An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

…When you look at how coops have the ability to change the world, I would first look at that fifth principle of cooperation, which is: Education, Training and Information. This Principle is what first attracted me to co-ops. Co-ops teach its members how to run a business, how to make collective decisions, how to resolve conflict, how to read financial statements, how to save for the future, the importance of voting, etc. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”

As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing Vernon Oakes.

Vernon Oakes hosts the leading weekly national radio program for the U.S. cooperative community. He is General Partner in Everything.Coop Communications, LLC, a media company that promotes cooperative business models by providing education and resources specifically for under-resourced Americans and their communities.

Vernon has significant national and international experience in various business activities including finance, marketing, sales, sales forecasting, distribution and service, and systems design. He became familiar with cooperative business models as a residential property management company owner and has more than 40 years of experience in property and asset management.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. What brought you to this specific career path?

I was living in Washington, D.C. and working full time in my property management business which I began in 1994. I believed it would be easy to secure contracts, because as I was an African-American living in Chocolate City with an MBA from Stanford University. I had management experience at the corporate level, but my competition had over forty year’ s of experience in property management. Even though I bid on five large properties in my first year, I didn’t win one bid.

I was introduced to limited equity housing co-ops, and I was able to secure management contracts with several smaller projects, as they were less attractive to larger management companies because of the low revenues generated. I was amazed at the level of competency displayed by the resident co-op members who were mostly African-American women. Their ability to make sound decisions, engage in fruitful deliberation, operate with integrity and supervise the vendors was impressive. They made extremely good decisions, and most of them had at best had a high school education.

I’ve come to understand that training is the foundation of co-ops. The fifth principle of cooperation is Education, Training and Information which is extremely important in creating successful cooperatives. I started looking at the cooperative model and got involved with the Potomac Association of Housing Cooperatives which covers DC, Maryland and Virginia. I became a member of the National Association of Housing Cooperative (NAHC) and joined the Development and Preservation Committee with two long-term cooperators, Roger Wilcox and Herb Fisher. Roger passed away a couple years ago at 97 years of age, and Herb is no longer practicing law in Chicago, but is in his 90s.

Through Roger and Herb, I learned about housing cooperatives. They continually said that if developers built housing co-ops, then people would buy them. From a marketing standpoint I understood and told them that there’s no demand for co-ops because people don’t understand them. If people knew about the benefits of co-ops, they would demand them, and developers would build them.

As the President of NAHC, I started promoting housing co-ops which led me to The Thornton’s Business Hour radio show in June of 2013. Immediately following my appearance on the show, I was offered my own show. Originally it was scheduled to run for the month of October, in recognition of National Co-op Month. That one month turned into nine years. Today we have over 300 shows on our Everything Coop webpage , on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

How do co-ops make an impact?

To understand the impact of cooperatives we must first define what a co-op is. A co-op is a business that is owned and controlled by and for its members. In the limited equity housing co-op, the members are the residents. The residents have an equal say in the running of the cooperative, and they all receive an equal share in the profits.

The biggest impact for me is what happens at the individual level. A guest on my radio show, Dame Pauline Green, who at the time was the President of the International Cooperative Alliance, put it quite eloquently when she said, “Co-ops help people to come out of poverty with dignity”. This is because when members have a voice, control, ownership, and income, their self-worth increases.

All too often I have seen individuals — family members, friends, colleagues, students — with little to no self-worth, (particularly in the African-American and the Native American communities), because they lacked power. When communities gain power over their existence it impacts the entire planet.

In the book, Cities Building Community Wealth, by the Democracy Collaborative, there is an example of what happens when individuals are empowered. Christina, a Mexican American earned $7.00 an hour prior to joining a worker co-op. At that wage, when she worked a 40 hour week her gross pay was $280 a week. After joining the co-op, her hourly wage increased to $20.00, and she only needed to work 14 hours a week to make the same $280.00.

This additional income and hours empowered her as a single mom. She could work fewer hours, spend more time with her children. The added time with her children allowed the family to grow stronger which not only helped them but also impacted their community positively, and the planet. The Cooperative model allows everyone to benefit together. No one is pushed down because another is up.

Another example that I helped to found is Common Good Management Services, which also illustrates Dame Green’s point nicely. Millions of people live in mobile home parks in the U.S. Most parks are owned by investor-owners and the parks are regularly bought and sold, driving up the cost of living for the residents. With the help of a national network led by ROC USA , hundreds of mobile home parks have been purchased by co-ops where the residents are the member owners. Extracting mobile home parks from the investor-owned marketplace puts an immediate stop to the exploitive relationship with the investor owner. Residents are empowered to govern their community for the common good of its residents. Common Good Management Services is a community-based property management co-op designed to manage the property in a manner that serves the residents. Both the mobile home park movement and the potential of Common Good are inspiring and based on exactly what Dame Green described as the impact of cooperatives.

