What role can social enterprise cooperatives play in alleviating social problems?

Last week marked the opening of Detroit’s newest example of a social enterprise. COLORS-Detroit is a worker-owned cooperative restaurant that provides a just work environment, job training, and worker-owned food business start-up support to the community. This restaurant, and a similar one in New York that has been operating since 2006, is part of the work of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. This organization’s social mission is to improve the working conditions for low-wage restaurant and hospitality workers. To further this social mission, ROC organized workers to open this restaurant, which serves food made with locally-produced ingredients, provides professional training opportunities for low-wage workers to help them move into higher-paid positions, promotes fair treatment of restaurant workers, and serves as an incubator for food business entrepreneurs. This business provides financial stability for other activities that help to promote restaurant workers rights, support economic growth in the community, and create a more just food system in the Detroit area.

Here is an article from ROC-Michigan members that has more information about the project: http://michigan.rocunited.org/colors-detroit-join-the-just-good-food-revolution/

Reading about the launch of this cooperative restaurant got me thinking about the role that co-ops can play in engaging those affected by social problems. Taking the “human-centered design” approach a little further, co-ops can help organize people who are directly impacted by a social problem and give them an opportunity to create a solution and determine for themselves how it should operate. Enabling people to have ownership over the solution to their social problem seems to me like a worthwhile approach to social innovation. How can we better enable people to come together to create and implement their own solutions?