Vernon Oakes hosts Everything Co-op, the leading weekly national radio programme for the US co-operative community. He is a general partner in Everything.Coop Communications, LLC, a media organisation that promotes co-operative business models by providing education and resources specifically for marginalised Americans and their communities. In October, he will be inducted into the US Cooperative Hall of Fame.
Tell us about your early life
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, which is coal country, with greenery, mountains, rolling hills and relatively poor communities. My grandfather was a coal miner. My father worked on a coal railroad, and met my mother when they were both in the army in World War II. So I grew up talking unions and politics, and at home there was a lot of interest in what was going on in the world. West Virginia integrated schools in 1955 – we were one of the first after the law was changed in ’54 – so I was a Black kid in an integrated school, then went to the historically Black Bluefield State College, and graduated from there in 1970. I got a master’s in mathematics from Penn State and later an MBA from Stanford. I was always a bit of an entrepreneur – driving, selling cars, teaching – and ended up working for Cummins, an engine company in Indiana, travelling the world doing marketing studies with them, then running a distributorship for them in Puerto Rico. But at no time during my formal education or early career did I hear anything about co-ops.
When did you first learn about them?
After Puerto Rico, I moved to Washington, DC, and started a property management business, and a friend of mine told me about housing co-ops. So I was 40 years old before I knew anything about them. I started managing limited equity housing co-ops – although when I first heard about them I thought this was white folks trying to make sure that Black folks didn’t get equity. So I didn’t like them at first! But I fell in love with this business model, watching everyday people make extremely good long-term decisions, holding each other and me accountable. I found them fascinating and wonderful.
That fascination continued and you now host a weekly radio show about co-ops. How did the show start?
That came out of housing co-ops too. I got involved in the local housing co-op group for DC, Maryland and Virginia, the Potomac Association of Housing Co-ops, and then the National Association of Housing Co-ops, where I became president. A problem we found was that people don’t know about housing co-ops. There’s no demand for them, and without the demand, developers won’t build them. So we have to create the demand and make sure people know about co-ops. I started going around being on different shows talking about co-ops – and one of them was the Thornton Business Hour, hosted by my cousin, Pat Thornton. The lady that runs the station, Karen Jackson, came out and put her finger in my face and said, ‘you should have your own show!’ That’s where the idea came from. In 2013 we received funding from the National Co-op Bank (NCB) to do a radio show for one October (Co-op Month in the USA). Everybody liked it. I loved it, and so we just kept doing it. And so this October, Everything Co-op will celebrate 11 years, and NCB has been our main financial sponsor ever since. It’s online on Thursday mornings, 10.30am ET (3.30pm BST) at Everything.coop.
What are some of the standout stories you’ve heard through the programme?
They’re all so exciting, but there’s a group I spoke with in Chicago that really stood out, ChiFresh, who started during Covid. It was a group of five African Americans, four Black ladies and one Black man, who were formerly incarcerated. They didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do, so they did brainstorming, marketing studies, chatting, and they found out what was needed was food for institutions, and so they created a co-op to fix meals for churches, hospitals and schools. It was highly successful, particularly during Covid, and now they’re buying their own building. Alongside this, the main two reasons single parents, mostly single women, can’t get a job is because of childcare and transportation – so their building is close to where they live and they’re creating a childcare co-op.
I had first gotten excited about co-ops by incarcerated people when I heard about a bakery in Italy. At ChiFresh, these five people had already gotten out of prison, but at the bakery, people were in prison being a part of this co-op, and then when they got out, they already had a job. They were already owners. In this situation the recidivism rate is 3-5%; in the US, it could be 70 or 80% of people who reoffend and go back to jail because they have nothing out there but the old life that got them in there in the first place. It shows how co-ops can be for anybody that has issues, particularly if there isn’t money or education in the community. That’s how co-ops often exist, they get started to solve some community problem.
Another standout was Dame Pauline Green, who came on the show and said something which I have repeated myself at least every second or third show: that co-ops help people come out of poverty with dignity. A co-op gives people belonging. It gives people purpose, but most importantly, it gives people voice – particularly women and Black people. And it helps people to have self-worth.
Why don’t people know about co-ops?
I’ve been criticised sometimes for this belief, but in my view, capitalists just don’t want people to know about co-ops. In the US, if you look at who owns the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the news channels, they’re all capitalists, and they decide what gets published. You don’t hear stories about co-ops on TV or the radio. The media does not tell the stories of co-ops – or if they do, they tell a negative story, so people don’t know about them.
What can co-ops do about this lack of knowledge?
Co-ops are one of the world’s best-kept secrets. But we keep them as the best-kept secrets, instead of getting on the rooftops and shouting about the principles of co-operation. That’s what we need to be doing. We’ll talk about it to each other, but not out in the open to the whole community or politicians – or help elect politicians who understand co-operation and support it. There’s a lot of work that we have to do.
You were in New York when the 2012 UN International Year of cooperatives was announced – and again a few weeks ago for the soft launch of the 2025 IYC. How can co-ops use this opportunity?
I was talking with Doug O’Brien [CEO of NCBA-Clusa – the US co-op apex] about this recently. Every co-op needs to use this opportunity. If every credit union, rural electric co-op, consumer co-op, housing co-op let their members know about it and get their members to talk about it, then I think we have the beginning of something. We need to do it ourselves and not look for anybody else. We need to get the word out about it and organise special events in 2025. They can be tied to other occasions too. February is Black History Month in the US, so on the Everything Co-op show, we have African American co-operators. March is Women’s History Month, November is National American Indian Heritage Month. In 1844 the Rochdale Pioneers put down their principles and values, but co-operation has been around forever. We just have to shout it out.
It’s a time of global political change right now – and US presidential elections are coming up in November. What do you see co-ops offering in terms of economic and political democracy?
I think politics and economics go hand in hand. We need more politicians to understand co-ops and put in policies that help create co-ops and help them be successful. We have a lot of programmes, for capitalistic businesses that help people to be successful. But looking at the five-year survival rate, 60-70% of traditional businesses fail, while with co-op businesses, only 10-20% fail, and that’s because people are working together.
We talk about issues around education, healthcare, transportation, and childcare. We talk about getting people the skills that are necessary, or building the businesses necessary to create the jobs that are necessary. We can do all of that to co-operation, but we have to get politicians at the local level, state level and federal level that could create these policies to help us, and that’s what’s huge in this election, so it’s extremely important that the co-operators get out and vote.
Click here for more Meet … interviews from the global co-op movement
