Each year, USFWC’s Worker Co-op Awards recognize a range of worker-owned businesses and cooperators who are making incredible impacts in their communities and the worker co-op sector. We recognized this year’s awardees this September, and celebrated their achievements alongside hundreds of attendees of the 2026 Worker Co-op Conference in Boston.
Learn more about the Worker Co-op Awards here.
Rainbow Grocery, Worker Co-op of the Year
In a competitive industry, where Amazon owns Whole Foods and private equity owns the rest, Rainbow Grocery has spent half a century proving that a store with no boss can outlast the ones with billionaires behind them.
Rainbow Grocery opened a storefront in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1975, out of The People’s Warehouse – a project that used food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education. Rainbow Grocery opened exclusively reliant on volunteer labor, and formally incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative in 1993 and moved to its current home on Folsom street in 1996.
Today, Rainbow Grocery is a thriving model of cooperativism and economic democracy. Everyone who works there can become an owner, there is no CEO, and wages are equal regardless of job title. And, the produce has been organic since before “certified organic” was a thing. Beyond their own doors, Rainbow has also reinvested in their local ecosystem. They created a Cooperative Grant Program to fund the development of other Bay Area co-ops and run a Co-op Committee dedicated to help new cooperatives get off the ground.
Fifty years of worker ownership, in one of the most expensive cities in the country, in one of the thinnest-margin industries, Rainbow Grocery is proof that this model endures. We proudly present the Co-op of the Year Award to Rainbow Grocery Cooperative.
Franklin Salazar, Cooperator of the year
Over the past two years, Franklin Salazar has devoted his time and talent to technical work, doing so tirelessly and entirely on a volunteer basis. Franklin has stood shoulder to shoulder with worker cooperatives formed and led by immigrants, providing them with the key tools to take full control of their businesses: from personally accompanying members to the bank to resolving the most complex accounting challenges. When the community needs him, Franklin is there, staying until a solution is found.
But his commitment goes even further. Franklin teaches computer classes for immigrant-led cooperatives and trains workers on how to prepare business presentations for clients. And most inspiring of all: he manages to weave political education into each of these efforts, creating spaces for dialogue about what it truly means to exercise collective ownership of our workplace. Originally from Buenaventura, Colombia, Franklin also serves on the Board of Directors of the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives and works every day to strengthen the systems cooperative, Sunlight Collective.
For his deep determination, solidarity, and exemplary dedication, it is a true honor to present the Cooperative Member of the Year Award to Franklin Salazar.
Aquilina Soriano Versoza, Coalition Weaver
Aquilina Soriano has spent a career building bridges across movements; between worker co-ops and worker centers, between immigrant organizing and economic democracy, between the labor movement and the cooperative movement. Aquilina Soriano Versoza is a founder and the Executive Director of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, which serves and organizes the low-wage Filipino immigrant community in Los Angeles. She has been a leader in the domestic worker movement in California and nationally, as chair of the board of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
In her work, she has woven together worker power and cooperative development. In 2014, Pilipino Workers Center founded Courage Homecare, a cooperative that began with a dozen worker-owners and was built through a collaboration with Pilipino Workers Center, National Domestic Workers Alliance, The ICA Group, the Democracy at Work Institute and the California Domestic Worker Coalition. This is coalition weaving in practice!
Alex Papali, Advocacy Champion
Alex Papali helps lead the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power in Massachusetts. COWOP launched in 2019 with coordination support from the Center for Economic Democracy, and has grown into a statewide network of more than 40 member organizations including worker cooperatives, capital and technical assistance providers, organized labor, and our own USFWC.
Every year, COWOP members come together and vote on the coalition’s legislative agenda, meaning that policy priorities are set by the cooperators themselves, grounded in what the local co-op community actually needs. Over the years, in large part due to Alex’s advocacy and organizing, these priorities have become within the State of Massachusetts. The MA Center for Employee Ownership is now a standing part of state government infrastructure committed to supporting worker-owned business, with several of the office’s advisory board seats filled by worker-owners! Coalition members have also pushed to expand technical assistance funding, as the number of co-ops in MA nearly tripled between 2010 and 2022.
Democracy Brewing, Rooted and Growing Award
Democracy Brewing opened in 2018 in Downtown Crossing as Boston’s first worker-owned brewery as a brewpub built on the idea that owning your own business shouldn’t only be available to a few. Then, just about two years in, the pandemic arrived. Democracy Brewing was hit hard, like every restaurant in the country and across the world. The worker-owners persevered through this and even started thinking about how to grow. They opened a second location in East Boston, with a Latin American menu shaped by the neighborhood, spearheaded by Executive Chef Miguel Zambrano – a worker-owner who started his time at the company as a dishwasher.
In their own words, “Democracy Brewing exists to create more worker ownership.” They measure their growth by how many more people become owners.
Phat Daddy’s On Da Tracks, Community Builder Award
We’ve had the privilege of working alongside Phat Daddy’s On Da Tracks since 2020. Their journey started in the middle of a pandemic, after being denied a city business grant three different times. But they believed that the people doing the work should have an opportunity to own the business they were building. So they opened anyway, and six years later, that journey isn’t over. Phat Daddy’s is still doing the hard work of developing worker-owners, strengthening democratic management, building leadership within the cooperative, and figuring out what long-term sustainability looks like.
Phat Daddy’s represents the seventh cooperative principle, Concern for Community, not just in words, but in practice. Their Pay It Forward program started simply. They saw people walking through their neighborhood hungry, and one of the worker-owners started asking, “Do you want something to eat?” Those individual acts of care grew into an effort that now feeds dozens of people.
They’ve also worked to create better jobs, committed early to paying workers a full wage while allowing them to keep their tips, and opened their doors to others interested in worker ownership. They’ve hosted free cooperative workshops right in their neighborhood, creating space for people to learn what a co-op is, how one can be financed, and what democratic ownership and management actually look like.
Hear more about worker co-op Phat Daddy’s on Da Tracks from worker-owner Octavia Cordon here!
