How we work
on purpose.
so·cial en·tre·pre·neur noun a person who establishes an enterprise with the aim of solving social problems or effecting social change.
What’s your mission? What do you want to fix in the world?
Not sure? We can help you define it or refine it. We help design your business where revenue is a by-product, not the goal, and entrepreneurial success is measured with different metrics. Our clients and collaborators are ready to reimagine work that doesn’t suck and values humanity. We embed your mission, vision, and values into your operations and creative content.
We’re building the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) one business at a time for the Collective.
We are intentional at both the micro and macro levels, supporting this community and providing different opportunities to make an impact through design and communications. As a Collective of socially responsible innovators, we want “work” to be a safe and rewarding experience for everyone.
Using multiple strategies, we’re taking action to fix systemic economic inequality.
Macro challenges we’re working on:
Improving conditions, exposure, and access to capital for marginalized business owners.
Exposing exorbitant fees charged by government agencies.
Making business certification processes more accessible and affordable.
Identifying ethical tech platforms and decolonized design processes.
Building connections between the United Nations, SDGs, and U.S. small businesses/independents
Advocating for SDG5 to move beyond the binary and SDG 10 to discuss colonization, anti-Black racism, and systemic racism.
Ensuring VCs and governments are held accountable to Black Lives Matter statements and other public promises to invest in marginalized communities.
Closing gender and racial pay, wealth, and opportunity gaps with every business transaction.
Multiple methods of impact we provide:
Individual Sponsorship. We believe in supporting the creator economy from grassroots artists to startup founders.
Currently, we support 8 content creators with monthly sustaining payments for Substack and Patreon.
Supplies. We provide local art collectives and nonprofits with supplies. For a list of who we are currently compensating, email us.
Education and Workshops. We model financial transparency, teaching the benefits (and pitfalls) of social enterprise, B-Corps, the SDGs, democratization, and cooperative governance, stakeholder capitalism, stewardship models, and inclusive design.
Policies. We go deeper defining how we commit to "people and planet” over profit and document and set our targets based on the latest evidence-based research for flexible, sustainable workplaces.
Design. We look at the workplace holistically and build social brands, with ethical operations and inclusive communications
Purpose-driven brands must walk the walk to serve the common good, starting with our own.
How do we use open source initiatives to fuel collective action?
This was one of the questions we asked ourselves when we founded our Collective and wrote our first gray paper. Startups working on social and environmental change need access to low cost, openly available, evidence based information and best practices. To build a more equitable economy small business, grassroots organizations, and solopreneurs need access to the same toolkits, resources, capital, and information available to governments, foundations, and big corporations.
Access has always been a part of our theory of change: to use what was already out there, and build from their.
In 2019, we leveraged best practices from the WEPs, U.N. SDGs, and B Corp guidelines as our starting point. We continue to add to our toolbox and to our understanding of the economic system we are working to improve.
coFLOWco supports the Global Goals, but we do so cautiously.
coFLOWco joined Catalyst 2030 in October 2020 to collaborate with social entrepreneurs on the SDGs. We connected with other change makers from around the world to accelerate our work towards gender and racial equality and inclusive workplaces.
As founding members, it was our first stop in building a more ethical, equitable business and we’re grateful for what we learned about the way “business for good” operates at scale.
Progress without accountability is merely PR. You cannot package purpose.
As educators, designers, and technologists we question everything. The SDGs are no exception. We view the SDGs as a starting point, a shared language to identify others who care.
The Global Goals help us see which orgs have done the bare minimum in exploring existing solutions and frameworks. They help us communicate quickly which social and environmental justice issues we prioritize. They are a only jumping off point for our collaborations with founders and leaders committed to social change.
Unfortunately, the Global Goals have inequity embedded into their language (or lack their of). By design, their metrics are vague. The United Nations and other large governing organizations and nonprofit foundations are have too many conflicts of interest to make them a viable approach to systems change.
Hegemony and humanity remain at odds.
The U.N. is sustained by gatekeeping philanthropists and the benevolence of western nations who spend more on war than peace. The 1% fuel the inequality we see in today’s global economy and the climate including exploitation of workers and harm to our ecosystem. The Goals they wrote aim to correct their mistakes while they continue to cause more harm.
Unless the U.N. directly addresses inequality created by systemic racism, pervasive rape culture, and deals head on with colonialism we cannot achieve the SDGs. Human rights violations from United States and other nations must be called out. The system needs to change or the SDGs are hollow virtue signaling from the Powers That Be. The SDGs and social entrepreneurs believe that “People and Planet” should be the priority “over profit.” The global economic system and “The Market” do not.
