The city’s $250,000 commitment will enable an expansion of the work of Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED) to facilitate cooperative conversions to retain jobs, empower workers, avert commercial vacancies and preserve locally-owned businesses.
Worker cooperatives—businesses owned and governed by their workers—are on the rise in Baltimore. Much of the growth in the sector has been driven by BRED, a nonprofit organization founded ten years ago to advance worker ownership through education, cooperative development and non-extractive financing.
In 2016, BRED helped Taharka Brothers Ice Cream convert from a social enterprise to a business owned by its youth workers. Since then, BRED has invested over $5 million in worker cooperative conversions in Baltimore, preserving 149 jobs and facilitating the creation of more than 50 jobs post-conversion in businesses including the Wine Source, Common Ground Coffee, EnviroCollab and Appalachian Field Services.
Now, with support from Baltimore City, BRED will be able to accelerate and expand these efforts, helping more business owners preserve their legacy through worker cooperative conversion as a succession strategy. With over half the owners of all privately held employers in the U.S. already over age 55, cooperative conversion represents an important opportunity to help business owners keep the jobs they created in communities like Baltimore, while creating broadly held wealth that stays rooted locally. An estimated 2.9 million small businesses could be preserved by transitioning to worker ownership.
“Cooperative ownership is one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping beloved Baltimore businesses open and locally owned—especially when an owner is ready to retire or sell,” said Baltimore City Council President Zeke Cohen. “This $250,000 investment in the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy reflects this council’s commitment to keeping local businesses local. BRED has the experience and track record to help business owners transition successfully to cooperative models, and that means more Baltimoreans have a real shot at entrepreneurship and ownership in their own communities.”
BRED is a member of Seed Commons, a cooperatively-governed community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that has invested more than $25 million in Baltimore cooperatives since 2026. “This support from the city underscores the impact BRED’s cooperative conversion program has already made to improve the lives of Baltimore’s workers and the health of their communities, and will help make the next chapter of that work to advance democratic ownership bigger and bolder,” said Kate Khatib, BRED Senior Fellow and Executive Co-Director of Seed Commons.