By Ralph, Ethan, Gabrielle, and Rylan
This week we launched Up & Go, a web application that connects consumers with local, sustainable, worker-owned cooperatives offering top-quality services at guaranteed fair wages. The platform’s first focus is on house-cleaning, provided by majority-women-owned worker cooperatives in the New York City area. As it grows it will include more services and, we hope, expand to more regions, supporting just economies and the cooperative movement in cities around the world.
Over the past year and a half, CoLab designed and built the app in collaboration with the inspiring cooperatives it features and The Center for Family Life (CFL). CFL is a neighborhood-based social services organization that has been at the forefront of developing worker-owned businesses to benefit marginalized and disadvantaged communities. Development of the Up & Go platform was supported by the Robin Hood Foundation and Barclays’ Citizenship program, whose insights helped shape it and bring it to life:
“Low-income workers have effectively been denied the benefits this new [gig] economy has offered. With Up & Go, though, we’ve invested in worker-focused platform that democratizes access to work for women, workers without higher education, and other New Yorkers living in poor communities.”
-Steven Lee, a managing director at Robin Hood
Our work together has centered on a vision of a future in which technology enables new forms of cooperatively-owned, democratically-governed businesses to scale and thrive in the competitive world of online e-commerce. Offering an alternative to models that are often extractive and exploitative, these business support a new economy founded on cooperation and sustainability. We’ll have to go deeper on that another time. For now we’re excited to announce that the first step toward this vision has launched this week – an easy-to-use, open marketplace for cooperative house cleaning: upandgo.coop.
Read Up & Go’s official press release on www.marketwired.com.