Which principles or philosophies are the cornerstones of cooperatives?

We will start with the cooperative values, which are: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, quality, equity, and solidarity. I noticed that in the housing co-op meetings, decisions were made on what was best for the group. If the decision is best for the group, then each member in the group prospers together, in solidarity. Decisions are not made on what is best for one individual, because this normally means that this decision would be at the expense of somebody else. Cooperatives also believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others, which I see as the Golden Rule.

Cooperative organizations are governed by their values and principles, where the principles are guidelines by which the values are put into practice. The principles are:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership: Personal demographics don’t make any difference.

2. Democratic Member Control: One member, one vote.

3. Member Economic Participation: Must pay money to become a member and share in profit.

4. Autonomy and Independence: The co-op members must own and control the business.

5. Education, Training, and Information: continual education.

6. Cooperation among Cooperatives: Co-ops work together for the good of the members and the community

7. Concern for Community: Govern in a way to improve the community

There’s an eighth principle that different credit unions in the US have started using and that’s DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion. Some argue that you don’t need this eight principle, because the first principle states that membership is “open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political or religious discrimination.”

Unfortunately, if you take a co-op and put it into a racist society like the US, then those co-ops would probably be racist with leadership being white, particularly white men. So, having an emphasis on including everybody makes it better than just the first principle. It’s open to everybody and make sure diversity, inclusion and equity are included.

Let’s go to the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who believed that man has natural tendency to look after self-interest, and as social creatures man has sympathy for others that have less.

Smith saw humans as creatures driven by passions and at the same time self-regulated by their ability to reason and by their capacity for sympathy.

Narcissistic individuals by definition don’t have the ability to empathize. It also seems that those persons who inherited their wealth don’t have the capacity for sympathy, as described by the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the 21st Century.

How do Cooperatives have the ability to change the world?

When you look at how coops have the ability to change the world, I would first look at that fifth principle of cooperation, which is: Education, Training and Information. This Principle is what first attracted me to co-ops. Co-ops teach its members how to run a business, how to make collective decisions, how to resolve conflict, how to read financial statements, how to save for the future, the importance of voting, etc. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” The character of the cooperative and its members is found in the values and principles expressed earlier.

I would turn to principle 6 and the different co-op sectors. Principle six is Cooperation Among Co-ops. There are four types of co-ops that look for ways of working together that will benefit the members and the world. The sector’s names are based on who owns and controls the business or the function of the business. The four sectors are defined below:

a) It is a Worker Co-op if the business is owned and controlled by the employees (could be any business)

b) It is a Consumer Co-op if the business is owned and controlled by the persons who use the products or services (housing co-ops, credit unions, rural electric co-ops, food co-ops, REI, a health clinic in Madison WI, and Blue Hawk Distributor are examples of consumer co-ops).

c) It is a Purchasing Co-op if the function of the business created is to Purchase products and services to afford it’s member better quality at lower prices (such as farmers, artist, and the Consumer Purchasing Alliance in DC). In the 1960s when black farmers were getting out to vote, the white stores wouldn’t sell them gas. So, these black farmers pitched in their dollars and purchased a truck, went across state lines and brought gas. To get what they needed, they formed a purchasing co-op. And all these coops formed the Federation of Southern Co-ops in 1967.

d) It is a Marketing/Producer Co-op if the function of the business created is to market and add value to the products or services of the members to get access to more markets at a better price (farmers started Cabot Creamery, Land O’Lakes, Ocean Spray and artists started Ujamaa in Pittsburgh, Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico). I was in a store in San Diego and bought some eggs from a co-op. The eggs came from Wisconsin. The farmer in Wisconsin wouldn’t have been able to get the eggs to the marketplace in San Diego on his own.

Was there a “tipping point” or some holes in the way the average business is structured that are leading more businesses toward a cooperative model?

Absolutely. I got my MBA from Stanford. In every class that I was in, decisions were made on “what’s the greatest return on investment (ROI) for the shareholder?” The focus of the company is what’s the best return; money, financial profit for the shareholder; it was not what was best for the employee. Matter of fact, there’s this antagonistic relationship between management and the employee and between the board and the employee. In a worker co-op, the focus is also on what is best for the shareholder, but the shareholder is the employee.

