Our Work is Everywhere

The cooperative’s primary purpose is to coordinate resources across its platform groups and to deliver products and services to better the lives of individual cooperative members, their customers, and their communities. We believe that by devolving power and resources as close to a customer or challenge as possible while still remaining true to our mission is our “secret sauce” to building our culture of ownership.

Obran Cooperative is a worker-cooperative conglomerate corporation. Over the next few months we will be publishing a series of articles aimed at providing a closer look at our structure, how we work together, and how we see our role in the ecosystem with the broader community. While we represent a relatively new form of cooperative enterprise we recognize that we are built from the collective wisdom and practice. We hope to help further the field and contribute back to that community of practice as we evolve.

It’s no secret. The news industry has been caught in a death spiral. Over the past 15 years, over 2,000 American newspapers have closed, and over half of the newsroom jobs that existed in 2008 have vanished. Obran plans to break this cycle by putting the audience rather than advertisers at the center of the business. We plan to do this by forging a new relationship between communities and their existing newspaper.

Cooperatives empower people to come together in a way that serves both individual and community needs. This structure gives us an advantage over traditional businesses, making us a safe and dependable investment whether you’re an employee investing your time and energy or an investor looking for a decent return.

Obran Cooperative is excited to work with you to build a better economy. We want to ensure that your business, the employees who depend on it, and the communities that thrive because of it continue to grow and prosper for years to come. We're not venture capitalists looking for a quick score, and we’re not a private equity firm looking to buy the company only to loot it. When we acquire a company, we’re in for the long-term.

Over the past year we have been building worker power under the brand of Staffing Cooperative. This move reflects the Cooperative’s realization that every worker, regardless of industry, deserves to own their time.

We are building the first worker-owned cooperative conglomerate to take an equity driven approach to expanding worker ownership.