We’re proud to say we have new solutions and new approaches that go deeper than the SDGs to shift wealth back to creators and build workplaces that don’t suck. For coFLOWco and our clients, “People and Planet” come first. We know collectivism, mutualism, and collaboration with accountability and financial transparency are how we change the economy for good.
Our Profits have Purpose.
coFLOWco is committed in our bylaws to using 50% or more of our profits towards our mission, as a condition of our Trust Law membership from Thomas Reuters.
-
We support organizations improving the lives of women and girls, especially BIPOC womxn, nonbinary, and the LGBTQIA2S+ community. We also focus on organizations building more accessible education, supporting youth transitioning to the workplace, and those building a safer internet.
We give monthly and annual donations, support local Mutual Aid organizations, and support startups in alternative fundraising.
In 2021, we became micro-investors in Backstage Capital (Republic) via equity crowdfunding. In 2022, we supported the launch of Diversity Leader’s Group (now Mission Equality) and became Co op member-owners of Zebra’s Unite.
We reinvest profits back into our business and transparent budgets to all our staff and partners. We will provide dividends to our member-owners, as outlined in our Articles of Organization, which will be ratified by the founding coop members when we transition to an LAC.
-
As part of legal documents to become a Benefit Corporation, changes in organizational leadership must adhere to our mission and fiscal commitments (or go through a review process with members and to update with the Oregon Secretary of State.) This is known as “mission lock” in B Corp certification and one way to ensure the business does what it says its going to.
Update Summer 2022: While we honor the above, it is not yet binding. We have paused on this process to ensure actually make an impact. We are not interested in being performative with certifications or credentials. Our energy is better served by supporting our team and community. Additionally, the support for legal counsel through our Trust Law membership has proved incredibly difficult to access.
We will revisit this in 2023. In the meantime we are watching B Lab grapple with doing business for good at scale while continuing to assemble a strong Collective of Creatives, Strategists, and Ops experts who happen be building an ethical, equitable, transparent business.
Update 2023: We renewed our membership to Women’s Funding Network and Zebra Co op member-ownership. At the end of 2022 we became signatories of the Design Justice Principles from Design Justice Network and renewed our Women-Owned Small Business certification.
Want support in building a business with transparent, equitable, ethical financials?
Learn more here. Follow our progress, and reach out for support!
And check out our fully transparent budget for FLOWLab⁵ on our Fiscal Sponsor’s page.
A Social Entrepreneurs primary challenge: Choosing a Business Structure “For Good.”
For-profit social enterprise versus non-profit versus?
Someone has to pay.
As a social enterprise, coFLOWco gives back by design, in our by laws and in our work, day-to-day. Since 2019, we’ve been working to transition our LLC to an LAC, an employee-owned coop. We also started out company operations and policies supported by students from PSU’s B Lab; our goal was to build the business from day 1 using B Corp guidelines as our foundation.
A few months later, in March 2020, we shifted to supporting marginalized and underestimated founders in a more significant way during the pandemic, primarily pro bono, and put our B Corp Application on hold.
To make it to our next milestone and provide open source toolkits and research to other pre-revenue founders, we had to seek out different revenue streams. To push back on inequitable procurement, RFP, and grant processes requires that we go through these inequitable processes over and over to get funds to keep going. The irony is not lost on us.
We specifically did not start Collective Flow Consulting as a nonprofit. Our labor is worthy and compensation and ownership is how we create economic equality and opportunity, aka, our mission.
The patriarchy will do anything it can to avoid acknowledging or compensating our ideas. NGO’s and nonprofits were created to keep marginalized people out of paid work and keep employees from sharing profits.
While we did not want 501c3 to be our primary organizational business model (because our Labor is NOT a favor), we do want to shift power to underestimated founders and we realized we have to do what the bigger consultancies do, and funnel our research and our community work to a 501c3. Our vision is a self-sustaining ecosystem of separate entities.
We founded the FLOWLab community to continue providing low-to-no cost support for our community of creators and change makers in 2021. In 2022 we earned our fiscal sponsorship and nonprofit status.
It’s clear to us that to challenge capitalism and broken systems, expand on and publish our research, educate and share ideas, and seek out solutions for the Solidarity Economy and Future of Work we cannot operate a for profit entity alone.
In August 2024, coFLOWco turned 5! We will remain a for-profit company and if we grow big enough to warrant it, we will convert to a worker-owned coop. For now, we’re transitioning additional efforts and energy to building up the nonprofit while serving our clients as they change “business for good.”
Want to support our work to help founders survive the first 5 years in business Now, we need you.
Donate to FLOWLab⁵ or join as a member today!
“If the world is night
Shine my life like a light.”
— Indigo Girls