Ember was established in Colorado in 2022 as a public benefit corporation organized as a cooperative and operates as a collective using a modified consensus decision process.

We are a think-and-do tank. We wade through frustrating and overwhelming issues to identify and highlight things we can do in our everyday lives to shift norms, to build community, to forge a new social contract for a humane future.

Our general mode of operation is intended to produce four projects per year – one each quarter.

Our public benefit purposes are:

• Forging projects, tools, and platforms for the purpose of supporting agency, dignity, equity, transparency, critical thinking, and fun in a sustainable way
• Fueling cooperatives, other organizations, and individuals with services and expertise, prioritizing the needs of individuals or groups with shared purposes, missions, or values
• Sparking interest in the role and benefits of public benefit businesses, cooperatives, and democracy in the workplace through sharing information about how we conduct our business and practice our values
• Kindling relationships with other businesses and organizations to facilitate the advancement of any of our shared purposes, missions, or values

2022

We spent the better part of the year working on internal organizational stuff to make Ember a reality, which meant we did not do a full quarterly project. We did update the project that brought us together (Wishlist Challenge), we did a miniproject (About Page Shuffler), and we contributed to both public and member benefit in some low-key yet meaningful ways.

Public Benefits

• Wishlist Challenge: updated our sole quarterly project so far, which invites people to shift norms by reimagining how they wish for Christmas gifts in ways that resist Amazon, empower agency, promote equity and sustainability, and are just plain fun
• About Page Shuffler: made a website tool that randomly shuffles the people that populate an organization’s “about” page to deemphasize relative importance or power when it is irrelevant to an organization – like it is to ours – and avoid gender or ethnic bias that may occur from other arbitrary but systematic orderings (e.g., alphabetical)
• Highlighted progressive work of Charlene Carruthers, Shaun King, Fight for the Future, New Economy Coalition, and Beautiful Trouble through our blog and social media
• Resisted big tech (avoided giving Amazon, Google, et al. our dollars and data) by adopting open source, small tech solutions (e.g., Nextcloud) and contributed to the small tech ecosystem by submitting bug reports that have led to fixes in updates for all users
• Sparked interest in cooperatives and shifting norms through informal conversations within our networks

Member Benefits

Psychological Benefits:

• The flatness and power-sharing of our organization facilitate agency and equity.
• Contributing to a mission- and values-driven thing and growing it is satisfying, particularly of agency needs.
• Our small team structure makes communication and coordination easy.
• The work we do entails creative problem-solving and critical thinking, which is enjoyable to folks like us.
• Fully embracing a sustainability value means members care about each other’s wellbeing and we can trust people are taking on what they can and taking off when they need to.
• There’s no interpersonal drama so weekly meetings are enjoyable.

Technological Benefits: We have all the tools we need and we do not have to fork over dollars or data to big tech companies like Amazon or Google. We maintain a file server with a suite of productivity and collaboration tools, we have a chat server and email, we have a password manager, and we make our own websites and self-host our blog.

Obstacles

• Understanding legalese and writing bylaws were and continue to be a challenge. We have a full set of lawyer-drafted bylaws, but we continue to incrementally edit (e.g., adopting plain language when possible) and officially approve articles.
• Similar to the above obstacle, we have a partially constructed member handbook. The handbook is, by design, more of a living document than bylaws are, but it is still a slow incremental process of putting relevant pieces together.
• Both of the above obstacles consume resources that could otherwise be used to do the things that fulfill our public benefit purposes.
• Being a small team working together part-time limits what and how much work we can feasibly do.
• As a new organization, we struggled with visibility of our products insofar as spreading the word and getting support from others, and will continue to struggle until we build membership within the organization and relationships with other organizations.
• Personal life events, including contracting COVID, pulled us away from doing work at times.

Finances

2022 expenses were funded 100% by Founding Members' fees.

The Future

Constraints

Most constraints relate to resources. Having enough time and money is and, for at least the next year, will be a perpetual challenge. We need professional relationships to operate effectively. So, we need to prioritize forming and maintaining relationships with other organizations. Currently being at the legally required minimum number of members is a threat. If one of us gets hit by a bus, the coop is in a bad situation. Moreover we simply need more brains and skill sets contributing to projects. So, we need to prioritize recruitment.

Dreams

• Become known as a force for good and accessible resource
• Build a community of people that share our values
• Form and maintain strong working relationships with other organizations
• Add as many members as our growth structure will allow (a recruitment plan will be developed and implemented)
• Have measurable benefit in some societal domain and impact on shifting a norm (metrics and targets will be built into forthcoming projects)
• Have fun and make things we are proud of
• Continue what is working and build on it to improve incrementally

Conclusion

The experiment of collaborating on Wishlist Challenge from September to December 2021 was a foundation for the Founding Members' decision in early 2022 that we would formally organize as a cooperative. The work the three of us had done together in previous volunteer efforts made some decisions easy (approving the decision-making process, commitment to horizontal self-organization, Public Benefit Cooperative filing in Colorado). Nonetheless, the work of starting the organization dominated the year from writing about our public benefit purpose, working on bylaws, building the ember.coop website, creating tech infrastructure for our work, and more. As we value transparency and the cooperative principle of cooperation among cooperatives, we have publicly shared our tools for organization formation along the way and will continue to do so. In 2022, we were able to relaunch our 2021 Wishlist Challenge and produce benefits along the way for the public and members. We look forward to diving into projects and growing our team in 2023.