How we work
so·cial en·tre·pre·neur noun a person who establishes an enterprise with the aim of solving social problems or effecting social change.
What’s your mission? What do you want to fix in the world?
Not sure? We can help you define it or refine it. We help design your business where revenue is a by-product, not the goal, and entrepreneurial success is measured with different metrics. Our clients and collaborators are ready to reimagine work that doesn’t suck and values humanity. We embed your mission, vision, and values into your operations and creative content.
We’re building the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) one business at a time for the Collective.
Using multiple strategies, we’re taking action to fix systemic economic inequality.
We are intentional at both the micro and macro levels, supporting this community and providing different opportunities to make an impact through design and communications. As a Collective of socially responsible innovators, we want “work” to be a safe and rewarding experience for everyone.
Macro challenges we’re working on:
Improving conditions, exposure, and access to capital for marginalized business owners.
Exposing exorbitant fees charged by government agencies.
Making business certification processes more accessible and affordable.
Identifying ethical tech platforms and decolonized design processes.
Building connections between the United Nations, SDGs, and U.S. small businesses/independents
Advocating for SDG5 to move beyond the binary and SDG 10 to discuss colonization, anti-Black racism, and systemic racism.
Ensuring VCs and governments are held accountable to Black Lives Matter statements and other public promises to invest in marginalized communities.
Closing gender and racial pay, wealth, and opportunity gaps with every business transaction.
Multiple methods of impact we provide:
Individual Sponsorship. We believe in supporting the creator economy from grassroots artists to startup founders.
Currently, we support 8 content creators with monthly sustaining payments for Substack and Patreon.
Supplies. We provide local art collectives and nonprofits with supplies. For a list of who we are currently compensating, email us.
Education and Workshops. We model financial transparency, teaching the benefits (and pitfalls) of social enterprise, B-Corps, the SDGs, democratization, and cooperative governance, stakeholder capitalism, stewardship models, and inclusive design.
Policies. We go deeper defining how we commit to "people and planet” over profit and document and set our targets based on the latest evidence-based research for flexible, sustainable workplaces.
Design. We look at the workplace holistically and build social brands, with ethical operations and inclusive communications.
Purpose-driven brands must walk the walk to serve the common good, starting with our own.
How do you use open source initiatives to fuel collective action?
We leverage best practices from the WEPs, U.N. SDGs, and B Corp guidelines to as our starting point.
“People and Planet” come first which is why we believe collectivism is the way forward. To build a more equitable economy small organizations need the same tools and information as big corporations.
coFLOWco supports the Global Goals, but we do so cautiously.
coFLOWco joined Catalyst 2030 in October 2020 to collaborate with social entrepreneurs on the SDGs. We connect with other changemakers around the world to accelerate our work towards gender and racial equality and inclusive workplaces.
As educators, designers, and technologists we question everything. The SDGs are no exception.
Unfortunately, the Global Goals have inequity embedded into their language, design, and metrics. The United Nations and other large governing and philanthropic organizations were founded by rooms filled with white men and are sustained by gatekeeping philanthropists.
Written by the same people who caused the problems we see in today’s economy, they exploited workers and harmed our planet. The Goals they wrote aim to correct their mistakes.
The SDGs are only a starting point, a shared language. Unless the U.N. directly addresses inequality created by systemic racism, pervasive rape culture, and colonialism we will not achieve the SDGs. Even human rights violations in the United States must be called out.
Progress without accountability is merely PR. You cannot package purpose.
Our Profits have Purpose.
Want support in building a business with transparent, equitable, ethical financials?
Follow our progress and reach out to learn more.
We are committed in our bylaws to using 50% or more of our profits towards our mission and is a condition of our Trust Law membership.
We support organizations improving the lives of women and girls, especially BIPOC womxn, nonbinary, and the LGBTQIA2S+ community. We also focus on organizations building more accessible education, supporting youth transitioning to the workplace, and those building a safer internet.
We give monthly and annual donations, support local Mutual Aid organizations, and support startups in alternative fundraising.
In 2021, we became micro-investors in Backstage Capital (Republic) via equity crowdfunding. In 2022, we supported the launch of Diversity Leader’s Group (now Mission Equality) and became Co op member-owners of Zebra’s Unite.
We reinvest profits back into our business and transparent budgets to all our staff and partners. We will provide dividends to our member-owners, as outlined in our Articles of Organization, which will be ratified by the founding coop members when we transition to an LAC.
As part of legal documents to become a Benefit Corporation, changes in organizational leadership must adhere to our mission and fiscal commitments (or go through a review process with members and to update with the Oregon Secretary of State.) This is known as “mission lock” in B Corp certification and one way to ensure the business does what it says its going to.
Update Summer 2022: While we honor the above, it is not yet binding. We have paused on this process to ensure actually make an impact. We are not interested in being performative with certifications or credentials. Our energy is better served by supporting our team and community. Additionally, the support for legal counsel through our Trust Law membership has proved incredibly difficult to access.
We will revisit this in 2023. In the meantime we are watching B Lab grapple with doing business for good at scale while continuing to assemble a strong Collective of Creatives, Strategists, and Ops experts who happen be building an ethical, equitable, transparent business.
Update 2023: We renewed our membership to Women’s Funding Network and Zebra Co op member-ownership. At the end of 2022 we became signatories of the Design Justice Principles from Design Justice Network and renewed our Women-Owned Small Business certification.
For-profit social enterprise versus non-profits.
We specifically did not start Collective Flow Consulting as a nonprofit. Our labor is worthy and compensation and ownership is how we create economic equality and opportunity, aka, our mission.
The patriarchy will do anything it can to avoid acknowledging or compensating our ideas. NGO’s and nonprofits were created to keep marginalized people out of paid work and keep employees from sharing profits. While we do not want 501c3 to be our primary organizational business model, we do want to shift power to underestimated founders.
coFLOWco will remain a for-profit company, with The FLOWLab as the nonprofit entity of our ecosystem. To challenge capitalism and broken systems, expand on and publish our research, educate and share ideas, and seek out solutions for the Solidarity Economy and Future of Work…we need you.
If you want to sponsor FLOWLab and our work to help founders survive the first 5 years in business, join as a member or donate here.
To make it to our next milestone and provide open source toolkits and research to other pre-revenue founders, we had to seek out different revenue streams. To push back on inequitable procurement, RFP, and grant processes requires that we go through these inequitable processes over and over to get funds to keep going. The irony is not lost on us.
Someone has to pay.
As a social enterprise, coFLOWco gives back by design, in our by laws and in our work day-to-day. Since 2019, we have been working to transition to a employee-owned coop and earn our B Corp certification. A few months later, we shifted to supporting marginalized and underestimated founders in a more significant way during the pandemic, primarily pro bono. We founded The FLOWLab to continue to support for our community.
Fiscal Sponsors to the rescue.
We are grateful to Open Collective Foundation for their fiscal sponsorship. Getting approved as a Collective for OCF allows us to seek sponsors, grants, and members, and find funding.
This helps us quickly avoid barriers the patriarchy put in place to discourage us from moving forward. We can bypass forming a nonprofit and the cost, time, and bureaucratic work that nonprofit status entails.
See our vision, learn about membership, become a corporate sponsor, and check out our fully transparent budget for FLOWLab on Open Collective.
“If the world is night
Shine my life like a light.”
— Indigo Girls