Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelley Bader
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Slow Bloom actually began as Union drive in 2020 at our former employer, Augie’s Coffee. After a super-majority across 5 cafes came forward with union cards, our employer fired everyone and liquidated the business. In the wake of the firings, members of the original organizing committee turned the campaign for a union into a worker-cooperative and Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative was born. Getting the co-op off the ground in the midst of Covid was a massive challenge. We started out as a pop up and a cold brew delivery team to make some of the members some much needed income, but it was largely a marketing campaign, trying to show the community that we were still here with big plans. Thanks to massive community support, we raised the capital we needed to open our cafe and have been successfully open for business since 2022.
So much of the work has been coming to terms with what a worker-cooperative is, how it functions, and what it offers us as workers. Of course we have our industry and remain deeply committed to our craft, but those elements of the business came naturally. We had all worked at a highly competitive specialty coffee company for several years. But democracy, worker control, governance of the business – all of these were incredibly daunting endeavors. There were no models for what we were doing, we just hit the ground running and learned on the fly. Fortunately we had partners in the labor movement, mostly union organizers and friends, who helped us figure out what a democratic organization could look like. Today we continue to flesh out what our worker-owned endeavor really means, but it’s clear that we’ve rebuilt a home for ourselves and our community and we are as committed as ever to making lasting changes in our industry.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s hard to imagine a less smooth road than the one we have taken. Aside from starting up during Covid, a complete lack of experience on business ownership, and an overwhelming lack of capital, there are just more baked-in challenges to the worker-coop model. In part, this comes with the territory of doing things completely different from everyone around you. The world around us is not built for what we are doing, and so on every level from practical business and financial matters to social perspectives on our business model, there are just some extra challenges in store for us. Where competition is the highest value of the land, cooperation and solidarity don’t fit in and come at a higher cost. Then of course there are the internal challenges of democracy and co-managing a business in a setting so traditionally void of any worker-autonomy. The lessons we learn as we work together to own this thing are extremely rewarding but hard earned. And at the end of the day, we welcome all of these struggles, firstly because we are capable of overcoming them and growing in the process, and secondly because we take it as evidence that we are on the right path. A better world for workers is what we are after and if that was easy, we’d probably already be living in that reality.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
I take it that you don’t interview worker-coops very often and so this question, in my opinion, is both the entire point of this interview and practically a given. The folks who deserve the most credit are every worker who decided to take a stand for themselves and their fellow worker and unite for better working conditions and wages. Slow Bloom is a body of workers who decided to risk it all and make a change in the world. To that end Slow Bloom also gives credit to the history of the labor movement that preceded us and inspires us to follow on the path of striving for a better, more democratic and free world for all workers. Thanks to the UE and Anna for the countless hours of support and mentorship. Specifically we are grateful and indebted to our community who comes every day to support our shop, they took us from a glorified lemonade stand to a successful coffee roasting company.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://slowbloomcoffee.com
- Instagram: slowbloomcoffee
Image Credits
Gabe Perez
