Values come first at CoLab

In service to these values, our strategic objectives are:

• Providing an infrastructure that can support the evolution of a global, distributed network of cooperators.
• Addressing the operational and governance challenges of being an international worker-owned co-operative.
• Establishing a shared cultural bedrock for a deep alignment and solidarity between collaborators in our many regions.
• Developing a model for transnational collaboration in the world of work, supporting others by sharing our learnings, resources, and challenges.
• Contributing measurably towards the regeneration of the earth and equity within our communities.

Co-operative organizational agreements are fundamental to our ability to both sustain our work together and grow our impact at a local and global scale. As such, we seek to both learn from the experiments of others and to share our own efforts to make global collaboration more effective. Our hope is that by sharing our process of grappling with these questions, we can evolve together with others around the world to better to cooperate across boundaries.

CoLab operates in an extremely complex cultural, operational, and regulatory context. We face the governance challenges common to growing coops, combined with the operational challenges of distributed teams, the cultural challenges of building an inclusive and equitable international organization, and the compliance requirements of legal frameworks ranging from US state law to international commerce rules.

To date, we have navigated the challenges associated with global collaboration and equity through a 'learn by doing' approach, weaving together the many philosophical and cultural perspectives each member brings to develop solutions through non-hierarchical democratic consensus. We’ve seen these challenges as important learning points toward a practice of transformative international cooperativism that can foster global solidarity.

Along with our allies like the International Cooperative Alliance, we see a critical need to work together to share resources and engage in dialog in order to advance our work together. We propose to openly share ideas, models, bylaws, strategies, case studies, and data analyses with each other as peers committed to global solidarity within the co-operative movement. In this spirit, CoLab is honored to co-work with Democracy Collaborative to share its own research as models for transnational cooperation. And we hope that together with our partners at the International Cooperative Alliance, allied organizations in the Asia Pacific region, and amongst our peers in the tech co-op movement, we can together build a shared technological and communications framework for disseminating and growing our working knowledge as to how best to cooperate despite our differences.

Together, we move forward a new wave of global cooperation.