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Seed Commons

@seedcommons

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A Community Wealth Cooperative. Financing co-ops via a democratic network of local loan funds.

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Early in our history, we realized that we couldn’t scale our model of nonextractive finance if we were making all decisions about lending out of a central office somewhere far away from the communities we wanted to work with. A traditional lender can do this—they use a checklist of things like credit scores and bank account balances to assess how worthy of credit a borrower. Not only are these measures abstract, they are also fundamentally flawed: they can exclude too many people who haven’t been born into the kind of economic and racial privilege that make perfect credit scores and significant personal assets more likely.

Our model for finance works at the speed of trust instead. Seed Commons provides cooperative businesses with the financial support they need, but Seed Commons is itself a cooperative—we are governed by our member local loan funds.

Video from our 2024 annual all network gathering: @christopher_jarvis_ by @seedcommons

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2 years ago

How can non-extractive investment help power movements organizing for housing justice and community ownership?

Our latest case study looks at how and why Seed Commons’ member Right To The City @ourcityrttc started taking finance into their own hands, with deep dives into how @inquilinxsunidxs and Sky Without Limits established cooperative ownership of the buildings they won a right to purchase in a historic tenant victory in Minneapolis, and how @chainbreakersf is using community land trusts to interrupt development as displacement in Santa Fe.

Read it now at the link in our bio. by @seedcommons

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4 days ago

What a portfolio review can look like at Seed Commons…

Every year, we bring our entire cooperative together for our “all network gathering.” It’s a chance for our backbone staff to connect with all of the local members doing the work of non-extractive lending in their communities, and for these members to connect with each other. We make sure to meet each time in a different city, giving us the chance to spend time within the local ecosystem of cooperative and community ownership we have helped finance. This summer, for instance, we gathered in Oakland, getting the chance to visit new cooperative projects like @reemscalifornia Jack London Square, which opened under worker ownership a few weeks before we touched down, and to learn from veterans of the cooperative sector like @cheeseboardcoll, which has been operating democratically as a co-operative business for over 55 years….

But it’s not all eating delicious food from amazing worker-owned restaurants, including our friends at @understoryoakland. One of the key items on the business agenda for this gathering is a full portfolio review, where we help the member organizations of the Seed Commons cooperative understand where we have collectively deployed non-extractive capital, and how those investments in cooperative and community-owned businesses are performing. While the growth in the depth and breadth of our lending together has been breathtaking to witness, it always runs the risk of just becoming an hour of looking at a spreadsheet together.…

So this year, we flipped the script. Instead of our backbone team preparing one big report for our members, we asked our members to step up, and share the state of their own local piece of the portfolio with their peers….

This worked far better than we dared imagine. Finance and financial reporting is often treated as something cold and impersonal, the last place you’d expect to find a powerful opportunity to inspire and mobilize. But at our all network gathering, we saw the annual portfolio review turn into something joyous, a celebration of collective power and mutual support. Member after member took the stage to talk about their work, and whether they had just by @seedcommons

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9 days ago

Still Standing On Cooperative Business 🫡

A few weeks ago @seedcommons came to Richmond CA and brought members from across the country to learn from the diverse body of work we're doing to expand economic democracy and support small businesses in our city.

Princess Robinson, executive director of @richmond_land talks about their work building community power around the community land trust model, taking land off the speculative market and putting it into the hands of the people to enable permanently affordable housing.

Ms. Tamara, owner of @multiculturalbookstore hosted a bus load of cooperative enthusiast from Seed Commons and spoke about the magic found in books and lifelong learning. She also revealed her desire to convert the bookstore into a workers cooperative where she received a wave of praise and encouragement from the attendees.

Cooperation Richmond is proud to be standing on cooperative business with such great giants in the work and pillars in the community, looking forward to connecting more deeply with those who came with Seed Commons to strengthen our coop network.

Stay tuned!

