Psst! Your co-operative future just dropped

Welcome to our summer newsletter! The UN-designated year of the cooperative is filling our nights with intensely vivid dreams of co-operative futures, and we recently thought of bringing a notepad to one of these Orphic excursions. Here’s what was written on it when we came back:

It’s Friday morning, the first day of the weekend. Your kids are bouncing off the walls because you’re going to the park. Your local arts collective has taken it over, and they’ll be showcasing some of their interactive artwork. As a member of the community they serve, you got to vote on which artworks were displayed. You’re excited to see some of your choices today. You put sunscreen on the kids, leash the dog, and head out.

They’re immediately demanding ice cream. Fair enough: you figure you’ll need coffee before interacting with public art, anyway. Your friend just started a co-operative grocer-café down the road. The seating area’s giving mess hall, with long metallic tables. They have jars of homemade soup in the fridges at the back. You work for a small web design co-op, so you’re part of the national federation of IT workers. Like all your colleagues, you bank with a decentralized credit union. As one of the largest consumers of caffeinated beverages in the country, the federation of IT workers has special volume-buying arrangements with the federation of food service workers. You pay four dollars, plus fees and tip, for a large cappuccino and two ice cream cones. The fees go towards maintaining the payments infrastructure that your decentralized bank uses. Your tip is locked into the cafe’s smart contract for tip sharing, part of a set of open-source tooling maintained by the food service workers’ federation. The barista knows that they’re getting their share at the end of the month based on hours worked. Nobody’s able to skim off the top. The loan your friend and their partners took out to buy freezers and milk foamers was underwritten by the food service workers’ federation, at an interest rate of 1% per annum.

Looks like everyone came to the park for opening weekend, including several of your neighbours. You live in a housing co-op, so you know them pretty well from regular meetings and shared maintenance work. Here’s that one lady you got into a fight with over opening times for the pool. You’re glad you had other people around to mediate that one, and that you were all able to agree to a new fee structure so the pool could open at 6 AM. You exchange curt hellos.

The exhibit is pay what you can. You tap your phone to pay five bucks. The membership at your co-op loves the arts, so your workplace chucks in an extra five. Your kids find their friends at an AR basketball game, and you use this instant of freedom to explore the installations you voted for. There’s a VR headset that says 18+. You put it on and an announcer explains that this park used to be a residential school. You’re now a student at this school. Five harrowing minutes later, you take the headset off.

Your youngest shouts “look, I’m Kevin Durant!” and throws an invisible ball through an invisible hoop. Everyone cheers. Your phone buzzes. Your friend sent you several 😡 emojis and a video she just found on social media. The video shows a thirteen year old asylum-seeker sweeping the floors of a meat-packing plant. You know that it’s not an AI fake because it’s cryptographically signed by the camera that took it, which can also attest to the time and place of its recording. It is mathematically impossible for this video to be anything other than what it looks like. The whistleblower uploaded it to an app for secure activism; all identifying details have been stripped. The app doesn’t even know what IP address the video came from. There were 200 people working the floor that day, and there’s no way to ascertain which of them recorded it.

Your friend explains that her cooperative is working with its federation to punish the guilty plant. You tell her you’ll do the same, and dash off a message to your co-op’s contact at the federation of IT workers. Graciously, she answers on a Friday and executes a smart contract on your decentralized credit union. The meat-packing plant is now under embargo by the national federation of IT workers. If you tried to go to your local butcher to buy a prime rib, your card would fail until presented with a cut that wasn’t packed at the plant that’s been shown to use child labour. Your kids take their headset off. They’re sick of basketball. The family dog has to poop again. You toss your empty coffee cup away before picking the dog poo up. It’s barely one PM. Smart to bring snacks with you. You can stay out for as long as it takes to get everyone fully exhausted.

We awoke from this dream to realize that we, in fact, already have multiple friends that are involved in co-operatives of various types. We went out to ask them how they feel about their co-ops, some of which, we realized, we’d already seen in our delirium. This is what our friends said:

Marie-Eve (Montreal):

I live in a housing co-op, but I’m also active in a nearby grocery co-op. I take part in these kinds of structures (precious and necessary) to support a way of living together rooted in collective decision-making, the sharing of knowledge and resources, but above all, for the network of solidarity that emerges from it. It’s beautiful to shape the spaces we inhabit so they reflect who we are, and to have interactions that break out of the neoliberal transactional mold. It feels good, and personally, it gives me hope.

Simon (Montreal):

I’ve been living in a housing cooperative for about 13 years, with my two children. In the past, I often lived with 5, 10, even 14 roommates, in shared apartments with communal food, farm baskets, and so on. I never really imagined my life unfolding within a nuclear family model. Housing co-ops strike a good balance for me between the need for private space and the desire to live in a collective environment.

I don't see how equitable access to housing can be achieved without removing it from speculation and the capitalist market. I’d have a really hard time imagining myself as a tenant renting from a landlord, let alone a real estate company. That just doesn’t make sense to me. And being a homeowner myself wouldn’t feel much better. The idea of occupying a space while I need it, then leaving it behind (ideally in better shape) for others once I’m gone, applies just as much to the natural environment as it does to built spaces. That vision doesn’t align well with a neoliberal worldview.

Sharing responsibility for my living space with others, even when it’s heavy or complicated, is a first step into democratic life. It already requires negotiation, collective thinking, and building a shared future. I learn from the people I live alongside. It forces me to compromise, but we also share responsibilities and help one another based on our strengths. I’m proud to live in a co-op. I have a truly beautiful apartment in a strong condo syndicate with millions of dollars in assets downtown, and that’s mostly thanks to the people who came before me. Knowing that I’m carrying the torch and trying to further develop this model is deeply satisfying.

My co-op also has connections that go beyond housing. I’m involved with the local citizens’ committee that founded it. We have a shared community garden, a co-op bar, and more. All of this feels like meaningful alternatives to dominant models.

Violet’s anonymous friend at Karma Co-operative (Toronto):

I’m involved in the co-op sector because I believe it’s a meaningful and transformative way of organizing—one that meets immediate material and cultural needs while also laying the groundwork for an economy rooted in care and solidarity.

In a competitive world where trust in institutions is fragile and the weight of individual responsibility can feel overwhelming, the co-operative model offers a different path. It creates institutions people can genuinely trust. Unlike the broader capitalist system, co-ops foster a sense of collective responsibility—members look out for one another’s well-being. This shared responsibility eases the burden on the individual, allowing people to lower their guard, feel supported, and trust that the collective has their best interests at heart.

In day-to-day operations, this trust translates into an incredibly wholesome atmosphere—one that softens even the most stressful tasks and interactions, making the co-op a uniquely supportive and fulfilling place to work.

We think these testimonials are very exciting. The dream is getting closer! Wouldn’t you like to work in a more co-operative world? Come chat with us if so! We are always open to new collaborations and projects

Finally, we wrote about a blockchain performance experiment in our latest Dripline post, Are we a credit card yet? Go check it out to learn about our adventures in decentralized payments processing!