In Summer 2011, The Working World opened its third revolving loan fund in New York City. In many ways the setting could not have been more different than at our other two offices in Argentina and Nicaragua. New York is the center of finance, media, and culture in the richest country in the world. It is the historic gateway to the land of a “dollar and a dream,” the great symbol of the founding American story that with enough hard work, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit, anybody can make it.

However, that American dream is ever more a fantasy for a growing segment of the country’s population. In New York, official unemployment stubbornly hovers around 9%, with most independent analysts placing it closer to 15%. Meanwhile, the New York Times recently released a study that more than 20% of the city’s population had fallen into poverty. This means that as many as 800,000 people in New York currently live in poverty despite holding down a job. The implications are devastating, and unfortunately extend to much of the United States and indeed the rest of the so-called developed world: our problem is not only creating jobs, but the quality of the jobs that are being created. Quite simply, opportunities for people to make better lives for themselves are increasingly few and far between. In this regard, the United States is beginning to suffer from some of the same effects of a decadent economic system that have plagued countries like Argentina and Nicaragua for decades.

It is appropriate, then, that we should bring solutions fashioned in the Global South to create new types of opportunities for people here in the U.S. While cooperatives have a long tradition in the United States, their reach into working class neighborhoods was stifled and has been limited for many decades. While there were virtually no worker cooperatives in New York until recently, that trend has begun to change, led, perhaps unsurprisingly, by working class folks and particularly recent immigrants. We at The Working World intend to take the lessons we have learned in our years in Argentina and Nicaragua and apply them to support the growth of worker cooperatives as a viable economic alternative for people here in New York and throughout the United States.

You can learn about our investments to cooperatives in the United States here.