After the 2016 elections, staff at Luther Place Memorial Church in downtown Washington, DC launched a listening campaign. The goal was to listen to neighbors, with a focus on the most marginalized, in order to build community and learn what projects we might be able to take on together.

At listening sessions with immigrant neighbors, we listened to stories about the totality of their lives — dreams for their families, their workplaces, and their community. People had begun to experience wage theft and profound abuse. They dreamed about being in control of their hours, wages, and conditions of their work.

Our first cooperative, Dulce Hogar Cleaning Cooperative, was formed as a response. We decided to directly invest in working mothers in the community by helping them launch their own worker-owned business. Dulce Hogar has been operational for three years and is in the process of expanding across the DC area.

Inspired by this victory and committed to a broad vision of worker ownership, Beloved Community Incubator launched in 2018 as a separate non-profit focused on incubating and supporting cooperatives. We developed modest plans for growth however 2019 had other plans for us. Many of the worker-owners in BCI Member Cooperatives were deeply and negatively impacted by the initial COVID-19 economic shutdowns and stay at home orders. Undocumented workers and people married to undocumented immigrants (even those with citizen children), and workers in the informal cash economy such as street vending (a.k.a. “Excluded Workers”) were left out of federal stimulus funds. Citizen worker-owners were denied employment insurance and pandemic unemployment assistance because many were not classified as employees. We leaned in to the challenge of COVID-19 and grew to supporting over 15 coops and solidarity economy organizations through the BCI Network. Our mutual aid partnerships connected us even more deeply to groups of “Excluded Workers.”

Now there is an even greater need for workers to form cooperative structures and a solidarity economy. Economic downturns such as the one we are likely to experience for quite some time are always accompanied by an upsurge in cooperative formations and solidarity economy organizing. Our mission to help create access to ownership of economically and socially transformational businesses for lo