Every year, we bring our entire cooperative together for our “all network gathering.” It’s a chance for our backbone staff to connect with all of the local members doing the work of non-extractive lending in their communities, and for these members to connect with each other. We make sure to meet each time in a different city, giving us the chance to spend time within the local ecosystem of cooperative and community ownership we have helped finance. This summer, for instance, we gathered in Oakland, getting the chance to visit new cooperative projects like Reem’s Jack London Square, which opened under worker ownership a few weeks before we touched down, and to learn from veterans of the cooperative sector like the Cheeseboard Collective, which has been operating democratically as a co-operative business for over 55 years.

But it’s not all eating delicious food from amazing worker-owned restaurants, including our friends at Understory Oakland. One of the key items on the business agenda for this gathering is a full portfolio review, where we help the member organizations of the Seed Commons cooperative understand where we have collectively deployed non-extractive capital, and how those investments in cooperative and community-owned businesses are performing. While the growth in the depth and breadth of our lending together has been breathtaking to witness, it always runs the risk of just becoming an hour of looking at a spreadsheet together.

So this year, we flipped the script. Instead of our backbone team preparing one big report for our members, we asked our members to step up, and share the state of their own local piece of the portfolio with their peers. 

This worked far better than we dared imagine. Finance and financial reporting is often treated as something cold and impersonal, the last place you’d expect to find a powerful opportunity to inspire and mobilize. But at our all network gathering, we saw the annual portfolio review turn into something joyous, a celebration of collective power and mutual support. Member after member took the stage to talk about their work, and whether they had just finished making their first or second small loan as a part of Seed Commons, or whether they were one of the members who have deployed millions or even tens of millions of non-extractive investment into their community, the response was the same—cheers and applause from the room, an outpouring of respect, love, and recognition, every time.

We saw in this really powerful session something beautiful emerging. It was a glimpse of a world where finance isn’t a zero-sum race to the bottom, but a capacity that is stewarded collectively in the service of justice and liberation. That’s a lot more exciting than looking at a spreadsheet.