It has been few weeks since we updated you on our little project of becoming a coop. We've been blessed creating work with many great clients, finishing a new website for us, and shoveling out of multiple blizzards. Outside of this though, incorporating has been a large area of focus. 

So yes, it is official, we are incorporated! We got to say this twice last month because of a minor but hilarious oversight on the legal docs. For a brief period of time we were incorporated with part of our mission being to actively seek to spread Christianity. Nothing against Christianity and we are fairly certain Jesus was a super amazing guy, but we build websites and offer web related products, we are not as a company, religious. We caught the mistake right away and thankfully our lawyer Joel Dahlgren is awesome and happily re-filed at his own expense with no harm done. 

Our articles were filed and accepted under the good old state statues of Minnesota…This is where Joel lives and operates but not a single one of us owners lives or plans to live. Soo, huh? That sounds really strange right? It did to us as well but as we discovered when we started talking to lawyer folk that led us to Joel, Minnesota is the cat's pajama's for cooperatives. As you can see from correspondences like this: 

"…308B allows the Cooperative to give nonpatron members up to 70% of voting power and 85% of financial rights.  For this to be taxed under Subchapter T as a true Cooperative, I don't think you should go under 60% voting control and under 51% of financial rights for patron members.  If this were taxed as a Subchapter K partnership, those proportions could go as low as 30% and 15%, respectively, for patron members."

I am not going to even try to explain that or my brain might explode, but in a nutshell, Minnesota laws are the most accommodating to the cooperative model allowing for good flexibility with structural technicalities and tax filing. How it become so is less clear but my guess is that as states go it is fairly progressive and it is in the mid west, home to many farm and agricultural business who tend to form cooperatives. We are grateful to you Minnesota and even more so to Black Dog Co-op Law (Joel) for helping us wade through the briar patches and being helpful, patient and accommodating to our unique needs.  

That's the coop update for today. The next one promises to be even more exciting as we reveal who wins the epic battle between tax filing as Corporation vs. Partnership. And you thought the Superbowl commercials were exciting!

 

Taksu Interactive in is the process of forming a cooperative, brought about by the spirit of collaboration that runs deep with in our souls.  In life and in work, we have found that when we join forces with other like minded individuals to achieve a goal, we end up exceeding expectations, learning more and being less stressed in the process. In the works for over a year now and perhaps in our hearts dating back several years, Taksu is taking the leap to become a member owned technology cooperative. Working independently as designers, developers and new media professionals for the better part of 10 years, collaboration on each others projects began to become more and more common. It became clear that some kind of formal organization would allow us to share resources for more challenging projects and offer clients faster turn around time. We could do this all while creating a nurturing work environment and helping the careers of people we loved. It was a natural evolution. We are realizing too that there are many people out there who share a similar desire to redefine the concept of work and how it integrates with other parts of one's life. It is for this reason that we will be sharing a lot of what we go through here on this blog. We can also humbly say that we are not the experts, but hopefully by sharing our experiences in forming this coop, we can help others and ourselves grow stronger and happier. 

The process really started to snow ball when we discovered that an old friend of from the Bay Area, a coop founder himself, had begun coaching other organizations on the process. Shawn Berry (along with Tom Clossey) formally organized their wood shop, Woodshanti into a worker-owned cooperative in 2002. Since that time they have become a model for progressive business development, joining other long standing coops in Northern California like Rainbow Grocery and CELLspace. You can read more about Woodshanti and coops in general at www.go.coop. We have a big meeting with Shawn today, we'll let you know how it goes!