All certified CDFI’s are required to offer technical assistance as part of their programming. At CFNE, that’s reflected through our Learning Team. As we’ve been reflecting on our journey as an organization in the co-op ecosystem, we wanted to shine a light on the origins and growth of this relatively new arm of the team that offers business coaching for cooperatives and other technical assistance programs.
In this interview style article you’ll learn more about the CFNE Learning Team through the eyes of its first staff member, Carolyn Edsell-Vetter, our Program Director. It’s a long read, but provides so much insight into our world and how we see ourselves in the broader ecosystem. It’s worth the read, so get cozy with your favorite drink and dive in.
Before you get started, here’s some quick background to add context to how the Q&A begins:
Carolyn was a worker-owner of A Yard & A Half (AY&AH), a landscaping cooperative located near Boston, MA before joining CFNE.
How did you first get introduced to CFNE?
In 2012, inspired in part by the example of South Mountain Company, as told in John Abrams’ book , the Companies We Keep, the owner of A Yard & A Half (where I worked at the time) started discussing the possibility for the employees to buy the business from her. In order to learn more about worker-ownership, several of us on the company’s leadership team started attending meetings of WORC’N (the now-defunct Worker Owned & Run Cooperative Network of Boston), which included representatives from Equal Exchange, The Community Builders, and other worker-owned area cooperatives. Folks there connected us with other co-op conversions nationally, as well as recommending that we reach out to CFNE for assistance. The southeastern loan officer, Maggie Cohn, connected us to co-op knowledgeable accountants and lawyers, and educated us about the process of putting in a loan application, including sharing templates for a business plan and pro forma financial projections. Her questions, relationship-building with co-op members, and advocacy made the difference in our being able to persevere and secure the loan.
How soon after the borrower relationship started did the learning team position become available at CFNE?
Almost 5 years – we became a CFNE borrower at the start of Jan 2014, and the position of Cooperative Business Officer was created in the fall of 2018. The position was created, in part, due to the feedback that A Yard & A Half and other borrowers of color had given in the interim about the challenges that were experienced in the loan application process.
Why were you interested in the position?
I always thought of myself as a little bit of an “interim pastor” at AY&AH (with my background in religious studies, I had always seen socially-conscious /triple bottom-line business as my “ministry,” so this felt like a natural metaphor for me). I was really excited about the process of becoming a co-op, and was happy to provide some stability going through the conversion process, but knew there was a point where I would be able to make more of an impact elsewhere. And when I saw this opening for someone bilingual, with experience with small businesses, co-ops, and community development, it felt like a natural fit. After 18 months of intense co-op development and 5 years as a co-CEO in a fast-paced and rapidly growing landscaping cooperative, I was also ready to be able to have a life that put my 2 young kids at the center. I had seen that CFNE valued families, flexibility, and work-life balance. So I applied.
So you applied, interviewed, then got the job. What now? What was the transition like for you?
It was a pretty organic transition, because many of the things I did at AY&AH (training and mentoring co-op members on business management, financial storytelling, governance, and conflict transformation; representing the organization and building relationships; designing new systems and programs) were key parts of my role at CFNE. I’m also someone who loves to learn and to have varied responsibilities, so it was fun to jump deeper into the co-op pool.
What was the purpose of your role when you first started?
The original hypothesis of launching my role was that business/financial knowledge and low-cost start-up financing were the barriers racialized entrepreneurs faced to launch and operate co-op businesses. [With that said], my initial role was created with grant funding to increase racial equity in the lending pipeline through providing culturally appropriate, bilingual “technical assistance” (CDFI jargon for business coaching and training). Rereading the original job description, it was initially conceptualized as a lending position, with responsibilities for “outreach, technical assistance, and loan application support to minority and immigrant led co-op efforts in southern New England.” That lending focus is unsurprising because up until that point, CFNE had been laser-focused on lending, with TA largely consisting of “demystifying the lending process.”
What else can you tell us about your early days at CFNE?
When I started, the board’s racial equity working group (it wasn’t even a standing committee yet!) passed off a list of stakeholder interview data and contacts from a listening project that had recently completed to gather feedback from communities of color in our region. While I helped a few applicants with their loan applications and ran a handful of co-op finance trainings, I also started setting up meetings and calls, mapping the ecosystem, trying to understand what resources and community assets really existed to support co-op development.
I know that the Learning Team is far more than that now. How did tasks and responsibilities shift and grow from there?
Well, soon after I started, the pandemic hit. Once that happened, my focus pivoted to digesting rapidly changing information about relief programs available to support our existing co-op borrowers. We collected that information first on our website, then in a monthly borrower e-blast that would later become the Co-op Monthly. We also collaborated with an emerging group of racially diverse local economic developers and small business TA providers to get the word out to BIPOC and immigrant small business owners about PPP and other pandemic economic relief packages.
What did you learn from these early experiences and how did you respond?
That experience taught me about the resilience and creativity of entrepreneurs, the disarray that is the average small business’s bookkeeping, and the benefit cooperatives have in needing to share financial information with their members. As my racial equity outreach and the Equitable PPP effort brought me into relationship with more Black, Latine, and Indigenous cooperators — and more importantly, communities exploring cooperative options to meet their shared needs — it became clear that “money and knowhow” were not the only reasons BIPOC folks weren’t flocking to CFNE. People were hesitant for a myriad of valid reasons: trust, generational and personal trauma, cultural values about money, representation in the “mainstream” co-op movement, co-optation and professionalization of home-grown solutions by white-led non-profits.
