Scaling Worker Cooperatives as an Economic Justice Tool for Communities in Crises

Carmen Huertas-Noble, Missy Risser-Lovings, and Christopher Adams

Worker cooperatives can be used as tools to address many of the socioeco­nomic harms we face today, and the crises of capitalism that undergird them, providing an effective crises-response approach that lawyers working with the most directly impacted communities can deploy in their efforts to shift economic and political power to their clients and the communities in which their clients live and work.

Introduction

This case study analyzes the roles community coalitions and medical cen­ters in Brooklyn, New York, have played in serving as anchor institutions for worker cooperatives, addressing many of the negative social determinants of health—particularly those that affect Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, immigrant communities, Muslim American commu­nities, and the LGBTQI community. Negative social determinants of health include a growing dearth in quality employment, poor workplace conditions, racism, worsening poverty, inadequate access to quality health care, and a lack of access to healthy food. Our experiences working in communities that are disproportionately affected by these interconnected crises reveal what we believe are the deeper crises—late capitalism, rising income inequality, and their impacts on democratic institutions and democracy itself—that bring about many of the severe inequities affecting marginalized communities.

In addition, we explain how worker cooperatives can be used as tools to ad­dress many of these harms, and the crises that cause them, providing an effec­tive crisis-response approach that lawyers working with such communities can deploy in their efforts to shift economic and political power to their clients and the communities in which their clients live and work.

The Crisis in Marginalized Communities:

Political and Economic Inequality

The crises of the current states of political and economic democracy—or, more precisely, the crises that arise from the lack thereof—are two sides of the same coin. On one side is the crisis of rising authoritarianism throughout the world.¹ On the other is a capitalist system that was formed to operate on the dependence and normalization of the use of brutality to expropriate land and exploit labor.² For example, in response to the global financial crisis of 2008, the United States sponsored the bailout of corporate actors who created the crisis (an economic injustice), without requiring accountability measures or promises for democratic control over the use of those funds for a larger public good (a political injustice), thereby reinforcing the political and economic structures that created the conditions for the crisis.³ As Gautum Mukunda explained in the pages of the Harvard Business Review: “If you were a player in the Ameri­can financial system, the government did everything possible to make sure that you did not suffer consequences from the crash your industry had caused.....................

Perhaps even worse was the extent to which the government focused its efforts on stabilizing the financial sector instead of directly aiding most Americans.”⁴

Not surprisingly, the 2008 crisis was preceded by the greatest income in­equality gap the United States had seen since immediately before the Great Depression, a gap that continues to widen.⁵ Additionally, because of systemic attacks on many of our public institutions, most Americans are dealing with multiple crises at once without some of the traditional safety nets provided by programs originally designed to alleviate poverty.

Health Disparities and Food Insecurity

Research has shown that only 20 percent of an individual's health can be attributed to medical care, while social and economic factors account for 40 percent. These factors, commonly called “SDOH,” are the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play, which affect health. Negative SDOH include things such as precarious and/or unsafe housing, substandard education, underresourced and overpoliced neighborhoods, poverty, and lack of access to healthy foods. In addition to the obvious outcomes these factors have on a person's life, all of these factors cause stress, which harms health and increase the likelihood of substance use.

Medical centers in communities with high concentrations of poverty, such as those in Central Brooklyn, are often considered safety-net providers and serve primarily underpaid and underresourced residents, providing critical access to health care that would otherwise be unaffordable and/or inacces­sible. The closures of such medical centers—a crisis within itself in terms of access to care—exacerbate the various crises underresourced communities face, including poor health and high unemployment to name just two (albeit two that often cause a domino effect of problems in peoples' lives).

When safety-net providers close, communities already suffering from high concentrations of poverty and inadequate access to health care experience even higher unemployment, which is a negative social determinant of health itself along with all the social ills associated with not having adequate income to sustain oneself and/or one's family. And people who are impoverished, which includes the working poor (a term that should not exist if corporations were held more accountable), have a high risk of poor health and often face food insecurity.

The Department of Agriculture defines “food insecurity” as a household­level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to ad­equate food with either disrupted eating patterns or reduced food intake.

Food insecurity has additional consequences for children, impacting growth, ability to learn and focus, energy, delaying development, and leading to in­creased stress levels and behavioral health issues. Fast-food chains in predomi­nantly Black neighborhoods have been shown to be more than 60 percent more likely to advertise to children than in predominantly white neighborhoods. Food insecurity in children has resulted in $1.8 billion in additional child hospi­talizations and $5.9 billion in additional special education services for students in public, primary, and secondary schools. Food-insecure households spend 45 percent more on medical care than people in food-secure households.

