Running the Co-op
Seven lessons learned running America's largest student housing cooperative
Joining the Co-op
When I was 21 years old and a Junior in college, I got a rare opportunity: to be President of the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Student Cooperative, the largest and oldest student housing cooperative1 in the country.
At 90 years, 20 properties, 20 full-time staff, 1300 student members, and an eight-figure annual budget, the BSC was and remains a significant operation. Founded during the Great Depression, the whole board of directors is drawn from the students living in the cooperative houses.2
I was first turned on to the BSC, referred to simply as “the co-ops” by the undergraduate population, my freshman year. Out of my parents’ house and excited by everything, it wasn’t long before my freshman-year friends started taking me to “co-op parties,” opening up new horizons of sights, sounds, and smells for my 18-year-old self. For an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, reading Hegel and Marx and drinking deeply from the countercultural cup, a student-run housing organization was just about the coolest thing I could have imagined. After a brief but worthwhile detour through Greek life, I moved in to a 124-person house called Casa Zimbabwe my Sophomore year.
Finding Leadership
A curious and ambitious student, I double-majored in Cognitive Science and Political Economy — wanting, as I put it — a little bit of everything. Having at that point spent several semesters studying history, economics, psychology, and political philosophy, my interest turned to leadership while sitting in on my first board meeting.
The first half of the meeting consisted of procedural business; I listened in while trying to get my bearings, seeing who was in the room and how the group fit together. About halfway through the meeting, a key issue came up and the board took a “roll call” vote, in which every house’s representative voted one-by-one.
Watching this council of student leaders vote was deeply inspiring. The 20 units are a mix of all shapes, sizes, and personalities: big party houses, small studious ones, queer, Black, vegetarian, and women-only themed houses, grad-student houses, and everything in between. Going around the room, watching 30+ diverse student leaders casting votes, I may as well have been watching the Council of Elrond. I was completely smitten.
I joined the Board the next semester as a “Cabinet Member-At-Large,” a junior position which sat on the Cabinet — the executive committee of the President, six Vice Presidents, two senior staff, and two members-at-large, meant to represent the “views of the average member.”
I loved being on Cabinet. I was in awe of the student leaders and the staff, who seemed to me the smartest and most passionate people I had ever met. I wanted to earn their respect, and so I started reading anything I could get my hands on — the written history of the organization, and its entire policy manual. I particularly enjoyed the historiography of the policy manual — different policies written by different authors, in different contexts and styles. Counterintuitively, this written policy book made the organization feel more human to me, not less. And to my nascent legal mind, the idea that I could grasp an entire organization by simply reading its rulebook had tremendous appeal. Soon enough I started getting attention — out of nowhere, this energetic member-at-large had policies and procedures memorized that even seasoned leaders couldn’t quite remember.
At the end of my first semester as member-at-large, I ran for President, and won. Running against a VP (and friend) with far more experience, I won because of my emphasis on fairness and process above any particular agenda; a message which resonated with the board’s cooperative values.
I served as President for one year, receiving strong reviews, and stayed on for a second years as a vice president before graduating and moving on. It was a heady, formative, and often tumultuous experience in my life, influencing the development of my identity, friendships, interests, and values in a way that can be clearly seen today: in my work with Colony, Zaratan, Chore Wheel, and beyond.
The rest of this essay will share seven lessons learned from my experience as a student leader of the Berkeley Student Cooperative.
Seven Lessons
1) Process first
When I first gained access to the president@bsc.coop email address and started looking through old archives, I was struck at how disorganized the records were. Meeting minutes were frequently missing or kept in random folders. Being tech-savvy and (circa 2010) “very online,” I spent the first few months of my term overhauling the board’s record-keeping. I developed a set of Google sites (remember those?) for the various board committees and encouraged the various VPs to adopt consistent record-keeping practices. During my second semester, the internal affairs committee followed my lead and moved the board’s entire policy manual onto a wiki, making the organization even more transparent and accessible to membership. As of this writing, both systems are still in use.
