Co-op News (August 2019)

Ted Howard: Architect of the Cleveland Model
On 9 July 2019, Co-operative Futures and
Co-operatives West Midlands hosted an evening
with Ted Howard, at the co-operatively owned
Warehouse Cafe in Birmingham.
Mr Howard, who co-wrote The Making of
a Democratic Economy with Marjorie Kelly (see
review, left), has spent his career working in
social justice advocacy and campaigning for
a democratic economy. He co-founded the Democracy
Collaborative in 2000 (he remains executive
director) and was the architect of the green jobs and
wealth-building program in Cleveland, Ohio, known
as the Evergreen Cooperatives (or the Cleveland
Model), which was based in part on the Mondragon
Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.
In 2010 he was named one of ‘25 Visionaries Who
Are Changing Your World’ by Utne Reader magazine.
“I am convinced that there is a very interesting,
dynamic dialogue between the UK and the US,”
he said. Mr Howard highlighted how, in the 1970s
and 80s, UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and
US president Ronald Regan ushered in a bold
neoliberal agenda that swept the globe. But, but
added, “I am hopeful a new expression is emerging
for our countries and for the world – that of
a democratic economy”.
Co-founding the Democracy Collaborative was a
significant turning point for him. “That was when
I began to make the journey beyond politics and
policy reform to look at the key structural issues that
are embedded in our capitalist economy,” he said.
“What are alternative ways of organising
enterprise that are more democratic, committed
to and rooted in community, that produce greater
benefit for people? That journey has led me into
an inquiry about how can we envision a political
economy that is neither centralised state socialism
[...] nor this hyper-corporate capitalism that
we have now.”
A second turning point was the experience
of Mondragon, which he has now visited six times.
“It has influenced the work we’re doing in Cleveland.
It’s illuminating to see highly democratic worker
ownership done at scale. But as they say there, this
is not paradise and we are not angels. There are
still challenges.”
The third part of his journey came when he was
challenged to actually build a co-op structure after
years of researching and writing about the model. “This
is our work in Cleveland,” he said. “When we started,
I said ‘how hard can it be, this isn’t rocket science…’
Eventually a friend of mine said ‘no, it’s not rocket
science, it’s much harder than that’. The reality has
been a transformative experience in my life.”
In the 1950s and early 60s, Cleveland, Ohio was
one of the five wealthiest cities in America, and one
of the largest with a population of nearly 1 million.
JD Rockefeller, the industrialist, was born there,
and at one point it was home to 50% of the world’s
millionaires. But then came the deindustrialisation
of the 70s and 80s. Today Cleveland is one of the
country’s five poorest cities, with a population
of just 385,000.
“There had been a sense of great futility,” said Mr
Howard. “I was invited to come there by a number
of institutions to try to find a new way to develop
the economy. What we hit upon was to emphasise
worker ownership rather than just a salary;
emphasise decent work, not just a job; and we
created a strategy, working with legacy institutions
(universities, hospitals, cultural centres, etc) to
encourage them to buy locally, while at the same
time setting up worker co-operatives in the city to
provide the services they need.”
One of the challenges was to find people to run
these services – often technical and complex, such
as with industrial laundries – while remaining true
to values. Bringing in co-operators and training
them in this work didn’t work. “What did work was
bringing in corporate experts and training them in
co-operative culture,” says Mr Howard.
“We made every possible mistake in the book,
but we’re still standing.”
AUGUST 2019 | 49