L.A. Co-op Lab

L.A. Co-op Lab is a collective that was established in 2015 to explore and invent ways to build L.A.'s capacity for worker ownership as a pathway toward a more equitable and democratic economy. 

 Our aim is to advance worker-ownership as one way to push back against inequality, gentrification, and the gig economy by helping people who are often excluded from good jobs to collectively create their own and meet community needs.

 We achieve this primarily through education, coaching, financing and network building. 

 We teach online classes and in-person workshops to provide groups with the tools they need to construct the building blocks of a worker cooperative: a business that is democratically owned and controlled by the people who work there. Co-ops are also teams: and for this reason most of our classes are best experienced as a team. 

 Many of the exercises in our classes are designed to prepare co-ops for the kind of questions that would help us, as lenders, better understand the workings of a co-op, its prospects for success and how capital might best be used in service of livelihood.

L.A. Co-op Lab is a founding member of Seed Commons, a financial cooperative that helps co-ops achieve sustainability with financing and other forms of support. We channel investment to communities that have historically been excluded from the benefits of the economy. We use non-extractive financing. This means the repayment of loans comes only from an increase in revenues or profits stemming from our investment. Repayment will not be extracted from prior existing business assets nor the personal assets of those who make up the enterprise. 

 We offer free office hours to emerging worker co-ops in Los Angeles as well as more in-depth coaching to groups that meet our criteria of radical inclusion. We work with start ups as well as existing businesses seeking to convert to a worker co-op structure. Teams can come to us at any stage of their co-op's development and we are always happy to welcome new faces into the L.A. co-op community.