Over the years, Shareable has launched and supported a wide range of projects—from the Social Co-op Academy to MapJams in cities around the world—that have sparked collaboration, innovation, and community resilience. Explore our past programs and the impact they’ve made.
Food Assistance Cooperatives
Shareable is piloting a member-led food assistance co-op in Rome, Georgia, inspired by the proven Urban Recipe model in Atlanta.
Food Assistance Cooperatives build community by giving families consistent access to nutritious food while fostering dignity, choice, and mutual support.
We’re documenting and testing the approach to create tools that food banks, food assistance programs, and mutual aid groups nationwide can use to start their own co-ops. Learn more about the model in this article.
Sharing Cities
Shareable catalyzed the Sharing Cities movement in 2011 by hosting ShareSF, the first conference about the sharing economy in cities. As the movement grew, Shareable continued to support it through news coverage, specialty publications, campaigns, and advisory services.
In 2013, Shareable published “Policies for Shareable Cities” — the first-ever policy guide about sharing in cities — with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. That same year, we launched the Sharing Cities Network to connect local sharing activists around the world. Since then, over 100 cities have launched sharing programs. We also began advising Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, on his groundbreaking Sharing City Seoul initiative. In 2016, he won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for this program. In 2018, we published this book to illustrate a vision for commons-based urban development.
In addition to movement building, Shareable has advised city governments, social enterprises, and research organizations about how to reach their goals through sharing.
Emergency Battery Network
The Emergency Battery Network project equips communities to stay powered during outages by creating shared networks of portable batteries. The training and toolkit cover everything from organizing volunteers to sourcing, maintaining, and safely distributing backup power. Originally developed to support mutual aid groups during extreme weather events, this resource helps communities build resilience when the grid goes down.
Social Cooperatives
Social Cooperatives are democratic, multi-stakeholder enterprises that operate independently of the state and exist to serve the public good—not just their members. They do this by prioritizing community benefit, ensuring strong worker representation in governance, and reinvesting surplus revenues toward social purposes. Despite having a robust ecosystem that’s thriving globally, they remain largely undiscovered in the U.S. These innovative businesses blend cooperative principles with social missions, creating dignified, quality jobs and uplifting marginalized communities.
Shareable facilitated the Social Cooperative Academy to increase awareness about social cooperatives, foster dialogue around financial and legal structures, and build an engaged, collaborative network for advocating for meaningful change.
The 2024 Social Cooperative Academy was led by the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC) and is co-hosted by CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, MEDLab (U. of Colorado), Rochdale Capital, Shareable, and Solidarity Hall.
Featured speakers included John Restakis, Doug O’Brien, Katrina Kazda, Joseph Cureton, Maru Bautista, Jerome Hughes, Michael Schuman, Mo Manklang, Matthew Epperson, Elias Crim, and RMEOC ED, Minsun Ji.
Watch the Social Co-op Academy session recordings on YouTube.
The Academy continues as a monthly community of practice. Contact Elias Crim at elias@rmeoc.org for details or register to access resources and discussions.
Watch the Social Co-op Community of Practice session recordings on YouTube.
MapJams
From 2013 to 2016, Shareable supported groups in over 100 cities in creating and maintaining community asset maps through our MapJam program. MapJams are gatherings where people get together for a few hours to connect the dots and map grassroots sharing projects, cooperatives, community resources, and the commons.
While we haven’t updated this resource in over a decade, you can still get “The Complete Guide to Hosting a #MapJam in Your City” to get started.
ShareFests
Building upon the success of our MapJams, Shareable supported individuals, community groups, and organizations to host ShareFests in over 50 cities worldwide throughout 2014 and 2015. ShareFests are participatory events designed to bring the local sharing economy together. They range in size from small sharing events like clothing swaps to large, multi-day public gatherings with thousands of people. Focused on the transformational experience of sharing, these events were typically co-created by local organizations and the public. They have ranged from 30 people to 3,000 at both the neighborhood and city-wide scale.
Seed Grants
Since 2013, Shareable has provided seed funding to over 100 projects, including Cooperation Jackson, Solidarity Economy St. Louis, Rust Belt Riders, National Tool Library Alliance, and more.
Although we no longer issue an open call for applications, we continue to offer limited seed funding to participants in our co-labs and other programming.