TeamWorks transforms low-wage, "dead-end" service jobs into powerful social and economic development opportunities. 

Members of The TeamWorks Cooperative Network are able to:
  • Earn a good income and pull themselves out of poverty.
  • Develop financial assets.
  • Become co-owners of a social business.
  • Gain access to quality health insurance.
  • Develop their skills and interests.  

The initial launch of new TeamWorks cooperatives is financed by foundations and social investors through the TeamWorks Capital Fund, which is managed by Opportunity Fund (formerly Lenders for Community Development), a not-for-profit community development financial institution.  TeamWorks has the potential to leverage greater social benefit per philanthropic dollar than funds invested in traditional grantmaking because its cooperatives and the network’s headquarters organization are self-sustaining social businesses.  As a new cooperative repays its start-up loan into the TeamWorks Capital Fund, the resources are re-used to start additional cooperatives.  This approach is explicitly designed to allow our network to go to scale and be genuinely sustainable.

There are currently two TeamWorks cooperatives providing house cleaning services in Silicon Valley and on the Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Go to cleaning cooperatives’ website.  A third one will open in the summer, 2009.  We are focused on building our network of house cleaning cooperatives into the social business analogue to the traditional franchise system.  We may expand into other types of service businesses in the future.

Our development model is primarily inspired by two sources:

  • the vision and definition of social business that has been pioneered by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen family of companies in Bangladesh.  For an introduction to the social business concept, we recommend Yunus’ most recent book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.
  • the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, which have demonstrated that worker-owned cooperatives can contend at scale in the mainstream economy. We have adapted key concepts from the Mondragon experience to the U.S. business environment with extensive pro bono legal assistance from the law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP. 

TeamWorks Central is the headquarters and technical assistance provider for the network.  It directly manages the early development of new cooperatives and provides intensive training to candidates seeking to become member-owners of those cooperatives.  It also provides ongoing technical and administrative support to established TeamWorks cooperatives.

TeamWorks was founded in 2004 by David Smathers Moore after a career in philanthropy and non-profit community development organizations.  He lived in Chicago for many years where he worked at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Labor and Community Research.  More recently he was a community organizer with People Acting in Community Together (PACT) in San Jose, California, a member of the PICO National Network. 

For more information, please download materials from our document library on the side of this page.  We welcome your questions and comments.  Please contact:

David Smathers Moore
e-mail:  dsmathers [at symbol] teamworks.coop
phone:  (650) 248-3415

TeamWorks Central
616 Guerrero Street
San Francisco, CA 94110