u/MamaMoonstruck

I've been thinking about where and how to share this story for a bit now, and I decided sharing this here might help others who are thinking about starting a co-op to learn from our mistakes:

About a decade ago I was working at a nonprofit and became connected to a community who was lacking basic resources and amenities in the neighborhood. At the time I was really interested in co-ops and I started talking with community members about the idea of starting a co-op to address one of the needs in the area. People were interested, I was young and dedicated myself, I quit my job & organized my life around it. Ten years later the co-op is legally incorporated, but completely falling apart in every way you can imagine. Heres what I think went wrong:

1. Fear of change/Lack of flexibility. About 3 years into working together, a nonprofit in the area essentially addressed the issue we were organizing a co-op to address. They likely addressed it due to the attention we brought to it but what's relevant is that we failed to pivot in that moment. The group discussed it and then voted, and essentially voted to still pursue the initial idea, despite it now being much less needed in the community. I felt we should do something different, but I didn't push hard enough. Looking back I should have been a better leader in that moment, & try harder to motivate the group to pivot. Instead the fear of change, and the fear of "all that work being for nothing," we stayed on a course that ultimately made us no longer relevant to the broader community.

2. Lack of leadership development, lack of understanding, training and preparation for the governance side of running a co-op. An aspect I think we lacked was effective leadership development. We were working with a lawyer on our bylaws, but the process was convoluted by a few members (see #4), and ultimately I don't feel we had a proper understanding of the roles that would be required of a fully functional co-op. I see this as a failure of my lack of experience and limited mentorship. If I could go back I would spend a lot more time on collectively learning about the various roles, having folks express what they'd be interested in, and then working on leadership development/ recruitment for those roles.

3. I was carrying too much of the load, and then my life changed. I prioritized the co-op above everything else and had taken on a lot of the work. Over the years my life and work responsibilities outside of the co-op increased, I became a full time caretaker working a full time job in addition to the co-op. I tried to keep up with everything I was doing but I was physically burning out. I asked for help from the group, and tried to recruit additional support from outside the group. A few people started to get involved but were pushed away by other members (see #4). At the same time no one within the group was willing to take on any of the work I had been doing. Overall the co-op was dependent on my personal self-sacrifice and it wasn't sustainable when I physically couldn't carry everything I had been carrying. When my personal capacity changed, no one was willing to fill in the gaps. Its a failure of my own lack of boundaries earlier on, and again relates to our insufficient leadership development.

4. "Big personalities"/self-interest/ Narcissism. I know this word gets thrown around a lot but after years of working with them, I genuinely believe 2 members of the group have narcissistic tendencies. They each steamrolled conversations, manipulated other members and the overall process, engaged in constant power plays and treated the broader community with disrespect. Their behavior resulted in everything from rejecting potential partners and support, sabbotaging funding opportunities, and pushing away new members. We went through counseling multiple times, created and revisited community guidelines, tried to establish processes for conflict resolution, and at every step one or the other would take the conversation in a completely different direction, attacking others in the group, and avoiding addressing the issues affecting the group on a regular basis. My leadership was not strong enough to contend with these forces and the pattern took me too long to realize. My biggest regret is having too much patience for people who in hindsight had no regard for the people around them.

5. Committees isolated from each other. For years we worked in committees working on different components of the work, committees who had very different viewpoints and just kind of agreed to disagree in whole group conversations. One committee focused on doing mutual aid work in the community and valued community benefit, and another worked on business planning, and apparently carried a complete lack of respect for those doing the mutual aid work. Over time these two groups grew to strongly dislike each other. The group as a whole was also isolated from potential mentors and other groups we could learn from, due to the way new people were treated by the big personalities of our group.

Fast forward to today. One of the big personalities is in a major leadership position. Without going into details, confronting each problem only shifts it into a new problem. Almost half the members have resigned, for most of the folks who are left it feels like we are just trying to land a crashing plane. It's been a devestating couple of years. I have so much respect for functioning co-ops and wish I could go back in time knowing what I know now.

Things are still up in the air & I'm still processing, but I hope that sharing these reflections helps someone in some way.