Hospitals and health care can play a role in addressing food insecurity. While many insurance providers have covered nutritional counseling, a few recent initiatives attempted to also address food insecurity. Some hospitals bring healthy foods to patients who face barriers to accessing nutritious foods by hosting farmers markets on site, by providing vouchers for families to pur­chase healthy foods at these markets, and/or by ensuring that the vendors accept public benefits.

Cooperatives: An Economic Equalizer

In many respects, these power imbalances that lead to the range of crises affect­ing marginalized communities flow from these communities' lack of political power, which, more and more in an age of skyrocketing economic inequality, is a product of a lack of economic power. The centerpiece of the American economic order is the corporation, which the United States Supreme Court has recognized as having political rights, a decision that has led to a greater concen­tration of political power that flows from greater concentrations of economic power, thereby subordinating human rights and creating marginalized commu- nities.¹¹ And it is this concentration of political and economic power that has led to many of the broader societal inequalities described above.

In order to acquire a just share in the benefits of our economic systems and to address the various crises too many communities face, such as food insecurity, poor health, and poverty, working people must gain control over the aggregate political power of the corporations that form the core of our political economy. Because the power to control a corporation is based on the ownership of governing shares of its stock, working people must own those governing shares. An organization owned and controlled in such a way is often referred to as a “cooperative.” Thus, cooperatives are one strategy that those who engage in a legal practice that focuses on community economic development (i.e., so-called CED practitioners) employ to help redistribute economic and political power.

Worker Cooperatives as Tools for Political and Economic Justice Worker Cooperatives Defined

Worker cooperatives are distinct from traditional corporations because work­ers have governance rights based on the democratic principle of one worker, one vote. Workers also share equitably in the profits of the business, usually based on patronage. The cooperative structure stands in stark contrast to the traditional corporate model, where the primary concern of the business is usually maximizing the wealth of shareholders and where it is the sharehold­ers who have governance rights. In traditional businesses, workers' wages are typically seen as expenses to be minimized as much as possible, and workers typically have no governance rights.

A vehicle to generate wealth for workers who are lower-income and have less wealth, worker cooperatives subordinate capital to labor—profits are distributed based on the workers' labor, not their capital investment. The extent to which nonworkers can participate in the governance and profit dis­tributions of a cooperative business varies, but usually workers have at least a controlling voice in governance and receive a majority of profit distributions.

As businesses that prioritize the humanity of workers, worker coopera­tives create meaningful, long-term, safe, sustainable, and dignified jobs with increased job security and reduced workplace abuse. Profit-sharing limits income disparities within the business and provides asset-building oppor­tunities for all workers. Equitable pay structures are also more common in worker cooperatives. Furthermore, profits tend to remain local, so wealth­building occurs for both individuals and communities.¹² As worker-owners have more control over their work by democratically managing the business, they are more engaged than in traditional workplaces. Worker cooperatives also value community and thus tend to be more environmentally conscious of their practices compared to traditional businesses?³

While worker cooperatives are not a panacea to the multitude of crises we are facing, as workplaces where real democracy is practiced on a daily basis, worker cooperatives can serve as a model for building a meaningful movement for economic democracy and transformative economic and social justice. In the short term, they provide opportunities to address economic inequality and insecurity, especially for people with barriers to safe, stable jobs, like BIPOC, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and people who were formerly incarcerated.

CED and Cooperative Lawyering— Strategies to Scale

A major discussion in cooperative lawyering is how best to develop coopera­tives at scale to maximize their impact as social justice tools for communities in crises and to achieve systemic change. There are various strategies being undertaken to scale up the cooperative movement in the United States, including sectoral/industry approaches, such as replicable franchise-like models; maximizing the purchasing power of “anchor institutions” like hos­pitals and universities; structuring networks or federations of cooperatives to promote intercooperation; leveraging the assets of unions to develop union cooperatives; encouraging municipal investment and cooperative-friendly legislation, especially tax incentives; improving access to capital; leverag­ing technology and platforms; targeting retiring business owners who are open to their workers converting the business to a worker cooperative; and expanding educational initiatives to make cooperatives more mainstream and to build skills specific to cooperative businesses. We will focus on the sec­toral or industry transformation approach and the anchor institution strategy, because they are the core strategies used in our case study and can serve as a model for industry transformation at scale.

The sectoral or industry transformation strategy involves benefiting from economies of scale; when done in combination with policy advocacy, it can have broad implications industrywide in terms of improved work practices. Some advocates of this approach suggest that, if you replicate businesses in a single industry, you can minimize the need for industry-specific training and can avoid reinventing the wheel. Others approach industry transformation while including co-operatizing the supply chains for that industry, developing multiple co-ops in a variety of industries, all in support of the broader sector.

