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Building Community Wealth One Co-op at a Time

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Together, we are building Community Wealth for a just and liberated future.

Over the last 20 years, Nexus has worked to usher out the rigged rules, attitudes, and practices that concentrate wealth and power in fewer and whiter hands. For folks who have been intentionally shut out of mainstream economies, cooperatives present a tried-and-true alternative.

Cooperatives embody the idea that wealth is more than the success of any one individual—that wealth is owning what we produce. To us, wealth is building and inventing for our families and community, not only in crisis, but also in the pursuit of our dreams.

Meet Denise Butler

For more than a decade, Nexus Community Partners and African Career, Education, & Resource Inc. (ACER) have been partners in organizing, funding, and community wealth building. When Denise Butler, Associate Director at ACER, approached Nexus to work with an emerging collective of 24 Black immigrant women and business owners, we jumped at the opportunity.

With the help of Nexus and ACER, these women formed a cooperative: The Ignite Business Women’s Investment Group. Last year, Ignite purchased their first property: Shingle Creek Center in Brooklyn Center.

At the beginning, the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus (SOC@N) helped Ignite determine their cooperative structure, articles of incorporation, and bylaws. As the project developed, SOC@N worked closely with ACER, Ignite, their legal team, and project manager to provide flexible support wherever necessary, from weaving together knowledge, resources, and connections to successfully acquiring the 18-unit shopping center.

“Nexus was instrumental in supporting ACER’s work in building the first Black women’s cooperative in Minnesota. The infrastructural support provided by Nexus speaks to their expertise in the cooperative development landscape.” – Denise Butler, ACER

This milestone was years in the making. It has been an honor to walk alongside Ignite and ACER as they expand their work to meet the needs of their community. Join us in scaling up BIPOC-led cooperative development!

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Whether you can contribute $20 or a story about what Nexus means to you, you will continue to make our work possible!

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Have you participated in one of our fellowships? Been a longtime partner? However you’ve crossed paths with Nexus, we want to hear from you!

In October, the City of Saint Paul, Nexus Community Partners, Project Equity, and Living Cities convened local leaders from cooperatives, government, nonprofits, and philanthropy, alongside national partners, for the Saint Paul Shared Ownership Equity Summit. The day was filled with panels, networking, a workshop, and a rousing conversation between Mayor Melvin Carter and Living Cities’ President Joe Scantlebury. Cooperators shared their highs and lows when starting their co-ops and advice for future cooperators and developers. Funders shared how they’ve adapted to the co-op sector and challenged the status quo. After years of primarily online conversations, it was invigorating to be in space with so many talented and dedicated professionals working hard to realize Saint Paul as the co-op capital of the world!

Diana Siegel-Garcia, our program manager for the Shared Ownership Center @ Nexus, reflects, “Changing the face of ownership, to me, means supporting more worker-owners of cooperatives that are community grounded and invested in local ownership. It’s moving toward repairing the harm of centuries of exploitation of Black and Brown bodies by removing barriers and meeting people where they’re at in their cooperative journey. By developing cooperatives, I hope to empower my neighbors and community partners in realizing an interdependent, collaborative, and dignified quality of life. My dream is for there to be a rich, woven network of cooperatives across Minnesota and beyond, but first it starts with building partnerships locally.”

Watch a highlight reel of the summit below!

Want to see more? Watch session recordings and see opening and closing remarks in the City of Saint Paul’s YouTube playlist!

The Shared Ownership Center @ Nexus explains what a cooperative is, the impact worker-owned cooperatives and real estate investment cooperatives have on our communities, and the qualification criteria for the LOCAL Fund’s grants and technical assistance.

The LOCAL Fund: Worker Ownership offers grants and technical assistance for worker co-op startups, conversions of existing businesses, and existing co-ops in St. Paul. The LOCAL Fund: Community Ownership supports the development of shared-ownership commercial real estate in St. Paul, with grants and technical assistance for predevelopment, acquisition, demolition, and rehabilitation of commercial properties.

Learn more by watching our information session below!

Join Nexus Community Partners and Project Equity for a free webinar July 24 at noon. Learn how to sell your business to your employees, and how employee ownership can be used to build a succession plan and a tool for employee retention and business resiliency. Register here!

