Co-op Dayton

Lela Klein is the co-founder and executive director of CO-OP Dayton, an incubator for worker-owned businesses that broaden economic opportunities and strengthen blue-collar communities. Lela has spent her career fighting for economic justice and equity for working people around the world. As an organizer in the labor movement, Lela participated in domestic and international campaigns, gaining experience with democratic, worker-led organizations. Prior to co-founding CO-OP Dayton, she was general counsel of the IUE-CWA, a 45,000-member manufacturing union, where she led major strategic projects, advocated on behalf of working people, and created a mentorship program to foster leadership among young manufacturing employees. Lela was also an organizer and later an attorney with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). 

Co-op Dayton offers a model for community-led cooperative economic development in America’s formerly industrial cities that have been left behind by the global economy. In Dayton, Ohio, blue collar and African American neighborhoods have suffered deep disinvestment from corporate employers, retail and service providers, and have increasingly become sites of despair without access to good jobs or needed products and services. We work to rebuild our city from the ground up and to inspire and support other legacy cities. We empower residents to design, build, and own multi-stakeholder cooperative businesses that meet their needs. We see our work as more than just building a cooperative grocery store in a food desert. We are building the movement for a just economy in Heartland cities and neighborhoods that have long been abandoned and neglected.

Like many post-­industrial Heartland cities, Dayton, Ohio has been victim to dramatic economic upheaval: thousands of high-paying jobs have disappeared, replaced by low­-wage service sector and lower-skill manufacturing jobs. Downwardly­ mobile breadwinners compete for $12/hour, and a third of families report trouble putting food on the table. The impacts are felt across Dayton but particularly in the working class and African American neighborhoods on the city's west side.

Long-term disinvestment from America’s legacy cities, and the erosion of workers’ rights on the job, mean that many fundamental needs aren’t being met. In Dayton, the loss of major employers like GM, Delphi, and National Cash Register disrupted long-standing pathways to the middle class. The 2008 recession and foreclosure crisis left many homes vacant in neighborhoods that once thrived; and grocery stores and other services fled to affluent suburbs. While just down the road in Cincinnati and Columbus, wages have recovered since the recession and even increased; in Dayton, they have decreased by $200/week. In our global economy, the 150 American legacy cities, still home to more than 10 million people, continue to fall behind.

In 2015, I co-founded Co-op Dayton alongside other neighborhood leaders and advocates for workers’ rights, racial justice, and food equity. Together we are rebuilding our diverse Rustbelt city through community- and worker-led cooperative economic development and grassroots movement. Inspired by cities like New York and San Francisco with robust cooperative ecosystems, we are developing a model for smaller legacy cities like ours. Here we iterate and experiment with the advantage of lower costs of living and property, and a population deeply frustrated with the old and open to something new.

While traditional businesses have overlooked or stripmined cities like Dayton, our community- and worker-owned cooperatives bring together residents and workers to identify gaps, activate community assets, and pool resources to build the businesses that meet our needs. We organize community members, develop cooperative leaders, and support cooperative enterprise design and planning. Since our founding, we have recruited more than 2,500 community member-owners, fully capitalized, and begun construction on a cooperative grocery store, while developing more than 100 of our members as leaders of the Board and committees. We have also supported enterprise design and planning for more than 20 cooperatives led by residents of low-income and African American neighborhoods.

Dayton is a post-industrial city located along both the Underground Railroad and the Rustbelt. We organize in Dayton’s working class neighborhoods and particularly the historically redlined African American neighborhoods on the west side, where our grocery cooperative is currently under construction. Approximately 22,000 people reside in the neighborhoods; 80% of residents are African American; and 35% of households rely on food stamps. In January 2021, we will have a walkable neighborhood grocery store for the first time in 15 years.

The focus on access to fresh food and the idea for a cooperative grocery came from a series of community meetings in 2015 that explored disparities in opportunity across Dayton. Since then we have consistently worked to engage neighbors and develop their leadership in the cooperative grocery and our grassroots movement both through community organizing and through the cooperative business structure, which includes an Annual Members’ Meeting, elected Board, and multiple committees responsible for different aspects of the business. As we develop cooperatives beyond the Gem City Market, we continue to prioritize entrepreneurial teams led by low-income, African American, and women entrepreneurs.

Dayton, Ohio is a city that has been left behind in the global economy; and the neighborhoods where we work have been further left behind by a history of discrimination and redlining. We are creating opportunities for people to participate in and gain control of their economic circumstances. We are organizing for community self-determination of the types of businesses and the kinds of development that happen in our neighborhoods. And within each cooperative enterprise, we empower people to be owners, develop their leadership, hold their businesses accountable, and share in the wealth that they help to create.

In 2015, the City of Dayton’s department of public health, with support from the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University, created a series of “opportunity maps” to help residents analyze geographic disparities in health, joblessness, wealth and other factors across our city. At the community meetings where we examined the maps, we clearly saw the connection between diet-related illness and a lack of access to fresh groceries. We also shared feelings of rejection and abandonment by corporate grocers and desire for racial and economic justice and renewed community and commercial spaces.

