Echo Adventure Cooperative is a new worker-owned outdoor guide company established by four experienced guides who are based in the Yosemite wilderness in California. The new cooperative had the opportunity to take advantage of some recent legislation in California aimed at normalizing the worker-cooperative model in the state, and I had a chance to interview founding member, Elisabeth Barton, about how they got together and how they set up their company.
Tim: I guess the first thing I’d like to do is ask you if you could briefly tell me a little bit about the history of your cooperative, and maybe about some of the motivation behind starting a cooperative, about why you thought of doing it in the way that you did?
Elisabeth: Yes, great question. We incorporated in early August, and then operations began on the first of December, so it’s still really new.
It was an exciting adventure getting to this point; there are four of us that started this coop, and we had all come out of awkward job experiences. Guiding in and of itself is a relatively exploitive industry. A lot of people don’t realise, but oftentimes guides are making less than minimum wage and living in tents behind the homes of the owners that they work for.
So we had all experienced these exploitive practices and we were looking to transition, so then it just sort of happened over coffee, beer and a few conversations. Maybe within a month we were legitimately looking at incorporating, so it was very quick.
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