Employee ownership can offer:

  • Lower turnover: Workers at employee-owned businesses have 46% longer job tenure than their peers in firms that are not employee-owned.
  • Higher productivity: Employee-owned enterprises reported productivity levels that were 9–19% higher than levels in traditionally structured similar businesses.
  • Higher profits: Employee-owned firms have an average profit margin almost 8.5% higher than the average private firm.
  • Greater resilience: In 2020, during COVID business shutdowns, employee-owned companies were less than half as likely to lay off employees and 6 times more likely to say they expected to make a full recovery.

Nexus Community Partners will also share more information about the LOCAL Fund, which offers grants and technical assistance for worker co-op startups, conversions of existing businesses, and existing co-ops in Saint Paul.

A group of employees smile in front of a colorful wall. Graphic reads: "Free webinar July 24. How to sell your business to your employees."

The National Conference on Black Cooperative Agenda was a thought-provoking, community-building, and spiritually nourishing gathering of Cooperative folks across the country. Thank you to all the attendees, volunteers, and organizers who made it happen. If you missed it, you can listen to this broadcast from the conference! Everything Co-op’s Vernon Oakes interviews St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, Nexus’ Christina Nicholson, and Jessica James.

Listen here!

 

The Shared Ownership Center @ Nexus invites you to their information session about the LOCAL Fund, an initiative of the City of Saint Paul.

Thursday, May 30
1:00 – 2:00 pm CDT
Zoom (virtual)

Learn about the LOCAL Fund’s qualification criteria, and worker-cooperatives, real estate investment cooperatives, and their impact on the community.

Register now to receive a Zoom invitation!

Shared Ownership Center @ Nexus
LOCAL Fund Information Session

Sorry, this form is not available.

Nexus Community Partners’ Shared Ownership Center will administer $2.5 million in funding to grow cooperative ownership in Saint Paul

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2024

SAINT PAUL, MN—Today, Mayor Melvin Carter announced that the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus Community Partners will administer the LOCAL Fund, in partnership with the City of Saint Paul Office of Financial Empowerment.

“Helping frontline workers buy the business and facilitating group ownership of real estate is exactly the kind of practical, everyday improvement to our residents’ lives that our work from City Hall must aspire to achieve,” said Mayor Carter. “I am thrilled to have Nexus as a partner to facilitate these programs.”

Comprised of two programs – Worker Ownership and Community Ownership – the LOCAL Fund will leverage $2.5 million dedicated to supporting worker cooperatives and real estate investment cooperatives.

“The Shared Ownership Center at Nexus brings expertise in cooperative development with a long history of building community-led coalitions that center equity,” said Ikram Koliso, Interim Director of the Saint Paul Office of Financial Empowerment. “Nexus brings the right combination of technical skills, administrative capacity, and equity-centered leadership for the LOCAL Fund.”

The LOCAL Fund will build community wealth, anchor jobs locally, grow the local economy and tax base, and center an ownership culture that uplifts residents of Saint Paul now and for generations to come.

According to a 2018 study from National Center for Employee Ownership, employee-owned businesses, such as co-ops, have been shown to create a 92% increase in household net worth, a 33% higher hourly wage, and 53% longer job tenure. Real estate co-ops have been shown to revitalize commercial corridors by offering stable and affordable properties to businesses, while giving community members a voice in development decisions and a share of the profits.

The LOCAL Fund: Worker Ownership offers grants and technical assistance for worker co-op startups, conversions of existing businesses, and existing co-ops. The LOCAL Fund: Community Ownership supports shared-ownership entities with grants and technical assistance for predevelopment, acquisition, demolition, and rehabilitation of commercial properties.

Patty Viafara, Direcotr of the Worker Ownership Inititiave at Nexus said, “The Shared Ownership Center at Nexus is excited to build on our seven-plus years of supporting cooperative development with Black, Indigenous, and people of color at the forefront.”

Both the Worker Ownership and Community Ownership programs are open today! Fill out this inquiry form to learn how you can apply or visit www.nexuscp.org/shared-ownership-center.

This project is being supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number SLFRP1612 awarded to Nexus Community Partners by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

ABOUT NEXUS COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Nexus Community Partners (Nexus) is a nonprofit organization based in Saint Paul, MN, with a 20-year history of building more engaged and powerful communities of color through innovative initiatives and community-centered programming. For more information, visit www.nexuscp.org.

