A little about Awaken Wellness:
Our mission is to empower our community by helping individuals connect deeply with their own body’s capacity for healing. We do this by providing a range of transformative therapies, including acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and therapeutic bodywork, all rooted in compassion, respect, and a holistic understanding of wellness.
EnviroCollab is a women-owned, community-based landscape architecture, urban planning, and social design cooperative focused on engagement, equity, and sustainability.
We are very proud of the work we did last year and would like to share it with you. Below is our 2024 impact report highlighting projects, collaborations, outreach and funding. As always, thanks for supporting BRED and our mission to help create a more equitable future for Baltimore City residents and business owners. Happy 2025!
If you have ever come to our events or seen an IG Reel, you’ve heard us mention Seed Commons several times. Seed Commons is the national network of non-extractive loan funds that BRED belongs to. If you want to learn more about Seed Commons, this video created during the All Network Gathering is perfect for you. We hosted all our peer funds here in Baltimore for three days of learning from and supporting each other. Enjoy!
Fresh Cup Magazine wrote an article about coffee cooperatives in Baltimore City and how the co-op ecosystem has grown over the last six years. It’s a good light read for these heavy times. Read here!
Picture this.
It’s Saturday morning. You’re drinking a cup of coffee, maybe eating a light breakfast, and learning all about cooperatives with curious minded people. Where are you? BRED’s 2025 Jumpstart taking place at Impact Hub!
Who is this event for? If you are co-op curious, a business owner that wants to sell to your employees, have a co-op and are interested in learning more about cooperative tools to implement in the day to day structure of running a co-op, this event is for you.
Join Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy for a fun-filled day of conversations and workshops about co-ops! Starting up, co-op basics, day-to-day decision making, business models, and so much more! We are ready to help you on your journey. March 8, 2025 10-4pm register here. Childcare available – apply here by March 1st.
Giving Tuesday is fast approaching and we’re hoping you support Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy! BRED was founded in 2015 to provide much-needed technical support and funding to support the cooperative economy here in Baltimore, and beyond. We know how important sustaining and growing a healthy business ecosystem is here in Baltimore City, and we know that cooperatives are a vital part of that health. We ask friends, supporters, and comrades to share this post and donate to our Donor Box today. We want to keep providing services and resources to Baltimore and you can help us do that.
Throughout the day we will be sharing and tagging stories of cooperatives in our network that we would also love your support. So check us out on Instagram , give us a follow and share these co-ops with your people!! Thanks for all your support!
We recently helped The Wine Source convert from a traditional business into a cooperative. We are so happy for this group of amazing workers and what they have accomplished! Please take a moment to read this Baltimore Fishbowl article to learn more about The Wine Source’s process and about us!
https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/from-red-emmas-to-the-wine-source-baltimore-a-hotbed-of-local-worker-cooperative-financing/
Emily is a co-founder and worker-owner at Mera Kitchen Collective in Baltimore, Maryland. Established in 2018 as a way for new friends and neighbors to come together to share story-worthy food from around the world, Mera Kitchen has grown from small pop-ups and farmers market stalls to their first brick-and-mortar restaurant. Before moving to Baltimore, Emily spent 7 years with Doctors Without Borders, engaged in field operations throughout Central and East Africa and Southern Asia. She received her Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and her Masters in Accounting from the University of Colorado. Emily intended for her stay in Baltimore to be a short one, but that quickly changed as the city became her favorite place to live.
Kate is a co-founder and worker-owner of Red Emma’s, a cooperatively-owned restaurant and bookstore in Baltimore that helped to catalyze a city-wide ecosystem of worker-owned businesses over the last decade. In 2015, she helped to found the Seed Commons cooperative and its Baltimore peer, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, and in 2018, became co-director of the Seed Commons network, with Brendan Martin. She currently serves as BRED’s Senior Fellow and a member of the staff collective. She received her PhD from The Johns Hopkins University, her MPhil and MA from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Bolton Hill with her partner, her son, a border collie, and three bad cats.