When people think about Appalachia, they might not immediately think about people like Mavery Davis. 

West Virginia is a state that’s nearly 93% white. And it’s the white working class—especially in the declining coal mining industry—that figures prominently in discussions of the state’s economic challenges. 

But Mavery lives in the capital city of Charleston—which, with more Black residents than anywhere else in the state, doesn’t exactly look like the holler. Mavery, who moved to the area to attend college in 2005, proudly describes it as “Urbalachia,” a place for people who want to be in community with each other, and where all sort of creative entrepreneurship in food systems and food service—through the informal economy, urban farming, and artisanal manufacturing—make the small city a place that’s exciting to call home.

As a small city whose economy has been traditionally tied to the coal industry, Charleston is also not an easy place to survive. For Mavery, a one-time state finance director with an accounting degree and a CPA license, it was recognizing how the system seemed set up to create and maintain economic injustice that led him into activism. He was fired up working on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and then stepped into a leadership role as a co-founder of a new Democratic Socialists of America chapter. But it was when a DSA pamphlet arrived in the mail one day introducing him to the idea of worker cooperatives that everything really clicked—his sense of profound moral outrage at the way the world works suddenly connecting in a deep way with his training in finance and business. In traditional business accounting, workers only show up as an expense line, something that you try to cut as much as possible to maximize profits. However, as Mavery explains, a cooperative flips this around, and understands workers as assets—people you want to invest in. 

Mavery Davis [Photo: A Shot of Lee]

Today, Mavery is the Director of Lending for New Economy Works West Virginia (NEW WV), a member of Seed Commons, where he’s been spearheading their efforts to advance worker-ownership in the local food industry. Building worker cooperatives deep in Appalachia isn’t easy, because most people don’t have a frame of reference that includes workplace democracy. When he’s first talking with someone, Mavery says: 

I don't even use the word co-op that much—it’s confusing to people. We talk about businesses that are going to stay rooted in the community—business ​​that are grown here locally, that are going to stay here, and that we want to be able to pass down from generation to generation, for people that live and work here to always have somewhere to go, and not have to rely on the the big box stores that are coming in and giving us crappy products. People really resonate with that type of message here. So we start with that. And then we try to build out the conversation about co-ops and the seven principles.

It’s this patient mindset, crafted to work within local constraints and possibilities, that led NEW WV to an innovative approach to worker cooperative development. Their strategy: use family ownership as a launchpad for democratic workplaces. 

This strategy kicked off with Phat Daddy’s on Da Tracks, the barbecue restaurant started by Cameron and Octavia Cordon, and their daughter Azelah. The Cordons moved to Charleston 22 years ago, and Cameron was always working in the food industry—not just because he’s an amazing cook, but because with a record from 36 months of incarceration, the food industry was one of the few sectors he could easily find employment. Then COVID hit, the restaurant world collapsed, and Cameron and Octavia had to figure out what was next. What would it look like to be in the food industry, but in control? Trying to get their vision of their own restaurant off the ground led them to NEW WV.

Octavia had known Mavery for a while, but as she tells it “we really weren't buying into what the story was, because it was all new to us—I’d never even heard of co-ops until we started talking to him. And I was kind of skeptical.” 

Worker-owner and co-founder Cameron Cordon at the first Phat Daddy’s location, an open-air BBQ stand along Charleston’s railroad tracks.

This is why NEW WV starts by meeting people where they are at, and understanding what matters most to entrepreneurs who are trying to make ends meet. Mavery explains that “Black folks, women, poor people—they don’t have the same economic opportunities that others do, but they’re trying to start these businesses. They’re going off of all this stuff they see on the news, or on social media. They’re hustling, trying to find a way.” This kind of energy and commitment is really important—but putting it to work for the democratic economy can’t be about getting in the way. “They're already out there moving—and are we going to tell them to slow down, stop what they’re doing and come learn about co-ops?” For Mavery, a better idea is to start with what successful co-ops are going to need anyway—support around basic business strategy and best practices, and as that concrete and immediate help builds trust, you create the opening to go deeper on the principles of the cooperative economy.

