Research Action 2024 Year in Review

Research Action had finished up several projects in 2023, and for 2024 we just worked on one major project on cooperative development. Let’s review.

We have a huge project funded by the Kauffman Foundation, which gave us a three year grant to study the cooperative development process. We will compare “entrepreneur support organizations” that help worker cooperatives and regular businesses to identify the most effective approaches to aiding the firms and what they might learn from one another. Our previous work as coop development project evaluators got us interested in doing this research to help answer questions about what the best models are for incubating successful new worker cooperatives. The analysis of standard business development will provide for an interesting comparison to worker coop development. 

At the end of the year, after accounting for all income and expenses, we democratically discussed the coop’s finances. All our project work gets paid at different rates, depending on what we have negotiated with clients. That leaves the question about what to pay for the cooperative’s “administrative” work, such as attending our biweekly meetings, working on the website and financial accounting, etc. Last year we kept our payments for administrative work at $20/hr. We also made donations in 2024 to Grassroots International, Cooperativa La Milpa and Fridays for Future.

Please see our Projects page for more information about our work. If anyone wants to discuss a potential project, please let us know. Moreover, we always want to help others think about forming their own research collectives, and we’re happy to discuss how we started and run ours, so let us know if you want to talk!