In 2025, Research Action worked on just one major project, studying 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 worker cooperative development process. We are comparing “entrepreneur support organizations” that help worker cooperatives and regular businesses in order to identify the most effective ways to aid firms and see what they might learn from one another.
Our previous work as coop development project evaluators got us curious about the best models for incubating successful new worker cooperatives. Analyzing 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. In 2025 we increased our payments for administrative work to $25/hr. We also made a donation in 2025 to Mijente, a Latinx rights group.
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!