#SeedCommons #RichmondLAND #MulticulturalBookStore #COOPRICH taken in Richmond, California by @seedcommons

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2 months ago

The Story Behind The Glory:

Reem's ~ Jack London 🌉 @reemscalifornia

Shout-out the entire Coop mega team, @uptimacoop × @seedcommons × Cooperation Richmond, we all worked together to support Reem's in becoming a worker owned coop!

We went to see co-owner Rebeca and she says things are delicious 😋, meaning going very well for the cooperative, and that this lemonade is one of their best sellers.

Lemonade is a perfect example of taking something super sour and turning it into something sweet, mouth quenching, and delightful, with the right amount of ingredients and a lil bit of love, anything is transformable.

Reem's Cafe is a growing model for how you can come from inspiration to innovation!

If you haven't already, stop by Reem's and let them know @cooprichmond sent you and get a bite of what cooperative works tastes like in real life.

#CoopRich #SeedCommons #Uptima #Cooperation #Oakland taken in Jack London Square by @seedcommons

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2 months ago

@reem.assil, founder of @reemscalifornia, a Bay Area food group with an emphasis on hospitality and community serving up Arab street food, knew that simply following the traditional trajectory for growth in the food service sector wasn’t going to help build the world she wants to see. As she told Food and Wine last year, “Some people have to give up [their] privilege for workers to own more, because if we’re gonna keep people in this industry, the people who are most hurt by it have to have ownership in it. They’re not going to stay if they don’t have a stake in what’s to come, so we need to spread the ownership.”

So Reem started figuring out how to do things differently, launching a 15-month apprenticeship program to get her core employees ready to take on a role as owners. This month, with the help of a non-extractive loan from Seed Commons member @cooprichmond in partnership with incoming Seed Commons member @uptimacoop, Reem’s has opened its first worker-owned location, a new cooperative cafe in Oakland’s Jack London Square. We’re so excited for these worker-owners, and the future of Reem’s—and can’t wait to gather with our entire national financial cooperative in Oakland in a few weeks, where we’ll be getting a chance to devour some man’oushe. by @seedcommons

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3 months ago

Congratulations to Seed Commons' member @bred.baltimore! The City of Baltimore has budgeted $250K for 2027 to partner with BRED on scaling up their already formidable work as an engine of worker cooperative conversions—which means more opportunities for more non-extractive investment to preserve more legacy businesses and build more wealth for more workers.

📸: Vinny Green, a worker-owner of @taharkabros , which BRED and Seed Commons helped to convert to worker ownership, speaking in the Council Chambers after the budget passed alongside City Council President @zekecohen1 by @seedcommons

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4 months ago

Earlier this month, we gathered representatives from the full members of our national financial cooperative in the Hudson Valley for our annual convening, hosted by the lovely folks at @thewatershedcenter.

Every time we convene like this, we make sure to do it in a place that one of our member organizations calls home, so that we are able to combine the important discussions we have together about the governance of our national cooperative with on-the-ground visits to all see the projects we have supported with non-extractive investment firsthand. This time, our member @coop_hudsonvalley took us on a tour of the inspiring work they've been doing to advance an inclusive, worker-owned future for agriculture and a locally-rooted regenerative economy.

📸 1: Our backbone team and some of our national cooperative members, enjoying a glorious day for a group photo.

📸 2: Learning about @rocksteadyfarm, a queer and trans-led worker co-op that's just one part of Co-op Hudson Valley's larger portfolio of innovative worker-owned agriculture projects.

📸 3: Visiting @seedlings.coop, a maker-owned market, refillery, and education space launched in 2025 with the help of a non-extractive loan from Seed Commons through Co-op Hudson Valley.

📸 4: Stopping by @foundandfixed_hv, a worker cooperative furniture restoration and upcycling design studio, which scaled up to their current workshop and retail space with the help of our fund. by @seedcommons

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4 months ago

Join us for our Spring 2026 Impact Briefing!

