Growing a Solidarity Economy

“What do you think is the biggest gap in the solidarity economy, and how can we address it?”

These questions were the focus of several events in the fall of 2025, including a Community Wealth Building gathering in Washington, DC, and the Maryland Regional Solidarity and Cooperative Convening. At these events, and in interviews with a number of practitioners and cooperative developers, many answers came up: expanding capital options for the solidarity economy, responsive infrastructure for workers and community entrepreneurs, and a commitment to solidarity and equal exchange internationally that goes beyond what’s “in sight” every day.

Overwhelmingly, people also spoke about the desire for stories that connect with people to help bring them into this work.

What Is a Solidarity Economy?

To discuss stories and solutions in practice, we first have to understand what a solidarity economy is.

Emily Kawano, founder of the US Solidarity Economy Network, described it in Shareable as “a global movement for a world that centers people and the planet rather than maximizing private profit,” adding that it is a blend of old and new practices—including worker and consumer cooperatives, community finance, and community land ownership. “The trick is to connect these currently atomized practices,” Kawano wrote, “so they work together to transform our whole economic system.”

How can “the economy” and the “solidarity economy” become one and the same?

Is that transformation happening? There is some good news and bad news in this area.

The solidarity economy today is much more visible in the United States than it once was. Before 2008, philanthropic or public policy support for solidarity economy practices, such as worker cooperatives and sharing libraries, was scant (outside of the rare exception like Marion Barry’s cooperative programs in Washington, DC, in the 1980s). Federal community finance support existed, but the community development financial institution (CDFI) sector was far smaller than it is today. Now, these practices are recognized by national foundations and cities across the country, with real programs and funding behind them.

The bad news? Despite this progress, the solidarity economy makes up a tiny percentage of the overall economy (at least by formal standards like gross domestic product).

One could argue we’re even further from a system that “centers people and planet” than we were 50 years ago, when President Richard Nixon was advocating for universal healthcare and environmental agendas, and before $79 trillion moved from 90 percent of Americans to the wealthiest 1 percent. This, based on a Rand study that found the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received 67 percent of income in 1975—a number that had plummeted to 46.8 percent by 2019. That represents trillions of dollars in lost income for ordinary people every year.

Today, our economy is marked by an affordability crisis, a housing crisis, environmental crises, and crises of government representation and ever-growing corporate power.

Solidarity economy practices offer possible ways to resolve these problems and better meet our needs. But how can “the economy” and the “solidarity economy” become one and the same?

The Challenge of Capital

Organizing cooperatives and other solidarity economy initiatives—from credit unions to housing and food cooperatives to community land trusts and local services—is significant and vital work. But funding these initiatives is far higher-risk than lending to existing businesses, according to typical funders and lenders.

At the Maryland cooperative convening, a panel of funders including Hugo Spaulding of Capital Impact Partners, Kate Khatib of Seed Commons, and Eduardo Cabral of Triple Beam Advisors took on this problem and proposed solutions.

Spaulding and Cabral discussed the possibility of “search funds”—a vehicle traditionally used to fund MBA graduates as they search for an existing business to acquire and operate—reimagined for worker cooperatives, to provide people with living stipends and time to develop their own cooperative business opportunities.

Khatib raised a similar proposal, calling for more grants for early-stage cooperative readiness, to provide workers with compensated time for organizing, self-education, and cooperative development.

In a separate conversation, crowdfunding expert Jenny Kassan spoke about a different source of capital: communities. “People looking for investment often only look at the 0.1 percent of professionals who call themselves ‘investors,’” Kassan said. “Meanwhile, we’re missing the 97 percent of people all around us—neighbors, customers, fellow community members—who can invest in businesses too.”

In addition to regulation crowdfunding, which must occur through a government-regulated intermediary, Kassan discussed more nimble and affordable offerings that solidarity economy businesses can put to use. These might include raising member dues for cooperatives, intrastate crowdfunding, or simply helping businesses validate their offerings faster to get the capital they need from customer revenue.

