PRACTICE AREAS
Cooperatives
Facilitating structures that support workers and other collaborators to balance mission with profit.
We help businesses adopt ownership structures that align those with vested interests in your organization with company success and long-term sustainability.
Cooperative Formation
Assisting in the formation of worker cooperatives and other collaborative business models that put decision-making power in the hands of workers.
Perpetual Purpose Trusts
Helping companies restructure to include trusts in succession planning, to ensure that their mission and values are preserved indefinitely, protecting the organization from shifts in leadership or ownership.
Governance
Supporting teams as they use a variety of tools to transition into more democratic companies, conscious of and responsive to all of their collaborators, including workers and customers, as well as their broader impact goals.
TYPES OF CLIENTS
Cooperatives and
Community Ownership
Creative Industries
Maximum Fun Media Cooperative
Maximum Fun Media Cooperative
Maximum Fun Media Cooperative is a worker-owned podcast network of artist-owned shows. Maximum Fun always operated under the principle that doing what is right is more important than doing what is most profitable – when its founder, Jesse Thorn, was ready to no longer run the business in addition to hosting multiple podcasts, he had several options. Jesse and the MaxFun employees decided to convert the company to a worker-owned cooperative. We worked closely with the employees to create a new cooperative and to ensure that it had good governance in place so that they’d be set up for success. Simultaneously, we helped them negotiate a purchase of the business and assets from Jesse and the existing MaxFun entity. Post-conversion, MaxFun’s employees share directly in the profits of the business and elect the board, which is also made up of employees. Now MaxFun is not only a podcast network with artist-owned shows, but is also owned by the people who work there everyday.
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL
We could not have done this without Impact Matters. Given the uniqueness of the ownership change from a traditional shareholder model to being owned by a perpetual purpose trust, we needed a lot of guidance from Impact Matters. Their oversight of the entire process ensured that all of the necessary documents were complete and captured the essence of the transaction and the guiding principles we plan to operate under for many years to come.
Thank you!
BIOHABITATS