactly why now is when to do it.
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 neighbourhood 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.
Where this actually is
Stage one, and honest about it
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, 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.
Three stages is a long time to wait to be useful
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.