Beyond record-keeping, I improved board meeting process. When I first started attending board meetings, I witnessed drawn-out discussions in which participants would make long, rambling “quomments” (comments masquerading as questions). Conversations would drag on, participants would disengage, and the board would frequently find itself tabling discussions to future dates. In the first semester of my term, we developed a more efficient format in which the agenda and updated discussion summary were projected onto a wall during meetings, and a VP with a stopwatch kept participants accountable to one-minute comment limits. These process improvements made meetings more productive and engaging, encouraged people to articulate their points clearly, and allowed us to achieve more in less time.
When I reconnected years later with a student leader from another era, she shared how the professionalization I had brought to the board allowed them to successfully tackle thorny and challenging issues, long after I had gone. My take-away was that in grassroots-led organizations with high leadership turnover, building a consistent and effective process will have impact far beyond any individual project or person.
2) Nobody cares like you do
Leaders almost by definition care more about their organizations than participant in general. It is easy for new leaders, full of vim and vigor, to imagine what would be possible if everyone was as motivated as they are. This is a trap, and can lead to burnout and resentment.
People generally want things to be predictable, like things to “just happen” without them personally having to work too hard, and will avoid what they perceive as “extra” responsibilities. They will also be skeptical of those in leadership positions and will rarely appreciate how much work it takes to keep things running smoothly.
As a leader motivated to make positive change, there are a few ways to handle this:
Make participation fun. During my year in office, a talented board member (who became President after me) decided to organize a regional co-op conference. She rallied volunteers and organized a weekend-long event without spending a dime. She did this by making participation fun (going out for drinks after planning meetings), and framing the conference as a cool event to be involved with.
Make participation easy. As a leader, your secret weapon is leverage. You have more reach and more resources, and you can use them to set other people up for success. Rather than expecting people to plan and plant a garden all by themselves, take the initiative to find a gardener and schedule a planting day, so all anyone has to do is show up. And bring breakfast.
Make everyone a leader. One of the best ways to improve trust between leaders and everyone else is to give everyone the chance to be a leader. By taking on a leadership role, even briefly, people get a sense of what leadership “takes.” At Sage House, we rotate facilitation of the monthly house circle, so that every housemate takes a turn running the meeting. By sharing this responsibility, we avoid putting any one person in the position of “boss” and cultivate a broad-based appreciation of the effort needed to keep a community running.
3) Knowledge is power
As an unknown member-at-large with no prior leadership experience, I earned respect by mastering the policy manual. I wasn’t asked to do it — I did it on my own initiative, enthusiastic and excited about the organization I was getting involved with. Over the period of only one semester, I became a go-to person for idiosyncratic details about procedure and history. People went to me for advice because I was the local authority. Ultimately, I was invited into leadership because people felt like I would be a resource for them.
Titles do not automatically confer respect. By making yourself a subject-matter expert, people will naturally come to respect to your insights, opinions, and judgments. Conversely, if you come off as uninformed, ignorant, or foolish, people will look to others for guidance, regardless of your position. By constantly investing in your knowledge and skills, it will be easy for others to trust your judgment.
4) Facilitation is a skill
As a young and idealistic student leader, I was inundated with friendly faces trying to get on my good side. Eager to prove myself, I would bend over backwards trying to make everyone happy, and I learned the hard way that people sometimes try and manipulate those in power to achieve personal goals.
One of the powers we give to leaders is discretion, and so the key to effective leadership is facilitation: knowing how much time, space, and energy to give to any one person or priority. Facilitation can occur in the context of a meeting — deciding who speaks next, and for how long. But “facilitation” can also be seen as a broader leadership skill — knowing how much attention to give to one person over another, and how to balance the needs of a vocal minority with the often silent majority. This can mean giving someone extra time, or it can mean shutting someone down in a way that might at first feel rude. Inevitably, someone will feel picked on.
Ultimately, your goal is to be of service to as many as possible, and to be savvy enough to realize that while most people are simply preoccupied with their own wants and needs, some can be outright manipulative. As a leader, you have to use your best judgment in balancing all of the personalities and desires that come your way, being firm when necessary, and making sure that the organization as a whole continues to move forward.
5) Support other leaders
As discussed earlier, those who have never held leadership positions often underestimate what it takes to be a leader: the sacrifice, the skepticism, the endless thankless tasks. In “The Laws of Online World Design,” game designer Raph Koster writes about the plight of the in-game admin (emphasis added):
Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him.