Look at the principles of cooperation, the first concern is for the people, the members. What’s best for the planet is second, and third is profit. Profit is important but in a capitalistic model, it is king, it is all important. Managers in the capitalistic business make decisions based on what’s best for the shareholder first, then what is best for the manager. In the capitalistic business, the top managers may make 200 times more than the average bottom salaries. Whereas in a co-op, often there are rules that the top person may not make more than 10 times of what the lowest paid workers make. This rule allows more money to be spread throughout to the employees. In the cooperative the money stays in the community, but in the capitalist business the money goes to the shareholder, who may not live in that community.

The tipping point is the capitalistic model focuses on profits. Almost totally, to the exception of everything else. And we have things like climate change. And if it keeps going that way with short term decisions based on profit, we will see continued destruction for our planet. Whereas the co-op model is for our world, for our children, and for our grandchildren.

The capitalist model has totally missed the priorities of cooperatives. That we must take care of the planet, community and the people. The capitalistic model focuses on profit for the shareholder and management. That’s the tipping point.

What is needed to lead this idea to widespread adoption?

Awareness is needed to lead to widespread adoption. We’ve been producing the Everything Co-op radio show for 9 years. It got started because the United Nations declared 2012 the year of co-op and about 300 cooperators from around the world went to the UN in November of 2011. In that gathering, it was stated multiple times that Co-ops are “the best kept secret.” In 2013, we started the radio show to let people know about co-ops. Co-ops do an extremely good job of helping their members, an excellent job providing great products and services, and an awesome job at solving community problems. However, co-ops do a terrible job at promoting the co-operative brand.

I firmly believe that we have to let people know about the cooperative brand, and if we tell them about the benefits, the impact, and the things you asked in the aforementioned questions, they will then look for co-ops to do business with. They will start co-ops and convert capitalistic businesses to worker owned co-ops. This is especially true with the baby boomers, because the baby boomers own a large percentage of the normal, capitalist businesses. As they are beginning to retire you can convert their businesses to employee ownership, then the business and profits will stay in the community.

Can you share with our readers why it is important to support cooperatives?

If you look at 100 cooperative businesses that started 5 years ago, then 80–90 percent of them are still in business today. The reasons for this are:

  1. The training that took place for one to four years before the business started,
  2. The connection with the community
  3. The excellent products and services co-op provides the community and
  4. The community problem that the cooperative solved.

If you look at 100 capitalistic businesses that started 5 years ago, about 10–20 percent of them are still in business. They ultimately fail because they don’t get the education nor the solidarity with the community. And so most fail.

If you want excellent products and services, then buy from co-ops. This helps the employees, the community, and the planet. If you’re a nurse or a home health care worker, or plumber or taxi cab driver, or lawyer, etc., you might want to connect with 4 or 5 of your co-workers and start your own cooperative. You can reach out to the cooperative community to get the training, technical support and funding needed to be successful.

What are a few cooperatives that you would encourage our readers to learn about?

Well, credit unions are co-ops. In 2012 about 150 cooperators went to talk to President Obama’s head administrators about cooperatives. There was a cooperator in the front of the room who would ask each administrator if they knew what a co-op is. Most answered “no”, then he would ask them “Do you belong to a credit union?” Most said “yes”. One person, I’m not going to say who he was or his title because he was extremely high in the administration, said that he and his family belonged to 3 different credit unions. They belonged to 3 co-ops and didn’t know they belonged to co-ops. They did understand that if they wanted to apply for a car loan or any kind of a loan then they would get a better deal at a cooperative.

The products are created by the members for the members. The credit union has to make enough money to pay for the overhead, and may want to make enough money for growth, and may make money to donate to solve community problems. Most credit unions don’t give dividends to their members but that would be another reason for cooperatives to make a profit so they can give dividends to their members.

I like the worker co-op, Equal Exchange with about 120 members/owners. They have great products including coffee, teas, bananas, and chocolates. Equal Exchange pays its farmers a fair price for the products they buy. They buy from small farmers in Africa, Asia and South America.

You can go on the US Federation of Worker Co-ops’ web page, and find worker co-ops sorted by the type of co-op in each state. You can also find a food co-op by just going to google and putting in food co-op near you. You can find different housing coops by going to the “National Association of Housing Cooperatives” at NAHC.coop. As I travel around the US in my RV, I’ve found that google is a great way for locating co-ops in the area that you are in. The National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA.coop) has been working on a software app where you can find co-ops in your area. I’m hoping they will be able to get the application out in the market soon.

How can our readers find out more and follow you on social media?

We post every week on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter; we encourage readers to follow us to stay up tp date onwho is coming on the show We also offer an option to subscribe on our website at www.everything.coop.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.


Let’s Expand Co-Ops: Vernon Oakes’s Big Idea That Might Change The World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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