While Seed Commons today focuses primarily on our growing network of US-based peer loan funds, our story actually begins in Argentina, where in 2001 a decade of neoliberal reform had triggered a massive economic collapse.

With the country’s financial system in tatters, the real economy that communities depended on to survive had come to a screeching halt—the factories were still there and the work still needed to be done, but the flows of debt and corporate profits that usually called the shots had simply evaporated, seeming overnight. So thousands of workers at hundreds of companies did something that was either incredibly radical or just plain common sense—they took control of their workplaces and got back to work.

This massive and unprecedented wave of occupations, with workers and communities coming together to reboot the economy from below, inspired people around the world, especially with the release of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s film The Take in 2004. One of those people was Brendan Martin, a young fintech startup co-founder, looking for an opportunity to move beyond what Wall St. had to offer the world. In conversation with Avi Lewis at a screening of the documentary, the two zeroed in on the clear challenge facing the workers in Argentina’s occupied factories in Argentina—cut off from the traditional financial system, they did not have the access to the capital needed to run and grow the businesses—and realized they could do something about this.

Workers celebrating in front of a recovered factory in Argentina

That’s how Brendan wound up moving to Argentina to start The Working World, helping the recovered factories with a new model for finance. Rather than treating these cooperative businesses as opportunities to extract profits, The Working World understood that these workers needed a financial partner that was as invested in their movement to build real alternatives to the economic status quo as they were. This is where non-extractive finance was born—a lending and investment model that turned the relationship between people and capital on its head, never returning more profit to the lender than had been generated by and shared with the workers. Meeting these workers where they were at—which included in many cases even lacking clear legal title to the core assets of the business they were occupying and operating—meant fundamentally rethinking risk. Thanks to The Working World and its local partner La Base, the workers got the capital they needed to make their cooperative work, without the demands for collateral or personal guarantees that would have been made by traditional lenders.

And this model worked. Millions of dollars were invested in Argentina’s democratic workplaces, with 98% of every dollar repaid in full—outperforming traditional business lending by a wide margin. Inspired by the success in Argentina, in 2008 The Working World opened a new office in León, Nicaragua, to continue moving capital to the cooperative economy in Latin America.

Meanwhile, back in the United States itself, capitalism was falling apart.

A real estate boom fueled by unsustainable and even fraudulent lending had turned out to be a massive bubble, and the deregulated financial system that enabled it had collapsed like a house of cards. Communities and workers were coming together to weather the crisis—blocking evictions, reclaiming empty homes, and in Chicago, even taking a page from their Argentinian counterparts and occupying a factory—Republic Windows and Doors—when its owners tried to close it with no warning. They won a temporary reprieve and a new owner’s promises of great green jobs, but by 2011, those promises had failed to materialize and the factory was slated to be shuttered again. The workers occupied the factory again in early 2012, with a clear demand: this time, they wanted to buy the factory and run it themselves.

They weren’t the only ones occupying things that winter. The generation that had seen capitalism nearly collapse in 2008, and witnessed a subsequent bailout that had made banks and insurance companies whole while largely ignoring the pain of ordinary people weathering the same crisis, had flooded into public space and the public imagination, occupying Wall Street and beyond. As street-level assemblies forged an insurgent new consensus around debt, inequality, and the economy, interest in worker cooperatives—like the ones the Chicago workers wanted to start—was exploding. Thanks to SNCC veteran Dorothy Zellner and the Sparkplug Foundation, a $10K grant to The Working World allowed it to start piloting nonextractive finance in the US to meet this demand, and an urgent appeal for investment and support made it possible to raise the capital needed to help the workers in Chicago buy what they needed from their workplace to restart production as a democratically run, worker-owned business—New Era Cooperative Windows.

Something was happening—and it wasn’t just Chicago. 

Long-time movement organizers across the US South, drawing on a rich and often hidden history of Black cooperative development and helped by the legendary Highland Center, were building a network—the Southern Grassroots Economies Project—to advance a transformation towards a radically racially inclusive economy. This work crystallized in the vision for the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, designed to move capital and economic control back into the hands of Black communities across the South. 