📅 Date: Wednesday, May 27th 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT

📍 Location: Virtual (Via ZOOM)

👉 RSVP now at the link in our bio

Join Seed Commons co-directors Brendan Martin and Kate Khatib for an online impact briefing highlighting how our innovative model combining national scale with community capacity is driving unprecedented growth in the cooperative economy. We will share a behind-the-scenes look at our lending and membership development work and highlight on-the-ground stories from our local member organizations, who are using the non-extractive capital raised through Seed Commons to drive transformative economic change in their communities.

Our 2025 Impact Report underscored the remarkable growth in the amount of investment dollars we have deployed into the cooperative economy over the past half-decade, going from a total of $16 million to over $100 million. The foundation of this growth: the work we have done in partnership with our local members to build local capacity to originate and steward growing portfolios of investments, finding and creating the opportunities traditional transactional approaches miss entirely. In this briefing, Martin and Khatib will be joined by members of the Seed Commons team, as well as representatives from Seed Commons member organizations @poderemma, @bred.baltimore, and @coopcincy, who will share how the symbiotic relationship between cooperative capital and capacity has fueled the accelerating development of project pipelines in their three cities.

We’ll also hear from special guest Aifuwa Ehigiator, Investment Officer for the Program Related Investment (PRI) portfolio at The California Endowment, about their recent $5 million investment in Seed Commons, and why our approach matters to their mission. A Q&A will follow the presentation.

Please RSVP now to attend this briefing (Link in bio) TEXT: Spring 2026 Seed Commons Impact Briefing

Images of solar panels in a cooperative mobile home community, a commercial greenhouse, a worker renovating a vacant house, a landscaping co-op in front of their truck, and a vibrant cafe. by @seedcommons

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5 months ago

Introducing Six Fishes Acupuncture Worker-Owned Cooperative! We are so proud and thrilled to send the now worker-owners of Six Fishes Acupuncture @six_fishes_acupuncture : Nicole, Amanda, Ona, and Paul — all of the congratulations for buying the business this past May Day 2026!!!

They are now Philly’s newest worker cooperative *and* newest cooperative conversion. The founder of Six Fishes, Cara Frank @cara_o_frank , after many years at the helm, sold her beloved acupuncture clinic to the workers. (Three cheers for co-ops as succession strategies.) We wish Cara all the best in retirement. We hope she is a model for other Philly business-owners.

The workers have been building out their democratic governance, shared management, cooperative culture, and workplace democracy model for nearly a year. We look forward to seeing their vision in practice while maintaining the heart of the strong gorgeous Six Fishes practice which has been already built. Go check them out today!

And many many thanks to our partners at @seedcommons who made this conversion a possibility through their nonextractive financing to worker co-ops and their deep training/guidance and to @phlcommerce for supporting our ability to do the high touch technical assistance necessary to make this a reality. taken in Six Fishes Acupuncture, Chinese Herbs & Massage Cooperative by @seedcommons

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5 months ago

Big congrats to worker co-op sandwich shop @sea.soil.coop, which has just reopened in a lovely new expanded space at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn! This democratic workplace scaled up operations with the help of a non-extractive loan from Seed Commons member @theworkingworld, which is stewarding a growing portfolio of worker-owned restaurants across New York City.

As one Sea and Soil worker-owner put it during last year's national cooperative restaurant convening, running a sandwich shop and bakery democratically "is really exciting, and it’s scary, and it’s fun, and it’s giving us the opportunity of asking 'what do we want to be, who are we for?'" Part of that answer: Sea & Soil's innovative sliding scale pricing model, which allows them to balance financial sustainability with broader community access to some seriously delicious sandwiches. 🥪 🥪 🥪 by @seedcommons

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6 months ago

In just the past five years, Seed Commons has deployed $100 million in non-extractive capital to power the cooperative economy.

Our secret? We raise capital at national scale, while investing in the capacity of the member organizations of our financial cooperative. Our members, with their deep local connections to their communities, have then been able to build and grow the pipelines of projects advancing democratic ownership through which we have scaled our collective impact.

Learn more in our just-released 2025 Impact Report at the link in our bio. by @seedcommons

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7 months ago