Common Ground, a local Hampden coffee spot which has had a tumultuous few months, had its soft open last week in its new iteration as a worker-owned cooperative.
The coffee shop celebrated its grand re-opening Sept. 18 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and its signature coffee and breakfast menu. The location and décor are much the same as when it abruptly closed in July with less than 24-hours’ notice from former owner, Michael Krupp. The business organizational structure, however, is vastly different.
Nic Koski, one of the baristas at the shop before it closed, and now one of the worker-owners of Common Ground explained the cooperative model.
“We are a worker-owned cooperative, which means that we have a different structure than what we had before and what most businesses in the U.S. have. So, there’s no boss,” Koski said. “Actually, in our particular structure, there aren’t even really managers, either, like we used to have.”
Instead, workers share the business as equal owners.
“The way it works now is that everyone is either a worker-owner, meaning they have equal share of ownership in the business and an equal vote in business decisions, or they are on their way to becoming a worker-owner,” Koski said. “So that would be for people who are just starting off joining us. They will be on track to become a worker-owner after a year of just getting familiar with the place and comfortable in their position.”
Koski explained that sometimes people might work there for shorter terms than a year, like students on a summer break, and they would not be worker-owners, but paid the same amount as workers-owners.
“We don’t have it as before, where pay structure would have been really wildly different,” they said.
Previously there was a divide between pay for the owner and management versus other workers, and even between front-of-house and back-of-house workers, Koski said.
“The way we’ve done it now is that everyone is paid equally. We all get an equal share in the tips, regardless of your role or your duties because we value the work that everyone does for the business,” they said.
The cooperative has a “Workers’ Council,” which includes all the worker-owners.
“We meet once a week, and that’s where we make some of our most important decisions as a group,” Koski said. “Outside of that, we have smaller committees for different areas of work, such as the food or beverage or communications, and those different committees will meet about once a month. And then we’ll bring bigger proposals to the Workers’ Council.”
During the two-month long transition Koski said they and the other original Common Ground workers worked with Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), which is part of a national organization called Seed Commons.
BRED helped the new co-op navigate the transitions of buying the business; obtaining the lease; transferring licenses; and other aspects of reopening.
“The fact that we were able to do it in just two months, I think, was really impressive… just like how we were able to get everything together that quickly,” Koski said. “I mean, on our end, of course, it felt like it was taking forever. We were just waiting every day for new updates to happen.”
Those two months were difficult because Koski and fellow worker-owners didn’t have income. But they supported each other by raising awareness for their situation, using one of their Venmo accounts to keep track of financial donations, utilizing Food Rescue Baltimore for groceries, and sharing food within the group.
The Common Ground workers participated in Strike Fest, an event that supported the Teamsters and other unions, on July 23 when they were exploring the possibility of buying the shop and turning it into a cooperative. They had a table there, where many regular customers visited them to talk about the situation and their ideas. It was through those conversations and events they were able to raise mutual aid funds and support each other with food drive-like campaigns.
As for the current iteration of Common Ground, now that they’ve had a busy week after reopening, they want to maintain what they have before adding new menu items or implementing other ideas.
“We definitely have some ideas in the works. Right now, our goal was to try to bring everything mostly back to how it was as it was left just so it would kind of make it the smoothest transition as possible,” Koski said. “So most recently, we brought back our lunch menu. So, we’ve got pretty much everything as it was, including the prices being the same. And in the future, we’re definitely going to continue to evaluate our menu, look at what people want the most and where we can, improve. That’s pretty much our goal.”
Former Common Ground owner Michael Krupp told Baltimore Fishbowl he had no comment for this article.