The anchor institution strategy leverages the support and economic power of universities, hospitals, and other major institutions to support the develop­ment of the local community via procurement of goods and services from co­operatives. Nonprofit hospitals own assets in excess of $600 billion and have annual revenues greater than $500 billion.¹⁴ By purchasing locally from coop­erative businesses, anchor institutions can ensure that their expenditures circu­late within the local economy and help create wealth in the communities they serve. As local businesses, with local worker-owners, this money tends to fur­ther circulate in the local economy—for every dollar a person spends at a local business, there is a two-to-four multiplier effect on the local economy through hiring and purchasing?⁵ Additionally, purchasing locally creates reduced car­bon emissions, as goods have less distance to travel. Purchasing local also allows for a lower likelihood of service disruption due to weather and disasters.

Case Study: Brooklyn Sprout

Our case study for this chapter focuses on Brooklyn Sprout, a union co-op founded by community members to grow hydroponic produce in food deserts or food swamps to provide healthier food options to hospitals, homebound patients, and other residents. The union co-op is intentionally designed to empower workers and to help ensure that profits remain in the community to benefit the local economy and its residents.

Identifying the Need: Health Disparities and Food Insecurity in Brooklyn

Despite the government's recently stated policy goal to “revitalize” Brooklyn through development and improve residents' quality of life, the fact is that such policies were designed to maximize capital investment, resulting in new high-income residents moving in, with existing Brooklyn residents being dis­placed or having their quality of life diminished (e.g., when local businesses such as grocery stores cater to new residents' palates and raise price points). In reality, nearly one in four Brooklyn residents still lives in poverty. Nearly half of Brooklyn's residents are Medicaid beneficiaries, the majority of whom are located in predominantly Black and Brown communities. Brooklyn has the highest concentration of low-paying jobs in New York City. Only one in five households has an annual median income above $100,000, while the same percentage receives food stamp (SNAP) benefits. Brooklyn's incarcera­tion rates in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods are significantly higher than the average across the city. Bedford-Stuyvesant residents' aver­age life expectancy is 4.4 years shorter than the citywide average. Canarsie's rate of severe maternal morbidity is almost double the rate of New York City overall. East New York's rate of hospitalization for preventable diabetes issues is more than twice the city average. Brownsville's rates of hospitalization for asthma among children is nearly twice that of the city overall.¹⁶

Despite these statistics—or perhaps because of them—health care is the larg­est industry in the borough of Brooklyn. Not only does it employ more than 293,000 people in Brooklyn; the New York health-care sector supply chain (of which Brooklyn is a part) spends a substantial portion of its $10 billion invest­ments in goods and services in support of Brooklyn's hospitals, medical centers, and ambulatory care services. Furthermore, the central and northeast Brook­lyn public hospital system recently underwent a major restructuring to create a new regional health system, which decentralizes hospital care in exchange for heightened local, ambulatory, and preventative care services. Part of this restructuring includes the goal of focusing on preventative healthy living by addressing the social determinants of health (known as “SDOH”—the condi­tions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect health).

One social determinant of health in Brooklyn is the state of food security in the borough, or rather food insecurity (especially in marginalized com­munities). One in four Central Brooklynites lacks access to quality and varied food, which is almost twice the state average.¹⁷ Food insecurity is widespread and is a product of the various crises that communities that are marginalized in the United States face today. Food justice activists use the phrase “food apartheid” to reflect the systemic racism permeating America's food system and its related political and economic systems?⁸ Not only are there racial dis­parities in food insecurity?⁹ they are exacerbated by gentrification,²⁰ which changes the food retailers that compose the local food environment—and Central Brooklyn has been gentrifying rapidly.

Given the economic might of the health-care industry in Brooklyn, creat­ing enterprises that can contract with Brooklyn's health-care system would build local wealth for Central Brooklyn residents with wide economic dis­parities from unemployment and poverty levels, inadequate access to quality health care and mental health services,21 measurably higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and limited access to healthy foods or op­portunities for physical activity. It could also address some of the negative SDOH, including unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity.

Identifying the Community of Purpose: The Coalition to Save Interfaith

The Coalition to Save Interfaith (the Coalition) began to prevent the closings of safety-net hospitals and medical centers in Central Brooklyn and thus sparked an effort to keep one such medical center open—Interfaith Medical Center (IMC). IMC was slated to close due to “long-running underfunding, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and changing market conditions.” The Coalition, com­posed of local residents, health-care workers, community-based organizations, unions, business leaders, elected officials, and faith-based institutions, fought hard to keep IMC open in order to sustain access to health care, prevent job loss, and avoid the consequent spiraling crises associated with job losses in already hard-hit communities. The Coalition developed a community-driven, asset-based approach with a highly participatory design, which called for a greater emphasis to be placed on SDOH. One strategy to achieve this included sustaining local assets like the hospital itself, as well as increasing the supply of family-supporting, wealth-creating jobs and local ownership opportunities, with a goal of building a robust, community-owned entrepreneurial ecosystem.

