Loneliness Busting and Social Coops
What on earth might a "loneliness policy" look like?
Following up on our previous post about the U.S. Surgeon General’s loneliness report. this issue will get into the weeds a bit.
So here’s a high-level outline in the hopes of keeping things clear:
First, if the opposite of loneliness is social connection, where do we see strong, lasting, and meaningful social connections being made? I will argue here for looking at the dynamics around mutual aid activities, experiences which are becoming increasingly common in the ongoing climate emergencies;
Mutual aid, although it occurs amidst the pain of various disasters, also contains the seeds of connection, the inspiration of realizing we can come together spontaneously and contribute to fixing the world in moments when “the system is down”;
We know that other societies have created small-scale, localized, highly successful systems of care in similar contexts of community survival and autonomy—their “social economies” have much to teach us and I cite some examples;
An advantage to focusing on policy solutions in the area of social care is the opportunity to address a very wide sector of the economy, touching many millions, and clearly in crisis today—success in this troubled sector can have a big impact in moving us toward real system change;
More specifically, I would point to enabling the creation of a new category of place-based, democratically run small enterprises called “social co-ops,” borrowing from their documented history of success in places like Quebec, South Korea, and Emilia Romagna (Italy);
Social co-ops mostly operate within the care economy and they incorporate groups of volunteers. Which means that, as circles of care, they are innately loneliness-busters. Because they offer democratic workplaces, co-create their services with providers, recipients and community members, and emphasize relational over transactional operations, they are known to be effective engines of social meaning and connection, if they are properly enabled and supported.
OK, let’s back up now and fill in some details.
If the shared condition of loneliness is largely about lack of social connection—the lack of close friends, no meaningful work, struggles with consumerist addiction—where and how might we reconnect? Where do we regularly witness human community being built?
One answer is: in the reported experiences of people affected by disasters of all kinds. Given the increasing frequency of billion-dollar climate events around the country and our recent Covid-19 pandemic ordeal, we’re speaking here of a significant and growing number of citizens.
Disasters, including even small-scale tragedies, often awaken us to the urgency of human connection. More than that, they bring both a sense of pain but sometimes a kind of exhilaration as well when suddenly society’s rules have been lifted under the emergency situation. While a few might flee the scene, many others seize the moment to swing into action, as we know from frequent media reports describing how quickly our instincts of human solidarity can come to the fore.
Why do these self-appointed “first responders” report feelings of joy in these moments? What is it they glimpse in these otherwise dark moments about how the world could be made new again?
The canonical text on “the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster” is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Amidst the evidence from famous disasters going back to the San Francisco earthquake up through the London Blitz and the September 11 attacks, the book spins out Solnit’s brilliant counter-theory of human nature to show we are not innately selfish animals but wired for mutuality) that should inform all policy talk around social reconnection. (Here’s Solnit speaking about all these matters.)
We’re likely to take for granted the meaning of the familiar term “mutual aid.” It’s simply neighbors pitching in to help neighbors, right? But there’s much more to notice.
Mutual aid at its best, as author Dean Spade argues, “produces new ways of living where people get to create new systems of care and generosity.” Mutual aid responses, after all, are spontaneous upwellings of local support—as opposed to structured charity from small groups of paid professionals. They occur whenever disasters “break the spell”, which can mean breaking whole systems and exposing pre-existing crises.
In the Occupy Sandy response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, some 60,000 volunteers came together to provide immediate food, water and medicine, well before FEMA or other agencies arrived. Suddenly ordinary people found they needed each other and could assist each other in life-or-death situations. This was an experience that many people later testified they found deeply meaningful and affirming of their own agency as humans. It’s a rare moment when, temporarily at least, you’re able to act—to do good, meaningful work—in creative, autonomous ways.
Mutual aid projects, Spade notes, “teach us how the world used to be and lets us practice something different”—i.e., membership in a society where once again we matter greatly to each other.
What do these observations have to do with a loneliness policy?
First, we might argue that any wisdom around creating “new systems of care and generosity” deserves our attention. In other regions of the world, especially ones where social solidarity is stronger than in this country, we find systems of care which have typically arisen out of a mentality of mutual aid and even social resistance to a dominant regime, as in the cases of Basque Spain and Quebec.
Or South Korea, where the 1997 financial collapse cost 1.8 million workers (about 9% of the workforce) their jobs. In addition to an eventual government response, an immediate outpouring of mutual aid stimulated interest in forming new social enterprises, i.e., hybrid businesses with two characteristics: serving community benefit and employing marginalized people.
By 2012, the category of social enterprises in South Korea was expanded to include social co-ops, a form of cooperative business in which the profits are not divided among worker-owners but rather are retained for the public purposes of the co-op.
An example is the Bear Better social co-op, a workplace for developmentally disabled individuals where a slow tempo of work is valued. Its operations include a printing shop, coffee roasting, a bakery and a flower shop, earning some $10 million in annual revenues, with 359 employees, of whom 259 are disabled.
South Korea now has almost 5,000 social co-ops, of which 40% are in the social care sector. Over the last decade, these businesses have generated over 67,000 meaningful, non-precarious jobs for marginalized workers who are in turn providing high-quality care services for over 6 million people.
In the U.S. over the last decade, the number of operating worker co-ops has grown to approach 1,000, undoubtedly driven by economic precarity and a desire for an alternative to the conventional workplace culture.
Some of these businesses provide social care services but they are not social co-ops—i.e., they do not operate with multiple types of stakeholders, are not focused primarily on community benefit nor do most of them employ marginalized people.
Similarly, some aspects of social co-ops might remind the reader of social enterprises which are simply conventional businesses which include a social purpose in their mission. While part of a more social economy, social enterprises are not usually democratically governed, are not necessarily locally-focused, nor do they use a process of co-creation to provide their services—all characteristics of social co-ops.
To truly address the growing crisis of social care in the U.S., to which conditions of loneliness are no doubt an aggravating factor, we need policy solutions which would enable the following goals (a partial list):
Legal recognition of a new corporate form—the social co-operative, a hybrid enterprise (elements of a non-profit + a commercial business) whose profits go not solely to worker-owners but to the organization’s programming and operations (as is the case with non-profits today);
Easing of IRS regulations in order that these new enterprises can generate “unrelated business income” (the revenues of the care business) while also enjoying certain benefits of non-profit status—i.e., favorable tax treatment, preferential treatment with public procurement contracts, etc. This change is critical, given the low margins in the care industry, the challenges of startup funding, sustaining operations, etc.
Easing of corporate rules to allow easier conversion of non-profits to social co-ops, especially those with a mission of incubating and then launching the latter.
Enabling of the social franchising model (similar to the familiar model of franchising commercial businesses) in order to foster the expansion of social co-ops nationally.
Finally, I’ll note the team working with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center on a comparative study on social co-ops which will include a final set of policy recommendations. They also have a monthly Community of Practice underway with a focus on social co-ops.
More broadly, the whole concept of a social economy (which calls for a bottom-up, not top-down, transformation) needs a lot more airing in public, although you don’t have to look far to see people already adopting its practices, whatever terms they might use.
See you next time—peace.