Following the lead of the broader community, I and other activists studied best practices. Inspired by Mondragon’s Eroski grocery co-op and an effort in nearby Cincinnati, we decided that we would meet our needs and remake our local economy by building community- and worker-owned cooperatives. Founded in 2015 as a volunteer steering committee, we incorporated in 2016 and slowly added staff. We earned strong support from local labor unions; we formed a faith-based committee of church leaders; and we developed partnerships with the City, the public housing authority, the major healthcare providers in our city, and other aligned organizations.

Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, I watched as securing a good job went from a given to a lucky break. When I graduated high school and left for college, many classmates went directly into tough but secure manufacturing jobs. By the time I moved home in 2012, things had changed dramatically. Between 1999 and 2014, poverty skyrocketed as Dayton lost tens of thousands of good jobs at businesses like GM, Delphi, and NCR. Friends who once made $25/hour were trying to fit their family’s budget into a $12/hour job at a logistics warehouse. Opioid addiction had touched every family, and blocks in our working class neighborhoods were left half vacant from the foreclosure crisis. Redlining and corporate divestment have weakened and divided my diverse blue collar city and made us less resilient to economic change. My neighborhood, my family, my childrens’ public schools are all dependent upon our local economy, so this work is very personal and urgent.

I have spent my career fighting for economic justice and equity for working people around the world. As an organizer in the labor movement, I participated in campaigns across the United States. I served as general counsel of a 45,000-member manufacturing union, where I advocated for workers and led major strategic projects and international solidarity campaigns. After graduating law school at the crest of the Great Recession, I witnessed the destructive impact on working families and communities. I returned home to Dayton to use my legal and organizing training to build worker-centered solutions. I co-founded Co-op Dayton in 2015 and have led the effort to capitalize a worker- and community-owned grocery store. I'm a proud Echoing Green 2017 Fellow, Harvard Law School Public Interest Venture Fund recipient in 2017, 2018 Facebook Community Leadership Fellow, and the co-recipient of the 2018 Coretta Scott King Center Justice Award.

In fall of 2019, we faced a significant hurdle for our flagship project, the Gem City Market. Construction was delayed as I led the effort to complete the capital campaign. Independent grocers have very low margins, especially in low-income neighborhoods, so we needed philanthropic equity and forgivable debt to reduce ongoing costs. The final layer of our capital stack was New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC), a complicated federal program that could bring more than $1 million in forgivable debt. I began to lead due diligence in September, interfacing almost daily with our investors and 15 lawyers, accountants, and bankers with the goal to close by early December. I taught myself the finer points of NMTCs, learning a witches' brew of tax law, finance, and real estate development, all well outside my training as a labor lawyer.  At the same time, my mother, the sun in my family's solar system, was fighting terminal cancer. Each day was a blur of navigating byzantine finance regulations by day and trying to be present for my mother and my children in the evening. Though the path was bumpy, we closed on finance in January with support from colleagues, family and community.

I've often felt my superpower is my love of hometown. But it wasn't always so. Graduating from a blue collar Catholic school in the late ‘90s, I was desperate to leave Dayton. I moved east as soon as a scholarship to a liberal arts school would allow. But something of Dayton's working class spirit stayed with me. Through college I found myself pulled towards working peoples' movements. At 19, I extended a one-month internship at a garment workers union into a year of embedding on campaigns with NYC retail workers and Indiana distribution center workers. I organized alongside workers for nearly a decade, from graduate students unionizing, to hotel housekeepers on the picketline, to hospital workers fighting for safer nurse:patient ratios. Graduating law school during the uncertainty of the 2009 financial crisis, most classmates opted for the security of corporate firms, but I felt driven to use my legal skills to support blue collar communities as a labor lawyer, working on international solidarity campaigns and pushing for domestic policy change. Finally, in 2012, I made my way back to Dayton. Co-founding Co-op Dayton to build worker ownership in my hometown is the realization of my passion and path.

We've been forced to be creative in order to rebuild our city, create empowering jobs, and reopen pathways to mobility. While there is solidarity economy work happening in coastal cities, we innovate by bringing the worker-led cooperative business model to Dayton, the kind of city where we most need it. 

Initiatives developed in more affluent cities aren't always transferable to cities like ours. For example, some co-op developers prize the "anchor model" where worker co-ops are developed to serve the supply chains of wealthy institutions and government, harnessing their purchasing power to grow community wealth. That kind of strategy would be difficult for Dayton, a city that has lost major anchors and has an eroded tax base.

After years of decline, we were hit especially hard over the past 18 months. 14 tornadoes destroyed millions of dollars in homes and businesses, then a mass shooting killed 9 Daytonians, and then 45,000 jobs were lost to Covid-19 shutdowns. Corporate capitalism, redlining, and shoddy labor protections have left poor neighborhoods ill equipped to rebound from these hits.  

But from our losses comes the willingness to embrace new ideas. We see our work as more than just building one grocery store or several worker cooperatives. We are building hope for a new economy. Our incubator and co-op grocery create models replicable in small, diverse, blue collar cities. A national conversation about racial and economic justice and the future of work must include voices and creativity from cities like ours.