Climate organizers—from the coal mines of Appalachia to the oil refineries of the Bay Area—were demanding divestment from fossil fuels—but were increasingly aware that without a movement to build a new economy, those funds would never be reinvested in businesses that could sustain communities instead of destroying them. The Climate Justice Alliance, connecting the dots between the extractive fossil fuel economy and the extraction of community wealth baked into the financial system’s status quo, began to work with its member organization to dream about what it would mean to reinvest in our power, and what kind of financial infrastructure would be needed to make these movement demands for a new economy practically viable.     

And in Baltimore, Kate Khatib was finding that everyone wanted to start a worker cooperative. 

Kate was a co-founding worker owner of Red Emma’s, a radical bookstore and coffeehouse, which had gotten its start as an undercapitalized and partially volunteer project in 2004. At that time, worker cooperatives were something weird and exotic for most people in Baltimore, something that generally happened somewhere far away, like Argentina. But nearly a decade of running a highly-visible democratic workplace, together with the rapidly expanding economic horizons of the popular imagination in the wake of the financial crisis, had made them start to seem like common sense, especially for people who wanted to address the long-term racial inequality in Baltimore’s economy. But doing something about this was going to take capital—and none of the city’s status quo economic institutions were at all ready to invest in building a local cooperative economy.

Seed Commons co-director Kate Khatib hosting an author event with historian David Roediger inside Red Emma's.

When Red Emma’s embarked on a major expansion in 2013, Kate had connected with The Working World, which wound up helping finance a new in-house coffee roaster. But now other local worker cooperative startups and conversions were turning to Kate, looking for ways to raise the investments they needed—including local ice cream company Taharka Brothers—a youth employment and empowerment project that wanted to turn over ownership of the business to its young employees. The Working World knew that its model for nonextractive finance and rethinking risk only worked because of deep and authentic partnerships with the cooperatives it funded—and was hesitant to expand its loan portfolio in too many places across the country, beyond its capacity to build and maintain those relationships. Building on a recently established local roundtable of cooperative businesses, Kate and Brendan realized they had the solution to each other’s problems—by growing the capacity of Baltimore’s cooperative ecosystem to manage a nonextractive loan portfolio, The Working World could channel investment into the city’s worker-owned businesses more effectively, based on the bonds of trust forged at the local level.

This is how Seed Commons began to be built, with Baltimore as the prototype for a peer loan fund that could operate alongside The Working World as part of a larger network, designed with the participation of movement organizations like the Southern Reparations Loan Fund and the Climate Justice Alliance.

In 2015, this network met in person for the first time, convening for a training on nonextractive lending that would lay the foundations for a “financial cooperative,” capable of aggregating capital at a national scale but then deploying it locally through its member organizations on the ground. The Working World, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, and the Los Angeles Co-op Lab served as the first full members of this new cooperative, with five additional local loan funds in formation serving as apprentice members. In 2018, after helping scale and support this new network of peer member funds, Kate Khatib would be officially named co-director of Seed Commons alongside Brendan Martin.

Ed Whitfield leads a training at the first network training and convening for Seed Commons.

In 2018, the board of The Working World, convinced of the power of this approach combining at-scale non-extractive finance with a network that fosters local community capacity to wield cooperative economic power, committed to a transition plan that would see the network of loan funds—already cooperatively managing their collective work—step into the formal role of governance of the overarching financial infrastructure. To that end, in 2022 the local New York lending of The Working World was spun off into a new organization, TWW-NYC, which is now a member of the larger Seed Commons cooperative. International affiliates in Argentina and Nicaragua continue the support for cooperative businesses in Latin America, in collaboration with Seed Commons.

As of 2024, Seed Commons is a network comprising twenty-three actively lending local funds, with seventeen organizations in an apprentice period and working towards loan-making readiness. We have made $75 million in non-extractive investments since 2011.