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Our model

How the cooperative works

How Common Grounds is organized, written down so that another group of businesses can copy what works and skip what does not.

The short version

Common Grounds is a handful of independent coffee shops that decided to do some things together. Each shop stays its own business. The work they share happens in small groups called circles, each with a written purpose and a clear sense of what it may decide. Decisions are made by consent: a proposal goes ahead when nobody has a reasoned objection to trying it.

Nothing is meant to be permanent on day one. Each charter and each pilot carries a review date, and on that date the circle decides whether to continue, revise, scale, pause or stop. The model is light on purpose, because the people running it also run coffee shops.

What it rests on

  • Authority close to the work. The people doing a piece of work decide how it is done, inside limits the whole group agreed.
  • Each shop keeps its independence. No circle can direct a shop's staff, space, menu, brand, suppliers, money or data. A shared decision applies to a shop only when that shop agrees.
  • The lightest decision that fits. Routine choices are made in conversation. Contracts, money and anything hard to undo get the heavier tools.
  • Experiments before structures. A pilot with a budget limit and a review date comes before a program, and a program comes before anything permanent.
  • Open enough to trust. Money, shared resources, public claims and shared data are kept visible to the Members.

The cooperative's commitments follow the seven cooperative principles of the International Cooperative Alliance, and its circles and consent decisions come from sociocracy, simplified for busy owners. The two learning guides linked on this page explain both.

Where things stand

The cooperative is in its planning and pilot phase. The Members are choosing a legal structure, which could be a cooperative, an LLC, a nonprofit or a hybrid, and until one is formed this model is an operating draft rather than a legal document. Equity, voting rights and profit sharing are designs the Members are considering, not rights anyone holds yet. Dues are not decided.

The draft names the triggers that send a question to legal and tax advice first: forming an entity, holding shared funds, signing contracts, receiving grants, creating equity or profit sharing, hiring, publishing claims built on one shop's data, and opening to businesses beyond coffee shops.

The parts of the model

Circles and rolesThe Founding Circle, the project circles, what each may decide on its own, and the roles that keep a circle moving between meetings.How we decideConsent for most things, heavier tools for the commitments that are hard to undo, and what counts as an objection.Membership and the pathwayWho takes part, in what role, and how a business becomes a Member that helps run the cooperative.Data and trustThe least data that is useful, figures shared in aggregate, and nothing about one shop published without its consent.

Using it yourselves

Copy it. You may adapt and share these pages for your own group of businesses, as long as you say where they came from (the terms have the wording). If you are starting from nothing, here is the order we are following:

  1. Agree a purpose in a sentence that every business can say yes to.
  2. Write down what each business keeps for itself. Ours is the list under "Each shop keeps its independence" above.
  3. Start one central circle and one project, each with a short charter: its purpose, what it may decide, a budget limit and a review date.
  4. Decide by consent, and keep a heavier tool for the few decisions that are hard to undo.
  5. Review on the date you set, and change what is not working.

If you try it, tell us how it goes. The model gets better every time somebody else finds a gap in it.

Published October 5, 2026.