Underscoring all of this, Kassan said that community members, customers, and stakeholders are “absolutely” the best people to raise capital from—squarely in line with solidarity economy practices like peer lending, direct public offerings, and crowdfunding.

Still, these practices are niche in our economy today. How can these (and other solidarity economy practices) become more readily available—even mainstream?

A Supportive Culture and Infrastructure

At the Community Wealth Building gathering in Washington, DC, a different kind of need arose: responsive support across a broad spectrum of solidarity economy work.

Reflecting on the current landscape, participants spoke about outdated resources, not knowing where to search or find help, or being let down by organizations that couldn’t deliver on offerings.

Elias Crim, a long-time researcher of cooperatives, summed it up like this: “In Bologna [Italy], if you want to start a cooperative, you have to make one call—and you’ll get all the help you need. Where is that for the solidarity economy in the United States?”

That, in fact, goes hand-in-hand with findings from another public service sector in the United States: journalism.

This May, climate reporter Amy Westervelt published findings from an investigation into the Atlas Network, a group “of more than 500 ‘free market’ think tanks.” Digging through archives, she sought to understand Atlas’s and other corporations’ control over the information ecosystem, and how Atlas “finds, cultivates, and sustains talent.”

One of the main tools Westervelt found was intake forms—not unlike the contact forms and submission forms on many websites and grant portals in the solidarity economy. However, the attentiveness and care that Westervelt found—the support—offered a stark contrast to what solidarity economy practitioners and cooperative organizers experience today.

“Intake forms note what sorts of things [a] person is doing, where they’re located in the world, and what kind of support might make the most sense,” Westervelt noted.

Participants in DC shared experiences of rarely hearing back from funders and support organizations, difficulty finding those opportunities in the first place, and lacking simple support to connect with peers and potential partners in their own city.

Imagine if they had a system like what Westervelt described—where emails got replies, connections to partners and funders were made, and people received responsive support for growing solidarity economy practices in their communities?

It’s conceivable that many of those practices would—and will—be growing all around us.

The Solidarity in “Solidarity Economy”

For a solidarity economy to grow, we can’t forget the solidarity.

To realize genuine solidarity with communities around the world, we must correct the exploitation and unequal exchange in our current economy.

This will be no easy feat. Take it from one of the most successful solidarity economy projects in the world. Mondragón Cooperative, based in the Basque region of Spain, is the world’s largest network of worker cooperatives. At the firm, the worker-owners have a saying: “This is not paradise, and we are not angels.”

As advocates talk about growing a solidarity economy, it’s important to keep in mind the principle of equal exchange with workers and communities.

That isn’t tongue in cheek. As Mondragón has grown to transform more of its regional economy, its worker-owners have faced real challenges in upholding cooperative principles. That includes hiring non-owner wage workers and establishing subsidiaries outside of Spain that are not themselves cooperatives, according to a report authored by researchers Ignacio Bretos and Anjel Errasti.

These challenges will hit even harder in the United States, where nearly all of the ways people meet their needs—food, energy, care—depend on extraction from other parts of the world.

Where Do We Go from Here?

As advocates talk about growing a solidarity economy, it’s important to keep in mind the principle of equal exchange with workers and communities, centered in relationship.

The risk is that the “solidarity” in solidarity economies becomes a shallow, conditional solidarity limited to those “in sight” and blind to how products are made.

What would the trade of cobalt or the production of a computer or cell phone look like in a world of cooperative ideals—featuring fair exchange with artisanal miners and transport workers, fair exchange with manufacturing workers, and fair exchange with shop employees and last-mile delivery drivers here in the United States?

If the goal is a genuine solidarity economy, these are the types of questions advocates must answer.

Doing this, grounded in a clear-eyed vision of what solidarity means and what overcoming unequal exchange requires, offers a pathway to make the solidarity economy real—and thus transform the global economy to put people and planet at the center.