Yes! Magazine highlights Seed Commons' work powering worker cooperative conversions with non-extractive financing:

Common Ground’s workers fought for a vision of prosperity at odds with the popular definition of success, in which entrepreneurs accumulate vast fortunes through others’ labor. At co-ops, workers decide how to run the business and keep the profits, which is shown to lead to better pay and working conditions, and increased productivity over traditional businesses. But like most working people, baristas typically lack access to the capital needed to buy a business or the resources and training required to manage it.

In response, a growing number of cities are recognizing the benefits of worker cooperatives by investing millions of dollars in their growth. Baltimore, though, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing large corporations, but has yet to invest in supporting worker cooperatives through financing or training.

Instead, Common Ground’s workers found the embrace of Baltimore’s thriving cooperative ecosystem, which had grown significantly in recent years and was prepared to provide the resources the transition would require. For the past decade, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a local cooperative incubator, along with its national partner Seed Commons, has provided 100 cooperatives with technical assistance. Seed Commons has also loaned out more than $53 million dollars through its revolving loan fund, for which the incubator does not require personal collateral and asks for repayment solely from business profits.

Read the article now. (Jaisal Noor, Yes! Magazine, Dec. 7, 2023)