Stages of Cooperative Development

Some teams have wondered how to tell where they are in the process of building their cooperative. This framework helps you understand the landscape of cooperative development and where Baby Ghosts' support fits.

There is no single "right" path through these stages! Studios are made of humans, and humans move at different paces and have different needs and capacities. Some studios revisit earlier work, and some jump in to multiple stages simultaneously. This framework provides orientation, not prescription.

Stage 1: Pre-formation

Relational and governance foundations

This stage is for building the relational infrastructure and governance clarity that will inform all future decisions about your studio.

This means:

• Values alignment - What do we stand for? How do we want to work together?
• Power and identity - Who are we as individuals? How do power dynamics show up in our team?
• Decision-making structures - How will we make decisions together? What needs consensus vs. consent vs. delegation?
• Governance principles - What kind of cooperative culture are we creating?
• Conflict navigation - How will we handle disagreements and tensions?
• Financial transparency - What are our shared expectations about money, compensation, and sustainability?
• Storytelling - How do we collectively share our values, journey, and goals with an audience?

Most cooperatives fail due to interpersonal and values conflicts, not from lack of funding or technical skills. This foundational work prevents those failures, or encourages those failures to happen early by highlighting misalignments and building collective decision-making skills from the get-go.

This is the Baby Ghosts' Peer Accelerator. The program is designed specifically for this pre-formation work. We provide:

• Structured curriculum on cooperative values and governance
• Peer support from experienced cooperative practitioners
• A community of other studios navigating similar questions
• Tools, frameworks, and reflection processes

This work typically takes 6-12 months, though teams may revisit these foundations throughout their studio's life.

Stage 2: Formation

Legal structure & incorporation

This stage translates your relational and governance work into legal structures and formal incorporation.

The work you'll do during this stage includes:

• Choosing a specific legal structure (worker cooperative, non-profit cooperative, share corporation, hybrid, etc.)
• Understanding jurisdiction-specific requirements
• Creating bylaws that reflect your governance principles AND meet legal requirements
• Filing articles of incorporation
• Setting up banking, accounting systems, and tax structures
• Understanding compliance requirements

This comes after pre-formation because your bylaws and legal structure should reflect the values and governance principles you've already clarified. Trying to do this work without pre-formation often leads to generic bylaws that don't match how you actually want to operate.

This is NOT Baby Ghosts' expertise. We are not lawyers or accountants and cannot provide legal or financial advice about incorporation.

What we CAN do is help you understand how your pre-formation work should inform your formation decisions. We can sometimes connect you with legal and accounting professionals who specialize in cooperatives, share resources about different cooperative structures, and share what other studios in our alumni community have done.

Once you're ready, the legal formation process typically takes 2-6 months, depending on jurisdiction and complexity.

Stage 3: Early operations

Implementing your cooperative

This stage is all about actually living and working according to the cooperative values and structures you've created. This is where all the theory you've considered and worked on becomes practice.

During this stage, you'll run meetings using your decision-making structures, explore financial transparency practices, and navigate your first major conflicts with your processes. It also involves building sustainable routines for your team, managing your first major revenue/projects, and adjusting your governance. Having bylaws on paper is very different from living them in practice. Most cooperatives discover they need to refine their structures once they're actually using them.

At this stage, Baby Ghosts can provide informal alumni support. After completing our program, you remain in our Slack community where you can ask questions in your cohort or any community channel, check in on other studios' channels to learn from their experiences, attend ongoing workshops and social events, and access our growing resource library.

This is NOT formal structured support, but peer-to-peer learning and community care!

Expect this stage to last 1-2 years of learning and adjustment as you find your footing.

Stage 4: Mature operations

Established cooperative

Your cooperative has established rhythms, processes that work, and the ability to navigate challenges. You're focused on sustainability and impact and way past figuring out the basics.

This is the time you might be:

• Onboarding new members
• Doing long-term financial planning
• Further refining your governance (yes, this is a neverending process!)
• Contributing to the broader cooperative movement
• Maintaining alignment as team/projects change

Mature studios sometimes:

• Serve as Peer Supports for new cohorts
• Share case studies and learnings

Understanding where you are

If you're currently in the Baby Ghosts Peer Accelerator:

• You are in Stage 1: Pre-Formation
• This is the right time to be figuring out values, decision-making, and governance
• It's NORMAL to not have clarity yet on legal structures or bylaws
• The work you're doing now will make formation and operations much smoother

If you're wondering, "When do we incorporate?"

• There's no fixed timeline
• Some studios incorporate during or right after the program
• Some studios take 1-2 years of pre-formation work before incorporating
• Some studios decide a cooperative structure isn't right for them (and that's okay!)

If you're feeling lost about "the steps":

• This is less like following a recipe and more like learning a language
• Each studio's path looks different based on your context, capacity, and goals
• The "roadmap" is clarifying your values and building governance skills, not checking boxes

If you're still unclear about where you are in your journey or what work you should be focusing on, bring these questions to:

• Your Peer Support in your 1:1 meetings
• Program coordinators (Jennie & eileen)
• Your cohort peers who may be navigating similar questions