aorta
Written by Kate Eubank
Founders: 10 Founders/Owners (meet them at aorta.coop/team)
Industry: Facilitation, Coaching, and Consulting
Website: https://aorta.coop
In one sentence, how would you describe your cooperative?
AORTA is a worker-owned cooperative of facilitators, coaches and consultants devoted to movements for liberation; we are a group of 10 facilitation nerds who work with over 80 organizations and hundreds of individuals each year to strengthen movements for justice and liberation.
What is the mission of your cooperative and what do you hope to achieve?
AORTA envisions a world where people are able to live meaningful lives full of sovereignty, honest work and joy, free from dispossession, exploitation, and violence and rooted in right livelihood and relationship to place. We help bring that world into being by providing services and resources that catalyze and sustain successful, leaderful movements composed of skilled, democratic, principled, and courageous people and organizations that are able to build collective power and work in solidarity through liberatory praxis (action, learning, reflection).
What are the types of member classes in your cooperative?
Just worker-owners.
What are the benefits for individuals/businesses who become members of your coop?
Being a worker-owner in our coop often feels like both an awesome gift and a big responsibility! As coop members, we benefit in many ways from the fact that we govern and organize ourselves and make important decisions about our work and workplace collectively; and though they aren’t members of our coop, we believe that the organizations and individuals who bring AORTA in to support their group, receive coaching from one of us, or attend AORTA trainings and programs benefit from the deep experience in collective decision-making, solidarity-building and non-hierarchical organizational management that we’re able to share with them because we’re practicing it daily in our own organization.
How do you keep things fun and exciting for your members while still running a business?
As a distributed coop, our internal relational tending and connection mostly happens online. Every week, we start with a group check-in to keep connected with one another, and every quarter, we have an internal retreat that we call our dream weeks, where we are both tending to our business, but they are also times where we are intentionally sharing stories and visioning together. Additionally, we are big fans of games, puzzles, and imaginative play. There have been many budget or proposal review meetings that have involved dressing up in costumes and choose-your-own adventure style games. We’re a group that loves to laugh, and our meetings are full of silly wordplay, playful jokes, and we also love nerding out together, so we often connect over what we’re learning from our clients, collaborators, and our own explorations.
What challenges have you faced in running your cooperative, and how have you addressed them?
So many! The one that is truly evergreen for us (and that we imagine resonates with so many other cooperatives) is that co-running an organization that “goes against the grain” is hard! Sometimes being co-worker-owners trying to do powerful work and care for our collective, while also paying our bills within the context of advanced racial capitalism, feels like trying to keep a small (but fabulously designed) canoe afloat and steady in the middle of rushing rapids. Some ways we address this challenge include: starting from a place of values and creative possibility when confronted with external pressures and hard decisions; constantly working to develop our skills and habits in collective decision-making and balancing leadership and followership; being honest with ourselves and each other about the limits of what our 10-person organization can do at any given moment; connecting and building solidarity with other coops and anti-capitalist formations; and tending our relationships with each other through leaning into both hard conversations *and* our ability to laugh with each other.
What makes your cooperative stand out in terms of services/products?
One of our frequent collaborators describes our cooperative as a highly relational group, and it definitely comes through across our work. After all, our logo is a heart! Our work ranges from highly customized, bespoke coaching, facilitation, and consultation to trainings and workshops for groups and individuals on both political learning and practical skills development. We use participatory and creative facilitation techniques to guide conversations in virtual, in person, and hybrid groups. We prioritize accessibility and engagement, and are skilled at facilitating in the midst of complex power dynamics and high levels of tension. Throughout all of our work, we provide steady accompaniment and thoughtful guidance, weaving relational, structural, and cultural areas of work together.
If your cooperative had a theme song, what would it be?
We would have ten different answers that would probably change depending on the season. We also have a number of folks with excellent music taste, so we are frequently making and sharing playlists, and one of our members is a DJ! Right now, I would say we are connecting with this song: “Somos Sur,” by Ana Tijoux, featuring Shadia Mansour.
How is your coop helping to “Build a Better World?”
We believe that our collective liberation requires the bridging of our common humanity and all people recognizing our fundamental interdependence. In a time where tensions are high–we are supporting folks to engage with conflict generatively, so that we are able to turn towards each other in the midst of heat, not on each other. We support folks in understanding themselves as a key part of a movement ecosystem, and we facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, relationships, and resources across groups to help folks move from competition to cooperation. We strongly believe that if a meeting/gathering/group process is facilitated well, our movements for liberation will be able to make decisions more easily, be more precise and focused with their strategy, and be able to take bolder and more effective action.
Each month in 2025 we will spotlight a different cooperative as part of our celebration and support for the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives.
