The Journal of Public and International Affairs highlights Seed Commons co-Executive Director Kate Khatib's remarks on the closing plenary of the 2024 Worker Cooperative Conference:

WWC2024’s closing plenary featured DAWI Executive Directors Vanessa Bransburg and Julian McKinley in conversation with University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Stacey Sutton and Kate Khatib, a co-founder of Seed Commons, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, and Red Emma’s, a cooperative café and bookstore. Reflecting on the enormous growth of the worker cooperative movement in the last twenty years, Khatib remarked, “Workers now feel that we can ask for what we need. I never thought that our coop movement would have the kinds of resources we have now. They’re a drop in the bucket in the American economy but they’re helping us make real change.” Asked about her vision for the next decade of the movement, Khatib remarked that she hopes that the cooperative economy in the United States reaches a value of $100 Billion USD or about 0.5% of GDP. But, she asked, “How do we scale in ways that are true to what we want to do?” This goal is not just about growth for its own sake, Khatib emphasized: “It’s about changing the world. It’s about changing the way that we relate to work and to money.”

Read the article, "Building Equitable Economies at the 2024 Worker Cooperatives Conference," now (Ariel Munczek Edelman, The Journal of Public and International Affairs, November 5, 2024)