This is the sad reality of leadership, and one of the worst things you can do as a leader is publicly take sides against other leaders. By all means, provide critical feedback, but do so privately.
I made this mistake. Our Executive Director at the time was a dedicated, conscientious woman with high integrity, who would often push back against what she saw as self-serving behaviors on the part of the (non-student) professional staff. The staff, accustomed to minimal oversight by a transient student population, resented this accountability and took every opportunity to make her life miserable. During the annual ED review, which as President I led, I received several anonymous comments accusing the ED of various bad behaviors. In my idealism and drive for justice, I gave these anonymous critiques significant airtime during the review, asking our ED to respond to them in front of the entire student board. Instead of focusing on her many achievements and contributions in her role, I instead reduced the ED, one of my most consistent supporters and mentors, to tears. It was a major leadership failure on my part, and one I still regret.
6) Know when to move on
My year as President was defined by crisis. The summer before I took office, a student overdosed in his room. His mother sued, on the grounds that we had created an unsafe environment for her son. Millions of dollars were on the line and the entire organization was in danger.
Much of my year in office was spent responding to the fallout from the overdose and lawsuit. I worked actively to rehabilitate the co-ops image, writing op-eds in the student paper and regularly meeting with administrators. I worked actively with other leaders to develop an improved drug policy, which balanced empathy and support with safety and boundaries. It was a stressful time, and I developed an acute resentment of “scene kids” — students who came to party, offload consequences onto others, and make fun of people who actually “gave a shit.”3
After finishing a successful year as President, I made the (in retrospect) poor decision to continue in leadership as Vice President of Education and Training. My hope was to leverage my reputation and relationships to make specific improvements to the organization’s recruitment, education, and training procedures, making it harder for “scene kids” to cause harm and keeping the organization on a more even keel.
My second year was not a success. The new President resented my sometimes forceful attempts to pursue my personal agenda at the expense of her own. I struggled to work effectively with other student leaders, who had fewer reasons defer to my opinions and judgment. I finished that second year having accomplished few of my goals and having lost some of the respect I had earned in the previous year.4 In retrospect, while I felt strongly identified with the organization, everyone would have been better off had I stepped back and let a new cohort take the reins. I could have focused on myself, friends, and new opportunities for growth, rather than try and prolong a commitment which had been largely fulfilled.
7) Stay humble
Being the highly-visible leader of a large organization can be a heady experience, even more so at the tender age of 21. People respect you, they do what you tell them, they tell you how great, smart, good you are. Strangers want to befriend you; strangers want to sleep with you. It is exciting, but it is also not quite real.
What was “real” was that I had attained a position of high status in the context of my university and social circles. By most accounts, I did my job well, demonstrating high levels of empathy, intelligence, conscientiousness, and humor. I showed a lot of professional promise. As a nerdy child who had been well-liked, but socially marginalized, in adolescence, becoming a center of attention and admiration in early adulthood was impactful. Instead of constantly doubting myself, I learned to be confident. Instead of waiting to be called upon, I learned to take initiative. Instead of assuming that I was wrong, I learned that often, I was right. All generally good things.
The challenge emerged once I entered the (much larger) working world. Intellectually, I knew better than to identify with past success,5 but humility-in-practice required a level of maturity I did not yet have. My energy and enthusiasm brought me many opportunities in my early career, but I fumbled more than a few by refusing accept that in these new contexts, there was much I had yet to learn.
It is a delicate balance; as someone who grew up doubting himself, I can’t say that building self-confidence is a “bad thing.” But intense formative experiences can lead to behavioral over-corrections which themselves take time to fully unwind. By all means, pursue experiences of leadership. They will make you a better person. But never forget that it was your humility which allowed others to trust your leadership in the first place. Never forget the people who liked you for you. And never stop growing.
The New Yorker stylizes cooperative as coöperative, which I find extremely charming.
Or “units,” the technically more correct but less fun nomenclature.
In retrospect, I understand this resentment as a low-level trauma response to the intense strain and isolation I experienced during that time.
A few years after I graduated, the largest and most problematic of the houses was (controversially) made substance-free, which on some level felt validating.
I met someone at a business event once who told me that “you’re only as good as your last big win,” which I struck me as a bit negative, but also helpfully future-oriented.