While the Coalition was formed to save IMC, its work would also benefit its neighboring medical centers in Central Brooklyn, as the Central Brooklyn medical centers would become integrated as One Brooklyn Health Systems. After funding stabilized to keep the medical centers open, the Coalition to Save Interfaith changed its name to the Coalition to Transform Interfaith. The “transformation” would occur by making Interfaith an anchor institution for community wealth generation, starting with examining the supply chain to determine whether worker-owned cooperative entities could produce goods as part of a grassroots, community-led supply chain. And it was out of that desire to create such institutions that Brooklyn Sprout, worker-owned coop­erative, was formed.

The Emergence of Brooklyn Sprout

Brooklyn Sprout was conceived of as a union co-op that would grow pro­duce through hydroponic farming to source IMC's cafeteria and to deliver produce to homebound patients. The owners would be current residents and returning citizens, and the profits would largely remain within the commu­nity, thereby benefiting the local economy. As a worker-owned cooperative, Brooklyn Sprout aims to secure the right to affordable healthy food for those who do not have access. The enterprise's broader goals are to improve local residents' wellness by targeting the social determinants of health. The enterprise addresses poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration's impact on employment, and lack of access to healthy foods by creating an urban farm-worker cooperative that partners with IMC to grow food, so that local residents can be prescribed healthy foods instead of medicine and pay for such foods with either health insurance or other public benefit funds. Poten­tial worker-owners include local residents from the neighborhood (which has a disproportionately high unemployment rate), and particularly returning citizens, or people who were formerly incarcerated (Central Brooklyn also has a disproportionately high incarceration rate). Brooklyn Sprout will also partner with nonprofit organizations that provide job training programs and other reentry services to help ensure success.

The Brooklyn Sprout farm will be located on the grounds of IMC and will be constructed of modified shipping containers that are primarily powered by renewable energy (specifically, solar). The food prescriptions will be avail­able at farmers markets at IMC, as well as at farmers markets at nearby am­bulatory care facilities. Produce will also be available for purchase by local residents without a prescription. The enterprise also has an educational element—urban hydroponic farms in public schools—where students will learn about farming and how to leverage technological innovations that are altering the sector with the potential for greater production. In addition to providing STEAM training for students, the farms can serve as a potential bulwark against the probable collapse of the current agricultural system and consequent food scarcity due to the climate crisis.

As a cooperative, the enterprise should, at a minimum, have the means and rights of distribution of the product, and any surplus value is to be owned and controlled by the workers—people who, without such rights, would oth­erwise be deprived of some of the most important benefits generated by the production process. Furthermore, because the farm will be located on public land, the rights to access and use the land on which the production is located should not be able to be transferred, revoked, or otherwise rendered useless without the consent of a very high percentage of those who benefit from its productive capacity. Because one of the goals of the enterprise is to generate wealth for the community in common, the rights of ownership and control to the means of production (seeds, energy, water etc.) should also be protected from transfer or appropriation by means of capital exchange or contribution without a clear and equitable public benefit.

The idea of Brooklyn Sprout is in many ways a product of the food sover­eignty movement. “Food sovereignty” is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustain­able methods, as well as the right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It allows communities control over the way food is produced, traded, and consumed. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, dis­tribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the profits of multinational corporations.

Food sovereignty movements explicitly support Black farmers, who receive a disproportionately low percentage of farm subsidies.²² The Movement for Black Lives describes “food justice” as “a process whereby communities most impacted and exploited by our current corporate-controlled, extractive agricul­tural system shift power to re-shape, re-define, and provide indigenous, com­munity based solutions to accessing and controlling food that are humanizing, fair, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, environmentally sound and just.”2³ Framed this way, food sovereignty goes “beyond access to ensure that our com­munities have not only the right, but the ability to have community control of our food including the means of production and distribution.”²¹

Cooperatives are a natural fit for the food sovereignty movement, as they place the means of production and distribution in the owners. Indeed, there has been a call recently for cooperatives to help address inequitable access to healthy and nutritious foods. Cooperatives can serve as community-based al­ternatives to the global industrial food complex. As local community institu­tions, they can become local food hubs and support regional food networks.²⁵ Some have questioned the ability of worker cooperatives to make much of an impact, given that issues of food access center on poverty, and not just prox­imity, and worker cooperatives are designed, at least in part, to provide fair wages for the workers?⁶ However, while worker cooperatives are for-profit businesses, one of the cooperative principles is concern for community, and it is probable that worker cooperatives may consequently offer more reasonably priced food. There is also the potential for multi-stakeholder cooperatives to meet the needs of both consumers and workers.

