Wellspring Cooperative

Short Summary

The Wellspring Cooperative is planting the seeds for a community-based economy in the old industrial city of Springfield, which has descended from prosperity to poverty over several decades. Wellspring seeks to revitalize the local economy, provide employment and wealth to local residents, and generate community health, stability, and prosperity. This organization is achieving their goals by building a network of interconnected worker-owned companies.

Website address: wellspringcoop.org

Location: Springfield, Massachusetts, USA

Founders: Fred Rose & Emily Kawano

Author

Erica Light

Interviewee

Fred Rose, Wellspring Cooperative Co-founder, Staff, and Board Member

Profile

Wellspring’s long-term vision is to build a diverse worker-owned interconnected economy like that of the largest co-op network in the world, Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in Spain.

Participating worker-owned companies include the Wellspring Upholstery Collaborative, Wellspring Harvest, Old Window Workshop, and Jumping Jack Hoops. Another member of their co-op network is Green Love Eco Cleaners, which is currently converting from a single owner to a worker cooperative as the founder moves on from the business.

By joining a network of cooperative businesses, Green Love can learn from other cooperatives. All of these co-ops are supported by the overarching Wellspring non-profit organization, contributing structure to the network.

Wellspring’s employee training approach falls somewhere between social service and business. While market competition does require contracts to meet deadlines, Wellspring is invested in supporting laborers’ growth and development. The non-profit has learned that providing clear expectations and feedback early on benefits both the cooperative and the laborers.

Looking forward, Wellspring is hoping to grow their network to scale, providing financial security to the cooperative, return to investors, and prosperity to laborers. Wellspring looks to the community and the city government for support in their growth mission. In the meantime, the Wellspring Cooperative remains a site of emerging economic transformation, where participants can grow, overcome conflict democratically, and build an economy that works for people, not profit.

Governance

Wellspring uses a top-down organizational approach in conjunction with its co-op business model, where labor is owned by employees who participate in democratic decision-making. The co-ops make their own rules, and the co-ops and nonprofit make decisions through interlocking boards with labor representation. While the businesses are market-driven, the profits are shared.

The Wellspring team is also available to mediate interpersonal conflict and professional skills transition that accompanies on-boarding new participants. Employing and supporting laborers who are struggling with the social impacts of poverty requires flexibility. Wellspring successfully balances market pressures with social service provision.

Projects

The Wellspring Upholstery Cooperative

“We traveled around… and knocked on the door of this well established upholsterer who invited us into his workshop,” remembers Rose of his and Kawano’s first encounter with the owner of Alliance Upholstery. “He was interested in this idea of training people up in this skill and eventually handing over the workshop.” Alliance sold upholstery training to Wellspring for a while, then sold the business to the cooperative upon retirement. The Wellspring Upholstery Cooperative—the first co-op under the Wellspring Cooperative umbrella—was born. Their first upholstery contract was with UMass’s Berkshire Dining Hall in 2013. Thus, the cooperative emerged at the nexus of regional influences from UMass, Baystate, Hampden County Jail, Alliance Upholstery, and the emerging Wellspring non-profit.

Wellspring Harvest

Wellspring Harvest is Springfield’s first commercial hydroponic greenhouse. Since 2018 the worker-owned cooperative business has been producing roughly 250,000 plants (greens and herbs) annually, supplying the community with healthy food while employing seven local residents. Wellspring Harvest provides local produce like lettuce to purchasers across the region.

Wellspring Harvest source

Old Window Workshop

The Old Window Workshop (OWW) is the most recent addition to the Wellspring Cooperative network. Rather than replacing old windows, the women-owned window restoration business chooses the eco-friendly route of restoring and insulating existing windows. As a result, fewer building materials are incinerated or thrown into landfills, while restoring their windows makes buildings more energy efficient.

Old Window Workshop source

Origin Story

After receiving several grants, the Wellspring organization formed in 2011, and Wellspring founders Fred Rose and Emily Kawano began “to look broadly at the social determinants of health, and employment being one.” Rose notes, “If people are employed, their health improves.”

Wellspring identified the service demands of the numerous colleges and hospitals that constitute the largest regional employers and purchasers of services. “Our idea is to build a network of those anchor institutions and to use that market to identify products that we could produce locally that they weren’t buying locally,” Rose says of their initial research.

Hampden County Men’s Jail runs an upholstery workshop as a career-readiness and upholstery skills development program for jail residents. Building a relationship with Hampden County Jail, the team hoped to provide a job ladder with a flow of employees to Wellspring as residents were released from incarceration.