The Guardian highlights how Seed Commons has helped Baltimore's WaterBottle cooperative grow:

With support from Seed Commons, workers’ earnings increased. “We raised our wage rates from $11 to $17 an hour before we converted to co-op to $18 to $48,” Rivas Brown says. Jazmin Hernandez, who has worked her way up from trashing out properties to being on the drywall and window-install crew, says: “The most rewarding part of the job is bettering my economic condition.” [...]

Not only are the co-op members making more per hour, they’re also benefiting from their hard work in another way: when a property is renovated, it becomes part of the rental real estate portfolio that workers have a stake in. They have first dibs on assuming the lease on the freshly redone rentals. While the co-op owns 25 properties today, the goal is to rehabilitate 200 Baltimore properties by 2026.

Read more here now (Rory Evans, "They went from rehab and jail to owning a real estate portfolio: ‘You own the hell out of this house!’" The Guardian, September 3, 2024)