The Worcester Roots Project is planting its community-strengthening and re-shaping business models throughout the city, and if organizers have their way, worker-run businesses will be a big part of Worcester’s future.

The nonprofit organization helps develop and maintain cooperatives, or co-ops, democratically-run businesses in which the workers own the business and everyone works together to sustain the organization. By promoting a co-op economy, Worcester Roots seeks to make neighborhoods safer and foster an environment of collaboration, respect and environmental awareness.

With its mission to create opportunities for environmental, social and economic justice and a focus on progress through green cooperatives, Worcester Roots has a number of projects and initiatives that aim to help members of the Worcester community. While serving primarily as a co-op incubator, it also runs Toxic Soil Busters, a program for Worcester youth; offers Co-op Academy, an eight-week program that teaches individuals how to develop sustainable co-ops; and is in the process of building a greenhouse.

“It’s a way of producing sustainability within the organization,” said Julius Jones, co-director of Worcester Roots. “Because everyone who is an owner has a deeper vested interest in it than your typical business model, which has just a small group of owners or one owner who all the profits go to. There’s greater incentive for that company to stay in business and keep providing jobs to its owners.”

Jones said that co-ops can change society in huge ways. “When people have the ownership and they have a relationship with the work that they’re doing where they directly benefit from it more than just wages, I think it changes the whole dynamics of the job.”

Instead of workers putting in their labor and receiving just a paycheck, they also get the reward of time invested in their own company. They are receiving their own profits from the work they put in, rather than the profits going to a single owner. This means there is almost no risk of the business losing jobs because it “will always have its owners in mind, who happen to be the workers.”

Founded in 2001, Worcester Roots originally began with a focus on environmental justice, but has since added social and economic justice to its mission because, as Jones explained, these causes are all interconnected. The organization’s first project extracted lead from contaminated soil in the city’s Main South and Piedmont neighborhoods. Since then, the Worcester Roots Project has widened its outreach and grown to oversee various projects.

One such project is Future Focus Media Incorporated, a cooperative started in 2011 that now operates as its own legal business entity. This co-op teaches youth about photography, video production, web design, graphic arts and social media. The goal is to produce quality content for clients while simultaneously strengthening jobs skills and producing powerful stories about the lives of youth in Worcester.

The youth who participate in Future Focus Media tend to be from low-income families without access to technology like computers or DSLR cameras, and many are often first-generation high school or college students. Teaching them these skills is crucial to increasing their desirability in the job market. And they don’t just learn skills related to the technological world, either.

“[We] teach things about being on time, work ethic, working on a deadline, how to put together a business plan, how to communicate effectively and efficiently face-to-face, as well as by e-mail,” said Dee Wells, co-founder and instructor at Future Focus. “They’re all transferrable skills [that] can be used in college and beyond.”

Wells explained that Future Focus is “really a partnership between our youth and our core group of co-founders.” The organization is hired by clients to produce video, photography, website or social media content. The youth participants – who range from kids as young as 10 to older students in their mid-20s – then work with instructors to help produce this content.

It’s all hands-on learning, said Wells, because students are learning how to produce this media by participating in the process from start to finish. For example, when creating a video project, students learn “how to storyboard, how to think about what angles to shoot, shooting with multiple cameras, making sure audio is good, lighting is good, making sure the take is good. Then, taking that back to the office and editing it all together.” In this way, students have gained skills in video production and Future Focus has produced content for its client.

The organization works for a wide variety of clients, “be it a Chinese food restaurant that needs some help with social media and creating their website, someone who’s running for City Council or a big organization like UMass Memorial,” Wells said. “There’s no task too small or too big.”

Graduates of Future Focus have been offered internships and jobs at various groups and have even had the chance to display their work at local film festivals. Future Focus is also the primary founder of the Central Mass Film Festival, launched in 2013. The festival showcases movies filmed either in Central Massachusetts or by someone from the region.

While Future Focus Media recently incorporated and no longer operates directly under the Worcester Roots Project, “we’re all involved in Worcester Roots” and in promoting co-ops, the green economy and new business models, Wells said.

Both Worcester Roots Project and Future Focus Media are housed in the Stone Soup Community Center, an activist collective and resource center in Main South that brings together social justice groups from around Worcester.

For more information, visit worcesterroots.org, futurefocusmedia.org and stonesoupworcester.org.

By Anna Spack | Photos courtesy of Future Focus Media.