Oklahoma Worker Cooperative
Network Membership


Four reasons to join the Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network:

• You want to start a worker-owned cooperative. People who want to take advantage of our program, which may include help with fnancing, must be members of this cooperative.
• You want to encourage an economy of solidarity. You believe, as we do, that our local economy will be stronger and more resilient if more workers actually owned their jobs. By joining the cooperative, you help move this process along. We need volunteers and we need funds for our work.
  
• You want to become a cooperative organizer and trainer and help us help people to start their own businesses..
  
• You want to invest in worker-owned cooperatives. You must be a member if you want to invest in a local economy of solidarity via our programs.
  

Membership costs $25. 

• This buys you one Class A Membership Share in the Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network. That makes you a member-owner of this cooperative. If you leave, we buy it back from you.
  
• It entitles you to run for the board, to participate in our activities, to vote at our membership meeetings, and to receive a dividend in proportion to your patronage of the cooperative if we run an operating surplus for the year.
  
• Membership also carries the obligation of conducting at least $25 in patronage with the cooperative during the calendar year.  This means that you buy at least $25 of items from us during the year or make a donation of at least $25 during the year. These will be our operating revenues to provide the money we need to provide business incubation services to worker-owned cooperatives.

To join, click on the PayPal button below to pay via PayPal OR send a check for $26 ($25 for the membership share, $1 processing fee), made payable to
Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network, to:

OWCN
6909 Greenway
Oklahoma City, OK 73132.

The benefit this Cooperative provides to its members is a system of support and encouragement that helps people create their own
economic opportunity and job security by starting a worker owned cooperative.  We do not propose to operate businesses ourselves.
Instead, we help people fulfill their own entrepreneurial visions via the worker-owned cooperative business structure. 

A worker-owned cooperative is like any other business.  It has to make money to cover its costs which
includes the salaries paid to the workers. It provides goods or services to its customers.  The difference between
a worker coop and other business structures, like a corporation, is that it is 100% owned and managed by its workers.
There are many advantages to this form of business structure, but for now we'll just mention one: worker-owned
cooperatives do not outsource their jobs to foreign countries.

What is patronage?  Patronage is coop-speak for business.  When a member does business with
his or her cooperative, it is referred to as patronage. A "patronage refund" is a distribution to the membership of the
operating surplus of a cooperative (provided of course that there is a surplus). This is paid to the membership in
proportion to their patronage of the coop.  So if the coop had $1,000 in surplus, and the total revenues for that coop
were $100,000, and one member did 1% of that business with the coop, then he or she would be entitled to 1% of
the surplus as a patronage refund. To be frank, we don't expect the Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network to run
an operating surplus anytime soon. But it is part of the cooperative operational system, so we are explaining it up front.

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