That’s how it worked with Octavia and Cameron, who worked with Mavery and NEW WV to secure a $122,000 loan from Seed Commons for their first location of Phat Daddy’s on Da Tracks, which was, quite literally, on the tracks—a former chicken coop next to an active rail line, in need of serious renovations to get up to code as a mostly outdoor barbecue joint. But the business model worked—in no small part due to the passion of the founding family behind it—and once the co-op, which now has three worker-owners from the Cordon family and two workers on track for full membership, was live and open for business, the space of possibility started to expand. 

Octavia lays out how the real example Phat Daddy’s provided has changed the game: people are “hearing about cooperatives, and then they see us and they're like, ‘Oh, shit! This is real.’ They're like, ‘Oh, yeah, this makes sense.’” After the Phat Daddy’s launch, NEW WV moved to create and support two more similarly structured cooperatives—scaling family-owned Mo Betta BBQ up into a new worker cooperative, and helping support their expansion into a second location inside a busy city market in nearby Huntington, and launching BG’z LA Street Tacos, another “family cooperative,” as a weekly pop-up in Charleston with plans to continue growing.

Workers at the Mo Betta BBQ cooperative at their location inside the Huntington, WV market. [Photo: FB/Mo Betta]

Meanwhile, Phat Daddy’s found it had outgrown its modest original digs, and again, with the help of financing through Seed Commons, just expanded in April 2024 into a brand new full restaurant location—in a building that the cooperative now owns. (It’s still near the railroad tracks.) The new location promises more than just great food and worker-owned jobs—it’s going be a hub for local cooperative development. Mavery, showing off the new dining room, is thrilled that “we’re going to have a piece of property, a piece of land in our local co-op network, to build on the cooperative culture, build more co-ops, and do trainings, especially in the food industry. When we closed on this loan, not only did it help Phat Daddy’s, but it also helped the larger co-op ecosystem we’re building here.”

Support and solidarity between businesses is a critical part of this emerging ecosystem. Already, projects working with NEW WV were coming to Octavia, whose background is in business and administration, for unofficial help. Now, in addition to helping keep Phat Daddy’s running as a worker-owner, she’s also serving part time as a paid project steward with the local fund, working on business development, training, and peer support. For her, this kind of support really makes a difference for the people she is working with “who don’t have the great credit, and don’t have the collateral, and don’t have the connections and investors” that more privileged small business owners enjoy. Her mission is to instead help who she calls “small people with big dreams.”

Empowering the worker-owners who, like Octavia, have learned on-the-job what building a successful cooperative really takes, and giving them a chance to advance professionally while passing that hard-won knowledge to their peers, is a key win for Seed Commons’ approach. Local member funds like NEW WV are leveraging the support of the national network to grow cooperative leaders and educators from their local rank-and-file, rather than relying on external consultants who may lack real-world experience actually doing the work. 

Thanks to Seed Commons’ dedication to peer learning and grassroots cooperative leadership, the ecosystem of support that can be brought to bear on local business challenges is a lot bigger than just Charleston. Mavery recounts how he and other project stewards at other member funds realized that they were often dealing with similar problems across Seed Commons’ growing national portfolio of food service cooperatives—a realization that catalyzed a new monthly zoom meetup across the entire network for worker-owners and project stewards in the restaurant industry: “it’s invaluable to have that much experience in the same room with you on the same call every month.”

At the grand opening of the new Phat Daddy’s. [Photo: A Shot of Lee]

Building worker cooperatives in West Virginia may be slow work, especially when the culture of cooperation needs to be constructed from scratch and nurtured to scale. But as more businesses come online or convert, and as NEW WV’s unique experiment building “family cooperatives” continues to develop, the impact of the work being done today could be to catalyze much larger and deeper shifts towards a more democratic and more racially equitable economy in Appalachia. As Mavery puts it, “it is clear that without our Seed Commons network, meaningful access to business capital and technical assistance would not be available to people in our community.”