In its work forming Brooklyn Sprout, one of the first actions of the legal team was to identify a potential opportunity in the nascent AgTech sector—a company developing hydroponic farming systems within shipping contain­ers, which could help facilitate the inception of the enterprise. Because of the potential to scale (compared to traditional, vertical, and/or rooftop farms) with a small physical footprint and relatively small start-up costs, a modified shipping container farming flowers or vegetables could quickly generate a product to supply the hospital. This, in turn, would allow the enterprise to begin navigating the city and state procurement systems early in their opera­tions, improving their chances of success.

The team helped locate public land for the farm to facilitate access to capi­tal and operating expenses for a proof of concept. The team also developed a business plan in collaboration with one of the initial worker-owners. As the plan was being evaluated by funders, the team counseled initial mem­bers of the organization through entity-type selection, helped form the legal entity, and developed a framework for implementing a cooperative gover­nance structure as the enterprise developed. Additionally, the team consid­ered how the enterprise could position itself to coordinate with the hospital, local farmers markets, and community-supported agricultural programs and also comply with New York City's soon-to-be implemented food prescription program. The team also helped the client apply for status as a Minority and Women-Owned Enterprise (M/WBE)—another way to help secure resources and bring the organization to scale.

Challenges and Best Practices in Crisis Lawyering on Behalf of Worker Cooperatives

In our work with the Coalition and Brooklyn Sprout, there were several chal­lenges that helped us establish some best practices for representing worker cooperatives moving forward. In reflecting on our work with the Coalition, a few notable issues arose: the idea of working with conceivers of worker coop­erative projects, versus the members of that cooperative; the need for clarity of roles and adequate staffing to execute projects; the variety of lawyering approaches that may be appropriate for cooperative projects; and the need for inclusive legal problem-solving skills regardless of which lawyering approach is used. We will discuss each of these issues and challenges, in turn, and our proactive efforts to deal with them.

Working with Conceivers versus Members

Lawyers must clearly identify who their client is. When representing start-up worker cooperatives that are being supported by an organization or group of people who will not ultimately be the members of the cooperative, lawyers have the choice of representing those cooperative “conceivers,” or the actual coop­erative (working with its members) once the entity is being formed.²⁷ Several factors may influence the choice to work with conceivers: the accessibility of lawyers to conceivers working at nonprofits as opposed to for-profit coopera­tives (as it may be easier to get pro bono representation for nonprofits than for-profit entities); the legal versus general informational needs of the conceiver (i.e., do they need legal representation or some other role, based on general sharing of information or idea or model generation); the legal complexity of the project (as it may be necessary for legal work to be performed before the co-op launches for certain complex projects); the need for cooperative exper­tise in legal representation (versus contract, license, real estate, or other legal work); the long-term relationship between the conceivers and the cooperative (e.g., some incubation models last a year or more before the co-op officially launches); the desire of the attorneys to represent and prioritize the voice of worker-owners (which may not be as centered when representing founders but may be addressed once worker-owners are on board); the desire of attorneys to support large-scale projects for maximum reach and impact (which are more likely to be developed by conceivers and not just members); and the list goes on.

For larger-scale worker cooperative projects, it is likely that there will be conceivers providing support. Conceivers often seek out the input of coop­erative attorneys regarding entity type, governance, organizational structure, contracts, intellectual property, and other regulatory and compliance issues. Especially for complex projects, a lot of pre-formation work must be done to ensure the viability of the project. Many prospective worker-owners may not have the capacity to be very active during the entire pre-formation stage, especially if they are not yet being paid by the cooperative and thus likely have other work obligations.

Thus, for larger-scale projects particularly, it makes sense for cooperative attorneys to work with conceivers, at least at first. They can help troubleshoot potential issues for cooperative projects (e.g., around licensure in highly regu­lated industries) and embed structural protections to ensure the co-op remains a co-op and is democratically owned and operated. Cooperative attorneys as­sociated with academic institutions can also provide research support on mod­els and issues that arise and can leverage their networks for various needs.

