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_
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)
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.
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. 🥪 🥪 🥪
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.
What would it look like if the communities that would benefit the most from a green transition were at the table when that future was being designed?
Seed Commons member @poderemma in Asheville, NC is spearheading an ambitious, community-led research and development program for a green transition in affordable housing, one mobile home at a time.
Learn more at seedcommons.org via the link in our bio.
Our latest case study looks at how Seed Commons member @belovedcommunityincubator is bringing a community organizing mindset to the task of building a stronger cooperative ecosystem in Washington, DC. BCI just passed $3 million in non-extractive loans deployed, and shows no signs of slowing down.
Read the full story, featuring @dulcehogarcoop , @51stnews , @swamprosecoop , @sankofadc , @communitypurchasingalliance and more on seedcommons.org via the link in our bio.
In 2018, Oakland's worker-owned @hastamuertecoffee narrowly avoided being displaced from their neighborhood when they rallied the community to help @oakclt save their building when it went up for sale. This year, Seed Commons' member @repaired.nations helped Hasta Muerte continue to thrive, with a non-extractive loan designed to help the worker cooperative invest in new equipment and expanded marketing.
We're thrilled to have been able to make a non-extractive investment in the launch of the @yeleenbeauty makerspace in Washington, DC: "a shared production hub designed for women and founders of color to create, manufacture, and grow their beauty brands" which just opened its doors this month. Yeleen's members can now access the equipment, technical expertise, and shared resources they need to scale their businesses, creating more opportunities and a stronger network for community-based manufacturing.
What kind of software do you need to manage, at scale, a portfolio of over $115 million in deployed investments, made across a cooperative of 39 local member organizations? What if those investments are all non-extractive, demanding a different approach to the math underlying repayment schedules as well as a fundamentally different process for assessing risk? And if you need to do all this in a way which supports transparent, member-led governance while building local, distributed capacity for loan stewardship?
At Seed Commons, our goal is to distribute economic power to workers and communities, and so we needed a software system that mirrors that kind of democratic financial logic in code. There’s no off the shelf software project we could have used for this, because there has never been something that works the way Seed Commons does. So we built it.
Learn more about the open-source Madeline system that powers our national financial cooperative at the link in our bio.
We're hiring!
Looking for a career opportunity building non-extractive financial infrastructure that shifts power to workers and communities?
We have an immediate opening for a Bookkeeper/Staff Accountant — this is a fully remote position.
Learn more and apply at the link in our bio.
ENG: USFWC Members - voting is open for your Board of Directors! We're highlighting different candidates and their organizations each week until voting closes on September 8th. Learn more about Seed Commons at seedcommmons.org
Gather your coworkers and head to usworker.coop/elections to read all the candidate statements and cast your vote!
ESP: Membresía de la USFWC - ¡la votación está abierta para tu Mesa Directiva! Estamos destacando candidates diferentes y sus organizaciones cada semana hasta que la votación se cierre el 8 de septiembre. Aprende más sobre Seed Commons en seedcommons.org
¡Reúnete con tus compañeres de trabajo y visita usworker.coop/elecciones para aprender más sobre todes les candidates y emitir tu voto!