In response to everything we were learning, we started talking with co-op interested grassroots organizations about what work they were already doing, and what would enable them to scale up their exploration of culturally relevant co-op with models. An unprecedented number of new co-ops were launching during the pandemic, while some existing borrowers struggled to pivot. We realized that direct 1:1 support and partnership development were both potentially full-time jobs in the pandemic environment. It was time to grow!
So quick re-cap: you started late 2018/early 2019. Within about 1-year the pandemic hits and pivots the work you were hired to do. Combining some pre-existing data and all the new information you were learning through pandemic response, you noticed some gaps that needed to be filled and identified some ways to do that. What happened next? What did growth look like?
In January of 2021, we hired Johan as a Community Engagement Coordinator to increase strategic partnerships and provide additional coaching capacity. In addition to adding staff capacity, we doubled down on partnerships to support co-ops and other small businesses impacted by the pandemic and to respond to the increase in “co-op curious” communities. In partnership with the Cooperative Development Institute, we launched the Participatory Management Initiative to support businesses preparing for or having gone through a co-op conversion. We used the information gathered from 18 months of listening sessions with grassroots partners to conceptualize the Co-op Navigator Fellowship, which we planned to launch in fall of 2022.
Expansion of new programs drove two more hires to fill out our Learning Team. Program Associate Maggie Maiorana joined us in spring of 2022 to support the Co-op Navigator Fellowship cohort of 5 fellows and partner sites, as well as helping solidify Learning Team communications and data systems. As we began another collaboration with CDI, the Northeast Transition Initiative, Co-op Coach Karla Torres came on in fall of 2023 to ensure our continued capacity to provide personalized support to Spanish and English-speakers starting co-ops.
That is some rapid, consistent growth. What has been a highlight or memorable learning program accomplishment for you?
I don’t feel like we can claim credit for the successes of coaching clients or borrowers, but seeing them overcome obstacles is the most gratifying thing for me. That might be something as big as successfully pulling together all of the projections needed to apply for and close on a loan, or as “simple” as a co-op member facilitating a meeting to help their board solve an internal conflict. Each step a member takes helps build their self-confidence and their ability to pass that skill on to other co-op members.
At a more meta level, I’m really excited to have time to reflect on the learnings and impact of the first Coop Navigator fellowship cohort. It has been a joy to learn with Desi, Steph, Swain, Varun, and David, as well as our partners at the host sites, and to see all of the cool innovations they have developed over the past 2.5 years! Looking back at the impact model we developed in 2021, many of our hypotheses about the program’s impact have come to fruition, and where we missed the mark, we have a clear idea of how to shift things.
I love that. How do you see the learning program growing from here?
As I’ve been reflecting on all this, I’m a little surprised by how much we’ve accomplished in 5 short years! There’s been a lot of innovation and experimentation, in part because of the nature of a new team and new work, and in part in response to the rapidly changing conditions of the pandemic and associated funding environment. And while we continue to live in interesting times, I’m looking forward to metabolizing all of that growth — deciding what we want to retain to build into the more permanent structure of the learning team. Over the next 5-10 years, I hope that we can make the work we’re doing more systematized and replicable, so that we can continue to expand our outreach and relationship building and support many more communities to form co-ops. One concrete accomplishment that would make that possible would be to secure sustainable funding to continue running consecutive Co-op Navigator Fellowship cohorts. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling up cooperatives in a region as geographically, economically, and demographically varied as the northeast — having place-based fellows with deep knowledge and relationships is one promising way to increase cooperative density in the region while starting from communities’ unique assets, values, and dreams.
I was going to end there, but here’s one last BONUS QUESTION: Why is a learning program important for a CDFI like CFNE? How is CFNE’s learning program different from other CDFI learning programs…and how does CFNE’s learning program differ from co-op developers? Ok, I guess that was three questions, but what are your thoughts?
A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review referred to CDFIs as “Swiss Army Knives” for our ability to have multiple tools at the ready to solve problems needing a combination of capital, coaching, connections, and cultural context. We prefer to think of ourselves as a “Learning Team” (rather than the industry jargon of “technical assistance providers”) because learning for us is a two-way street. The individuals and communities we work with are using their own stores of experience, knowledge, and talents to design co-ops. As a community loan fund, we can learn from them about the best ways to support and enhance their work, even as we share our own experience gleaned from 50 years of partnership with co-op borrowers.
We believe the Learning Team’s collective strengths & values inform our core competencies and shape our Life-Centered Learning approach:
- Ecosystem Engagement: We listen in order to serve
- Equity & Innovation: We create value for the underserved
- Shared learning: We learn from our shared lived experiences
We see this work as complementary to work done by co-op developers and the broader business service and economic development ecosystems. Co-op developers provide essential deep engagement with groups forming co-ops, whether as start-ups or transitioning from more conventional forms of business. They combine the art and science of human association and business strategy, helping groups pull in the same direction to develop sustainable cooperative enterprises to meet their shared goals.
Where co-op developers go deep, we try to connect broadly, including forging relationships with people and communities who might not feel represented in the cooperative mainstream. Our internal metaphor is of being a boat that helps people and communities navigate uncertain waters through accompaniment and trusting relationships. Co-op members are always at the helm, deciding where to steer and how fast they want to harness the wind, but we can provide a map, compass, sail, and anchor to help them on their way.