The main drawback for cooperative attorneys working with conceivers is running the risk that the cooperative is dominated by the conceivers, thereby diminishing the value of a democratic workplace and lessening the empower­ment of workers. Or worse yet, working closely with conceivers can raise the possibility that cooperative attorneys support a project that ultimately more closely resembles a traditional corporation, despite everyone's original and best intentions. Lawyers can implement a few strategies that can address this concern: serving as a project partner or consultant on cooperative projects, as opposed to assuming the role of counsel for the project; including language in a letter of engagement that ensures that the entity must be democratically governed or the lawyer has the right to end representation; and ensuring the lawyer has a major role, potentially even a governing role, in the cooperative start-up, so that she may help facilitate the actualization of cooperative values in the project until the worker-owners have legally become members of the cooperative. This would also allow for the lawyer to go over governance and employment issues with the worker-owners and help shape any amendments to the governance documents as appropriate.

The Need for Clarity of Roles and Adequate Staffing

A related issue is the need for adequate staffing to see a cooperative proj­ect through to launch. A successful large-scale cooperative has many needs: people who bring the ideas/theory/philosophy of cooperative econom­ics; business people who help develop viable business plans and assist with branding and marketing; project managers who ensure those ideas become a reality and who handle day-to-day logistics; people who perform outreach to potential worker-owners and, if applicable, unions; people who train worker­owners in their trade and in cooperative management; people who leverage political networks; lawyers; fund-raisers; and others. A large-scale successful cooperative often takes multiple years to conceive of and launch, and these various roles must be staffed and funded.

These roles must be identified so that sufficient expertise is contributed to each area. And each role must be funded in the pre-formation stage of co­operative development. When they are not, projects are very slow to launch. Lawyers can sometimes take on some of these roles during the pre-formation stage, as discussed in the following two sections, but lawyers' resources are also limited, and clarity of roles is key to a smooth collaboration.

Different Lawyering Approaches May Be Useful, Depending on the Context

We also acknowledge that different lawyering approaches are called for in different circumstances, and there is not a one-size-fits-all strategy for the legal team to utilize. In the case of Brooklyn Sprout, an integrative lawyering approach worked well. In our practice, we often embrace a client-centered and/or CED-empowerment approach to lawyering, which is characterized by emphasizing the “role of marginalized stakeholders as decision makers and beneficiaries in a community's development process.”²⁸ Indeed, the CED- empowerment approach fosters the collective action and active democratic participation of community residents to reshape their social, economic, and political systems?⁹

While this project recognized community voices as the inspiration for and source of the representation,³⁰ given the scale, the knowledge base of the co­alition, and the tight time frames we faced, we took an integrative lawyering approach. This approach did not and does not focus exclusively on the law­yer's counseling role, through which she strives to ensure that that the client has enough information to make its own decision, to which the lawyer then ultimately defers. The integrative lawyering approach allows for the lawyer to be an equal contributor to the representation and the discussions that flow from that representation, but she does not assume the role of final decision maker. When the lawyer assumes an integrative role with a client, she should make sure she feels comfortable giving advice based on the lawyer's expertise, but she should also commit to empowering the client to push back on and reject the lawyer's advice. Thus, the lawyer may play a larger role in various parts of the project³¹—helping conceive of models, develop strategy, advo­cate, provide public education and outreach, fund-raise, and give legal advice. Throughout this process, the lawyer gives her opinion and/or advice more directly to the client and assumes a robust deliberative and dialogic role with the client. Conceivers with a clear vision for the work tend to defer less to the lawyers' opinion, thus lawyers can more freely debate strategy with such individuals, ultimately playing a larger role in the decision-making process that informs and guides the representation, with the recognition, always, that the client makes the ultimate decisions regarding the representation, with the client and lawyer discussing the means of how to accomplish the client's goals in a collaborative and meaningful way.

Embracing an integrative lawyering approach requires applying a flexible mixture of skills, which is referred to as “role integration.”³² For this project, we had to integrate a broad range of intersectional practice areas, skills, and roles. At times we helped fund-raise, advocate, and develop budgets and busi­ness plans, in addition to acting as transactional attorneys advising on matters such as entity type, governance, contracts, and intellectual property. Under the integrative lawyering approach, the attorney is “expected to do more than translate the organization/community's grievance into discreet legal frame­works and discourse”³³ The attorney may participate in activities on behalf of or in partnership with the client from which the client may benefit from the presence of an attorney for any number of reasons. This approach requires a “shifting, flexible mix of skills and a more dynamic interaction with the or­ganization and its varied functions—policy, community education, lobbying, and organizing”3⁴ as well as fund-raising and strategic planning. Indeed, be­cause the Coalition had a complex and clearly communicated vision but was operating with limited resources, the lawyering team was deployed in all of these settings, particularly the last two. Faculty and students strategized with the Coalition on: how to build out a Central Brooklyn health-care ecosystem that would have the medical centers serve as anchor institutions that generate community health and wealth; how to create a plan that made sense of all the moving parts; and how and in what order to tackle them. As part of our work, we also helped the client take advantage of an opportunity to secure needed start-up capital, which is often one of the major obstacles to co-op formation. We did this by helping the client write a business plan and successfully secure funding. The client could not obtain these services in the market in the time frame needed, so we provided those services with the full disclosure that this was not our area of expertise—but we were willing to do what we could so the deal did not fall through. And we are fortunate enough that we had an attor­ney on our team with experience writing business plans and fund-raising. We consider this nonlawyering as part of our work when a client needs to build capacity and is operating under time pressures. We do the work, however, as a capacity-building tool to help the client get off the ground. It is not work that we would continue to do for the same client in future projects.

