The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL) is a true wealth creation story – a story of community wealth building, anchoring wealth locally, and building lasting livelihoods for those on the economic margins. The story began with the Cleveland Foundation bringing together partners including the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic and other anchor institutions to determine how they could create generational impacts, living wage jobs and employee ownership, while keeping wealth local. Laundry was determined to be a key need for those assembled anchor institutions. Each anchor partner invested $250,000 to launch the laundry and ECL also received municipal support in the form of loans from the Cleveland Department of Economic Development. In 2014, ECL contracted with the University Hospital Cleveland Medical Center in contracts valued over $5 million. The first major profit distribution happened in 2015 for employee owners. In 2018, ECL contracted with the Cleveland Clinic to run their Collinswood facility, the location of our mobile workshop.
The mobile workshop included a tour of the laundry operations, which operate with strict hygiene standards in accordance with requirements for healthcare laundry and conversation with employee-owners about their experiences. This facility handles 70,000 lbs. of laundry a day and over 22 million pounds each year.
In 2020, the Fund for Employee Ownership launched five acquisitions, which is the first employee ownership conversion initiative in the US. In this process, the Fund acquires businesses, converts them to employee ownership and supports them moving forward. What they’ve learned from this process is that the company needs to have a minimum of 10 employees and a growth path to effectively impact households and livelihoods and build community wealth. These are revolving investments – low-cost patient capital as debt or equity. The original capitalization came about through grants and forgivable loans.
Their Evergreen Business Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of the nonprofit, offering back-office backbone operations and consulting services to those cooperative businesses that have been acquired.
Sectors that Evergreen is in are anchor driven – laundry, food, solar, etc. In 2021, the Cleveland Clinic re-signed with ECL for 5 years at $40 million.
John McMicken, Evergreen CEO, insists that “we’re more resilient because we’re employee owned.”
Today, they have seen results:
What does this look like as an employee? There is a one-year eligibility period to become an owner, at which point you can apply and existing owners vote on their membership. The pay grade and benefits are increased as an owner. The benefits package is impressive – free access to medical, vision and dental; insurance; payroll deductions for home purchase; legal assistance for a variety of reasons including expungement of criminal records; 401K; and more. Their expertship program allows for recruiting that rewards the new employee as well as the recruiting employee; after 90 days both get $350, after 6 months, both receive $650 and after a year, each receive $1,000.
“A job alone is not enough.”
The Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland have become a global innovation model for creating more sustainable regional economies. Over 300 local residents have an ownership stake as they create thriving businesses, while playing a transformational role in building vibrant neighborhoods. The Evergreen Cooperatives showcase a local ownership and control model consistent with the wealth creation framework for economic development, across a variety of sectors, including laundry services, food systems, renewable energy, manufacturing, etc.
Overall, mobile workshop participants enjoyed the visit to the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry; it spurred many questions about how to instigate cooperative development in their regions.
“I just wanted to thank you for leading what was an amazing mobile workshop to Evergreen Cooperative Laundry.
I could truly feel the inspiration in the room amongst all those who attended."
