Many people are attracted to worker-owned cooperatives because they offer a more accessible path to business ownership for those without significant personal wealth to invest. With their institutional commitment to fairness and equity, cooperatives are also a particularly attractive alternative for women, immigrants, members of BIPOC communities and others who have historically been shut out of opportunities to fully participate in the traditional business sector. Yet even within a welcoming cooperative community, barriers remain with language being one of the most significant. While there are numerous cooperative development organizations, few explicitly market themselves as bilingual, and fewer still explicitly specialize in practicing through lenses tuned to racial and gender equity.

Seeing a growing need for such a specialized approach, three Latina entrepreneurs reached out to FJWO for help in starting their own bilingual, bicultural consulting company: Colmenar Cooperative Consulting. Utilizing a popular education approach, Colmenar’s founders work to foster democratic participation and governance in a variety of workplaces. They believe that creation of worker-owned businesses addresses a root cause of inequality and has the potential to truly change the nature of work.

With years of previous experience in the worker cooperative sector, Colmenar’s founders had secured over $100,000 in contracts to launch their practice, but were anticipating difficulty in funding their initial modest payroll and other expenses until the contract payments came in. While a typical entrepreneurs might turn to “family and friends” to fund such soft start-up expenses, one of the problems that immigrant, BIPOC, and women entrepreneurs routinely face in starting a new business is that they and their families lack this kind of intergenerational wealth. This leads to a frustrating cycle, where it can be prohibitively difficult for such entrepreneurs to launch the very businesses that would help them to achieve financial security for themselves and their families in the future.

In the case of Colmenar Consulting, the Fund for Jobs Worth Owning stepped in and, based upon the contracts the group had already secured, issued the group a $35,000 line of credit, without a requirement for personal guarantees. Not only did this loan help three Latina women to become new business owners, but the loan also supported them in their own objective to lift up others in their community. In addition to directly assisting immigrant-owned cooperatives, nonprofits, and racial justice groups, Colmenar also specializes in working as a bilingual partner for more traditional organizations in the community. In this way, Colmenar also helps grow the capacity of other providers in the space by allowing them to reach out to underserved communities.

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