The Need for Inclusive Legal Problem-Solving Skills

Regardless of the lawyering approach selected, we see a need for inclusive, holis­tic legal problem-solving skills, including skills that may not traditionally be seen as legal. The authors recognize that inclusive legal problem-solving skills, including “metacognitive self-awareness, robust information gathering, active listening, language reframing, facilitation, problem-solving, and consensus­building skills,”³⁵ are essential skills for effective lawyering and produce the best outcomes for their clients. Part of problem-solving includes performing capacity-building work, such as drafting a business plan and securing financ­ing that may not be traditionally viewed as legal work. Capacity-building work is often needed in a systems-change context. It is critical in helping the com­munity turn their dreams into reality, and while some clients may not have these particular skills at first, they do have the business skills and need only temporary assistance in getting their business off the ground before they either develop these skills themselves or can afford to pay for them.

One might argue that a lawyer's expertise lies in legal representation and that lawyers should not spend their time fund-raising, relationship-building, or acting as business consultants. However, in our work generally, we have found that refusing to take on these roles can result in stalled or even failed projects. Furthermore, an expanded role for lawyers, including public educa­tion and other nonlegal responsibilities, is widely observed and advocated for in community-lawyering settings.³⁶ The authors also note that this critique seems to be applied mainly to the social justice-lawyering context, but not to an equal extent in a private, for-profit corporate context. Corporate lawyers have long played more expansive roles on behalf of their private-sector cli­ents: “[I]t is an established, successful corporate law convention for lawyers to have a more expansive professional role. CED lawyers, like business lawyers, act as strategist[s], counselors, and facilitators before a variety of involved third parties."3^y In addition:

[L]awyers can advance client empowerment by providing additional expert guidance on these [non-legal] matters in order to supplement the client's abili­ties. Providing this assistance fosters the actual development of client auton­omy. The lawyer's involvement educates the client on how to approach such matters on their own in the future, especially if the client organization and its members have not acquired these skills in the past/⁸

We do believe that lawyers should perform only work that they are compe­tent to perform, whether that is legal or nonlegal. However, we stand behind our choice to take on various roles in this project. When performing such tasks, however, it is important to clarify with the client what role the client wants to assume when taking on those tasks, especially whether it is legal or nonlegal. We also encourage clients to consider building into their project budgets line items for services such as project management staff and for activities that fos­ter collaboration among subject-matter experts who may provide additional needed technical services. We are very intentional in our efforts to ensure that we are not assuming too large a role in carrying out the tasks necessary to see a project through to completion, because we do not want to crowd out or displace the role that community members should play in ensuring that the outcome of the representation adequately reflects and embodies their interests.

Conclusion

Many in the worker cooperative movement are grappling with how to increase the size and scope of worker cooperatives. We hope that our approach can serve as guidance for those who wish to build out a model that combines an anchor-institution approach with a sectoral approach to maximize the reach and impact of the benefits of the model, including contributing to larger economic democracy and social justice movements, as well as laying a foundation for a robust cooperative ecosystem. In the health-care sector, this is an approach that can sustain access to health care and address the social determinants of health, including by preventing job loss and its consequent associated crises, while also creating sustainable, safe, and dignified jobs and building collective wealth. Given the multitude of crises simultaneously occurring today, particularly in communities that are marginalized, focus­ing on anchor institutions and specific sectors can address the intersection of various crises through worker ownership, including the lack of economic security, food sovereignty, and improved health outcomes, which are all exac­erbated by racial disparities and the political-economic crises of our time.

NOTES

1 On growing authoritarianism in the twenty-first century, see Yascha Mounk, The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (2018).

2 Matthew Desmond, In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation, N.Y. Times (Aug. 14, 2019) (tracing the brutality of the American system of capitalism to its origins in slavery).

3 On the interplay between economic inequality and political inequality generally, see Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2011).

4 See, e.g., Gautam Mukunda, The Social and Political Costs of the Financial Crisis, 10 Years Later, Harv. Bus. Rev. (Sep. 25, 2018).

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent 35-38 (2019) (discussing ever-rising inequality in the United States).