Since 2019, the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus, formerly called the Worker Ownership Initiative, has worked with 50-plus companies to explore models of shared ownership and supported the development of eight cooperatives across the Twin Cities. From assessing fit and feasibility to becoming cooperatively-owned and operated, SOC@N brings expertise and an equity lens in all steps of cooperative development.

 

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Contact:
Kamal Baker
kamal.baker@ci.stpaul.mn.us
763-381-1335

In February, a group of Nexus staff and Minnesota community wealth builders headed out west to sunny Oakland, CA for Project Equity’s Employee Ownership Equity Summit. Our Minnesota delegation appreciated the opportunity to map out our national shared ownership ecosystem and the cross-sector learnings shared between policy makers, financial institutions and regional cooperators. Big thank you to Project Equity for hosting an energizing, connecting, and informative summit!

From Christina Nicholson, Cooperative Finance Developer at Nexus:

“The trip to Oakland was fantastic, and spending time with all the amazing folks from the Twin Cities was very work—and life—affirming. Mayor Carter’s keynote powerfully kicked off the conference, opening up rich discussion about the definition of Equity. What inspired me most was the amount of genuine commitment to financial and social equity, and ingenious ways people build it in the Twin Cities and beyond.

Nexus Worker Ownership Initiative is excited to be featured in a new report from the Brookings Institute. Read the Saint Paul Case Study here.

“Institutionalizing inclusive growth: Rewiring systems to rebuild local economies,” is a playbook of innovative economic development strategies. Through in-depth case studies, it profiles the wide variety of local public, private, and civic institutions stewarding their communities through the four pillars that drive inclusive growth: economic development, talent development, spatial development, and asset development.

 

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Nexus Worker Ownership Initiative is excited to announce that The People’s Canvass has transitioned into a worker-owned cooperative. Through this conversion, they combine highly-skilled, community-based organizing power with a democratic, sustainable workplace. Congratulations!

Transitioning a business to employee-ownership is a triple win—business owners secure the future legacy of their business; employees get a voice in their workplace and are able to share in the wealth they help create; and communities retain important local businesses.

Nexus Worker Ownership Initiative has been working closely with workers at The People’s Canvass to make their vision a reality. Laura Kiernan, lead trainer at TPC, said, “Nexus has been such an invaluable companion on our journey towards workplace democracy. You could not ask for a better knowledge base and network to have on hand during a legal transition…I’m so grateful we were able to partner with them.”

Are you interested in practical resources to rebuild, reestablish, and reignite your businesses through worker-ownership? Contact us for a free consultation! www.ownwork.org

On this Worker Ownership Wednesday, we’re celebrating Christina Nicholson’s 1 year anniversary at Nexus.

Christina came to Nexus last year with so much fire, humor, and warmth—and 25 years of cooperative experience! She’s one third of the talented Worker Ownership Initiative team, and a lovingly curious and supportive co-worker.

After one year at Nexus, Christina shared with me one big thing she learned: “Over the past year, I’m really learning how much of Nexus’ work is building strong root systems. These root systems connect us deeply to each other, as individuals, organizations, and communities. But we don’t always see them there under the ground. Strengthening our connections to each other is a huge part of building alternatives to unjust and extractive systems. I am so humbled and grateful to be a part of organization that is dreaming a better world into existence by working hard everyday to love the hell out of it”.

Are you interested in learning more about Christina’s work? Visit us at www.ownwork.org to explore how worker ownership can transform small businesses and communities.

Did you hear that the People’s Canvass (formerly Knock Knock LLC) has become a worker-owned cooperative?

The Minneapolis team that built the nation’s largest deep canvassing team in November, and collected 16,000 signatures to put the Yes ‘4’ Minneapolis public safety initiative on the ballot, has broken new ground as the United States’ first political canvassing worker cooperative. Nexus Worker Ownership is proud to have supported them through this process.

“I’ll be the first to say it — I knew nothing about how any of this co-op stuff worked. I’m a canvasser. I go to the door and I talk to people about issues in their community,” said Charlie Bartlett, a lead trainer at The People’s Canvass and a member of the co-op transition team. “But working with Nexus gave us a vision and a pathway to achieve that vision. In the same way we feel called to do the work to improve our communities, the folks at Nexus are called to make that work itself more equitable.”

Are you interested in practical resources to rebuild, reestablish, and reignite your businesses through worker-ownership? Contact Nexus Worker Ownership Initiative for a free consultation at www.ownwork.org.