Amerge Music Cooperative 

Amerge Music Cooperative (Los Angeles, California)- $25,000

Amerge Music Cooperative is a groundbreaking artist-owned music licensing cooperative upending the industry standard where music industry labels, publishers, and licensing libraries own the rights to artists' music and take over 50% of the revenue. Amerge empowers music makers by building a transparent ecosystem where the creators own and profit from what they produce. 

New Economy Works

New Economy Works West Virginia (Charleston, West Virginia)- $30,000

New Economy Workers West Virginia's (NEW WV) mission is to build a more democratic economy by supporting worker-owned businesses in underserved communities across West Virginia. NEW WV proposes to launch the Firsthand Cooperative Lab targeted at youth in low income communities. Participants will complete 32 hours of cooperative entrepreneurship, financial literacy, leadership, and democratic governance training, followed by a 16-week apprenticeship experience. The Firsthand Cooperative Lab will also produce a curriculum, apprenticeship model, implementation toolkit, and evaluation report that can be adapted by schools, community organizations, and cooperative developers throughout Appalachia.

Frolic Institute

Frolic Institute (Seattle, Washington)- $30,000

Frolic Institute is building research and educational infrastructure and directing the mission-driven capital that makes permanently affordable cooperative homeownership accessible to low-wealth, generational renters. In 2024, Frolic Institute supported the founding of Corvidae Co-op, Seattle's first new limited-equity co-op in a generation and Frolic's first completed project. The grant will enable Frolic to embark on a structured co-design process with Crovidae Co-op residents to develop Frolic's Co-op Stewardship App, producing a resident-facing platform supporting cooperative governance, financial transparency, community calendar, maintenance coordination, and vendor management for all future Frolic communities

East Bay Fishermen's Cooperative 

East Bay Fishmen’s Cooperative (East Greenwich, Rhode Island)- $50,000

The East Bay Fishermen’s Cooperative (EBFC) is a new fishermen’s cooperative in Rhode Island that will serve as a model to revitalize local fishing industries. EBFC is a producers cooperative designed to sustain and grow local small-boat fisheries to preserve and strengthen fishing communities, make local fish accessible and affordable for everyone, end market consolidation, and restore fishery ecosystems. The grant will provide crucial start-up capital to purchase essential equipment and launch revenue-producing services. EBFC is being developed to address the crisis in the fishing industry in Rhode Island’s East Bay, and also to serve as a model to sustain and build local fisheries across the state.