Pam Fessler, 3 Million Could Lose Food Stamp Benefits Under Trump Administration Proposal, NPR (Jul 23, 2019, 12:07pm ET).

Kali Akuno & Ajamu Nangwaya, Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi 8-9 (2017). Akuno and Nangwaya describe how the capitalist system can no longer absorb the Black working class into productive endeavors, leading to “correction and contraction,” which excludes and if necessary disposes of all the surpluses that cannot be absorbed or consumed at a profit (essentially illustrating that capitalism after slavery views Black labor as a surplus, which they seek to remove from the market via imprisonment). Id. On the relationship between economic inequality and adverse health outcomes, see Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits, 40-43.

See, e.g., Louise Matsakis, The Truth About Amazon, Food Stamps, and Tax Breaks, Wired (Sep. 6, 2018, 07:27P.M. ET) (explaining that, despite being valued at $1 trillion, Amazon makes the Top 20 list of companies with full-time workers who receive SNAP benefits). Despite Amazon claiming $11.2 billion in profits in 2018, it also paid no corporate taxes.

Joshua Brustein, Hospitals in Crisis, Gotham Gazette (Sept. 26, 2005, www. gothamgazette.com/health/3004-hospitals-in-crisis.

On the role of corporate support for conservative politicians and policies that are hostile to working people, let alone the environment and public health, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of The Radical Right (2016).

See, e.g., Carmen Huertas-Noble, Jessica Rose & Brian Glick, The Greening of Community and Economic Development: Dispatches From New York City, 31 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 645, 654 (2009).

Id.

See, e.g., Community-Wealth.org, www.community-wealth.org.

See, e.g., Priya Baskaran, Introduction to Worker Cooperatives and Their Role in the Changing Economy, 24 J. Affordable Housing & Community Dev. L. 355, 366 (2015).

New York City, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Community Health Profiles 2018 (2018).

See Governor Cuomo Announces Next Step in $1.4 Billion Vital Brooklyn Initiative, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (Aug. 16, 2018), www.governor.ny.gov.

See, e.g., Anna Brones, Food Apartheid: the Roots of the Problem With Americas Groceries, The Guardian (May 15, 2018).

See, e.g., Rashid Njai et al., Prevalence of Perceived Food and Housing Security—15 States, 2013, 66 MMWR Morb. Mortal. Wkly. Rep. 12, 12 (2017).

See generally Daniel Sullivan, From Food Desert to Food Mirage: Race, Social Class, and Food Shopping in a Gentrifying Neighborhood, 4 Advances in Applied Soc. 30 (2014).

See, e.g., Brooklyn Community Foundation, Brooklyn Facts, www. brooklyncommunityfoundation.org.

See Brones, Food Apartheid.

Just Food, Justice From the Ground Ups Tipsheet: Defining Food Security, Justice and Sovereignty, 2 (quoting the Movement for Black Lives) (on file with the author). Id. at 4.

Dan DePasquale et al., Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City, 45 Fordham Urb. L.J. 909, 910 (2018).

See Jonathan Brown, Beyond Corporate Form: A Response to Dan Depasquale, Surbhi Sarang, and Natalie Bump Vena’s Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City, 45 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1121, 1123 (2018).

Note that this is not a discussion on the legal ethics of this choice but a reflection on strategy and logistics. The authors note that legal ethics are always a part of our considerations when weighing strategic and logistical decisions with clients. Carmen Huertas-Noble, Promoting Worker- Owned Cooperatives as a CED Empowerment Strategy: A Case Study of Colors and Lawyering in Support of Participatory Decision-Making and Meaningful Social Change, 17 Clinical L. Rev. 255, 258 (2010).

Id. at 284.

NYS DOH convened a series of community engagement sessions in which Northwell Health participated to inform its study, which included three major activities: (1) conducting surveys of community perceptions; (2) facilitating small group discussions on specific health issues (e.g., cancer, diabetes, asthma, etc.); and (3) eight community engagement meetings where individuals provided testimonials on a wide range of topics, including their vision of what type of health care system would best serve them. The NYS Commissioner of Health led community engagement meetings with representatives of the governor’s office, NYS DOH, and elected officials.

Sheila R. Foster & Brian Glick, Integrative Lawyering: Navigating the Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment, 95 Calif. L. Rev. 1999, 2057-59 (2007). Id.

Id. at 2004.

Id. at 2004-05.

Beryl Blaustone & Carmen Huertas-Noble, Lawyering at the Intersection of Mediation and Community Economic Development: Interweaving Inclusive Legal Problem-Solving Skills in the Training ofEffective Lawyers, 34 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 157, 160 (2010).

See Foster & Brian Glick, Integrative Lawyering, 2057.

Id., 159.

Id., 159.

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