New York City was first in 2015, but since then, municipalities around the United States have joined to support the development of worker cooperatives — businesses owned and operated by the employees.

“A lot of people are into co-ops,” says Franklin & Marshall Associate Professor of Government & Public Policy Biko Koenig. “A lot of people think they're really cool. And in the United States, there's a lot more smoke than fire. There's a lot more excitement about them than there are actual cooperatives.”

With a three-year, $218,000 grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Koenig and his primary collaborators – Brooklyn College sociology Professor Abby Scher and Melissa Beans ’25, an F&M postgraduate research associate – are examining co-ops’ various support structures. 

Specifically, they are looking at the impact of the entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) that not only help startup cooperative ownership companies, but assist existing businesses to convert into worker co-ops. 

“In the co-op world, they're called developers, cooperative developers,” Koenig says. “Groups that are trying to help people start new cooperative businesses, and then when those businesses are started, help them kind of navigate the challenges they find.”

Many new worker co-ops were created with the support of these ESOs or developers, but Koenig says there has been “very little research that’s been done on them.” While high-quality research has been conducted and published by trade groups, cooperative developers have received far less attention from independent researchers.

“They're made up of the industry folks; not a lot of external independent research,” he says. “We don't even have basic descriptive research.”

For Koenig and his collaborators, their project is to figure out what the ESOs are doing exactly.

“We want to lay out what are the best practices; what things have been going particularly well? What things don't seem to be working well? What's the variation across the country?” he says.

In particular, the researchers are interested in examining co-ops that are one to five years past their initial participation with developers to meet one of the aims of the Kauffman Foundation.

“The whole structure of the grant, but also the structure of the project, is to be used by developers and by co-op folks themselves and by people in the ecosystem,” Koenig says. “As opposed to like, let's write some academic papers and hope people read it. That's actually the secondary goal.”

The researchers plan to finish their data collection next spring and finish reports by August. 

“Then we spend next fall holding community meetings with people in the broader co-op world, report back on what we found, hear from them about what they think about our research, and see if there's ways to actually implement what we found,” Koenig says.