Catalyst hub

Catalyst hubs are community-serving buildings that serve as neighborhood destinations for innovation culture - designed, governed and owned by local communities as cooperatives, based on the solidarity cooperative framework.

Examples

• Commongrounds in Traverse City, cofounded by cohort Kate Redman, a $15 million, 50,000 s.f. new mixed-use 4-story building with 500 community members and tenant owners.

Societal Benefits

The Societal Benefits of Cooperative Ownership
Extractive (Institutional) Ownership	Generative (Cooperative) Ownership
Financial Purpose: Maximizing profits in the short term	Living Purpose: Creating the conditions for life over long term
Absentee Membership: Ownership disconnected from life of enterprise	Rooted Membership: Ownership in human hands
Governance by Markets: Control by capital markets on autopilot	Living Purpose: Creating the conditions for life over long term
Institutional Finance: Capital as master	Community Finance: Capital as friend
Commodity Networks: Trading focused solely on price and profits	Ethical Networks: Collective support for ecologial and social norms

Adapted from Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, by Marjorie Kelly

Personal Benefits

The Personal Benefits of Cooperative Ownership
Finance-As-Partner Ownership	Cooperative- As-Partner Ownership
Financial Partners: Partners based on who has money	Purpose Partners: Partners based on who shares purpose
Personal Risk: Revenue responsibility held solely by partners	Shared Risk: Revenue responsibility shared by community
Limited Support: Assistance limited to financial partner network	Extended Support: Assistance extended to cooperative community
Fragile Ownership: Partner’s project interest can change overnight	Resilient Ownership: Shared accountability in maintaining core mission
Limited Equity Growth: Limited by growth capacity of financial partners	Robust Equity Growth: Accelerated by increase in community value

Adapted from Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, by Marjorie Kelly

Examples

Commongrounds is a 50,000 s.f. innovation hub cooperative in Traverse City, Michigan, which serves as both a pilot project and learning laboratory. It is presently the only project of its kind in the country - a mixed-use community building that is owned and governed as a cooperative.

Cooperative development and governance systems

Prosocial

Prosocial - A perspective, practical purpose, research effort and community toward the welfare of others and society as a whole. This might be an attitude, a behavior (e.g. helping, sharing, donating, cooperating, volunteering), or an institution. It might be directed toward family and friends or the social acceptance of all people. Ultimately, Prosocial is an entire worldview.

Co-creation

Co-creation systems - Systems, models, tools for co-creation, designed, governed and owned by participants with a shared purpose, such as campaign teams and local communities.

Self organization

Self organizing systems - Processes where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation.

Partnerism

Partnerism - An economic system that, unlike Capitalism & Socialism, recognizes the economic value of care and adequately rewards it in both the market & non-market sectors. Like Capitalism and Socialism, Partnerism is an economic ideology that promotes a set of values, assumptions, and beliefs. First coined by Riane Eisler in The Real Wealth of Nations, Partnerism as an ideology promotes and rewards caring for one another, nature, and our collective future.

Sensemaking

Sensemaking - A process by which a large population of people are able to give meaning to their collective experiences, referred to as story-based or narrative-based assessment, and 'the first form of scalable ethnography'.

Flow state

The foundational human state that Innovation Hub Cooperatives are based on is the flow state.

• Wikipedia entry on flow state.
• Enabling joy, bliss, flow, ecstasis in our communities - Overview of flow state in community development.

Development phases

1. Phase I: Develop Core Team and Vision
   1. Define and pre-develop the mission, vision and founding support team
   2. Seed the idea, enable emergence of partners
   3. Develop project access
   4. Develop cooperative governance and financing agreements
   5. Develop interim staff

1. Phase II: Develop Founding Membership and Vision
   1. Develop 15/150 founding membership
   2. Launch publicly
   3. Support visions from the membership
   4. Launch successive series of campaigns
   5. Conduct feasibility studies

1. Phase III: Property Acquisition
   1. Secure down payment for property acquisition
   2. Secure tenant partners
   3. Secure finance partners
   4. Finalize financing

1. Phase IV Optional: Construction/Renovation
   1. If necessary: Secure development and construction team
   2. If necessary: Secure development and construction loan

1. Phase V: Ongoing Management and Emergence
   1. Financial accountability
   2. Restorative practice
   3. Self organization
   4. Crowdsourced placemaking

Resources

• Be The Change Cooperative - A cooperative of local communities co-creating regenerative community buildings governed and owned by local neighborhoods through a shared platform.
• Catalyst hub cooperatives - A similar model to innovation hub cooperatives, supported by Be The Change Cooperative.
• Collective Impact Lab blog - A collection of articles on projects and systems related to innovation hubs, including The Rise of Mutual Stakeholding
• Glossary of terms related to Innovation Hubs