Nine veteran employees of The Wine Source closed on a deal earlier this week to become owners of the Hampden beer, wine and spirits emporium. Just a few weeks earlier — and two blocks down 36th Street — the worker-owners at Common Ground coffee shop toasted one year of cooperative ownership.

Ice cream maker Taharka Bros. and Metta Integrative Wellness, two other worker-owned businesses, also are based in the North Baltimore neighborhood. So was the cooperative Thread Coffee Roasters, before moving to a new headquarters in Greenmount. Hampden seems to be a hotspot for co-ops.

“Having all of this in that proximity is exciting,” says Emily Lerman, a project steward at the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, a group that helps cooperative businesses organize and obtain financing.

Proximity spurs awareness of the cooperative model, in which worker-owners have an equitable distribution of power and vote on business decisions, said Lerman, who is also a worker-owner at Mera Kitchen Collective, a cooperatively run restaurant in Mount Vernon.

The number of co-ops in Baltimore has grown in recent years, and while Hampden’s abundance of retail and restaurants makes the neighborhood a natural magnet for co-op conversions, she sees the entire city as ripe for the model.

Word of mouth is “the best opportunity for us,” Lerman said. A place like The Wine Source is “such an institution and community anchor in the city and the neighborhood that we hope they can be an inspiration for even more.”Cooperative planning

Inklings of a plan to turn The Wine Source over to its longtime staff began in March, when founder David Wells announced he wanted to sell the store and retire.

Caitlin O’Connor, an employee since 2010, wondered what might become of her job, and of her coworkers, under new management.

“It occurred to me that we have quite a few people that have been here for a very long time and are involved in the operations of the store,” O’Connor said.

She started to float the idea of a co-op, though she admits she had “zero idea” how it might come together.

“By the time it was announced that the store was for sale, David was already getting offers from other people, so we kind of were scrambling a little bit to figure out what would this look like: how would we get money?” she said.

The group turned to Lerman’s group, known as BRED for short, for guidance in drafting formal documents, structuring the co-op and setting up readiness training for the aspiring worker-owners. It also answered the key question of financing.

Though she declined to disclose the purchase price, O’Connor said she and her colleagues bought the store with the help of a loan from Seed Commons, a community wealth cooperative that offers non-extractive loans and investments, in which the cost of capital is less than or equal to the total profit generated by the business receiving that capital. In practice, that means Seed Commons structures its loans so that no interest or principal payments are due until after a lender can cover basic expenses like wages.

Baltimore’s Kate Khatib helped found Seed Commons, which now has 39 member organizations across the country. The cooperative has invested more than $88 million since 2011.

Khatib is also a founder of BRED and a co-founder and worker-owner at Red Emma’s, one of Baltimore’s longest running cooperatively owned businesses. Other aspiring co-ops have looked to the bookstore and coffee shop as they navigated the complexities of forming and funding a cooperative.

“When we started Mera, we said we want to be a co-op; let’s talk to Red Emma’s,” Lerman said.

BRED grew out of that need for a centralized resource. Members offer each other advice and support each other’s businesses — Mera, for instance, serves Thread’s coffee.

‘A lot of new regulars’

Common Ground’s workers also started a cooperative with logistical and financial help from BRED and Seed Commons. The cafe, a Hampden mainstay for more than 25 years, marked one year of worker ownership on Sept. 18.

Common Ground’s rebirth as a cooperative revived the coffee shop after its sudden closure in the summer of 2023. Staff and community members rallied behind a fundraising effort to get the doors back open.

A year in, worker-owner Nik Koski said the cafe is seeing more community support than ever: “We’re getting a lot more folks coming in and a lot of new regulars.”

Koski said Common Ground has raised wages under the new model, particularly for back-of-house staff, and offers paid holidays and sick leave. Future goals include adding new benefits such as health insurance and retirement funds.

The past year hasn’t been without difficulties: Worker-owners have had to figure out how to distribute workloads evenly and to shift from an employee’s mindset to that of a business owner.

“There’s the challenge of shifting direction,” Koski said. “Now we have to learn how to run the place in general. Not a lot of people are in that mindset of ‘this is actually our responsibility,’ and I think we’re starting to see that change.”

‘Endless’ opportunities

At The Wine Source, O’Connor said she and fellow worker-owners are still hammering out the finer points of cooperative ownership. They want to create a system for other staff to become owners, too, if they are interested. The path likely will involve a tenure threshold and a small financial buy-in.

For now, with the holiday season approaching, they are focused on keeping the store running smoothly and are not planning any major changes.

“There’s definitely some nerves,” said Phil Romero, another worker-owner who’s been employed at The Wine Source since 2017. “We weren’t the owners, but we know how to run this business, because all of us have been basically doing different roles for years anyways. But this is the first time that is officially on us.”

The co-op model can be useful for succession planning when there’s no family member or new owner lined up in the wings, Lerman said. In the case of The Wine Source, Wells was eager to retire but also wanted to preserve the legacy of the store he founded in 2001.

“I could not have hoped for a better resolution,” he wrote in an email. “I feel The Wine Source is in most capable and experienced hands.”

While the number of co-ops in Baltimore is on the rise, other regions count far more. Maryland did not crack the top 10 in a list of states and territories with the most cooperatives in a 2021 report from the Democracy at Work Institute and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. New York topped the list with 110 firms, followed by California (99), Puerto Rico (57) and Massachusetts (53).

Lerman and her group hope to put Baltimore on the map. Though many of the city’s co-ops have emerged from the food and hospitality sector — vegan ice cream shop Cajou Creamery is another supported by BRED, and so was Joe Squared before the Station North pizzeria closed last year — she encourages workers in a broad swath of industries to consider the model.

The group also has worked with landscape architecture firm EnviroCollab, construction services company Earthbound Building, staffing agency Core Staffing and Baltimore Bicycle Works, a bicycle shop with locations in Station North and Belvedere Square.

“The opportunities for what can be a co-op are endless,” Lerman said.

Got a news tip? Contact reporter Amanda Yeager at ayeager@baltsun .com, 443-790-1738 or @amandacyeager on X.