Grounds for Change – How a Cup of Coffee Makes for a Better Economy

Most people walk into Gimme! Coffee and order a latte. They don’t think about who owns the espresso machine, who voted on the charitable donation policy, or how the packaging decision got made. After this conversation, they might.

Claire Christensen is the Executive Director of Gimme! Coffee — which means she runs the place day to day, and reports to a board of directors elected by the people who work there. It’s a distinction that matters, and it’s a good early sign of how precise this conversation gets. Over the course of an hour, Claire traces the full story of Gimme!’s conversion from a conventional sole-proprietorship to a worker-owned cooperative: what prompted it, what it cost, what it changed, and what is still being figured out.

How It Started

Kevin Kudemak founded Gimme! Coffee in 2000 with a single café on Cayuga Street. The following year, the company began roasting its own coffee. Over the next two decades, it grew to five cafés and a roasting operation, with around 55 employees and roughly $4 million in annual revenue.

When Kevin decided he was ready to move on, the conventional exit — a sale to one of the four major multinational coffee companies, or to venture capital — didn’t appeal to him. He wanted the business to continue. He wanted the people who had built it to keep their jobs and have a future there. So in 2019 he began seriously exploring conversion to a worker cooperative.

The feasibility process — which establishes whether employees want ownership, whether they have the capacity to run the business, and whether the company can afford to buy itself through a loan — was just getting underway in spring 2020 when every Gimme! café closed. The conversion that normally takes about a year took three, waiting until the financials recovered enough to present to a lender. They submitted in early 2022 and completed the conversion that year.

The Structure, Explained Plainly

Gimme! chose a worker cooperative over an Employee Stock Ownership Plan — the other common path to employee ownership — for a specific reason: they wanted employees to have a say in strategy, not just a share of profits. In an ESOP, the financial upside is distributed to workers. In a cooperative, governance is too.

Becoming a member-owner at Gimme! requires a year of full-time work, attendance at an orientation and a board or committee meeting, a brief oral review of rights and responsibilities, and a $1,300 buy-in payable as $25 a week through payroll deduction. The transition team landed on that number deliberately — they had heard of cooperatives with $5,000 buy-ins and two-to-five year waiting periods, and wanted something that wouldn’t function as a barrier. Currently about 75% of employees are eligible, and just under half of those have become member-owners.

Profit-sharing exists in the structure — distributed as patronage dividends based on hours worked, not role or seniority — but is modest right now because much of what would otherwise be profit goes toward repaying the loan used to purchase the business. Claire is honest about this: it makes the membership pitch harder in the short term. The benefits that are concrete right now are governance ones — the ability to run for and serve on the board, vote on strategic decisions, give input on the annual budget and operating plan, and participate in decisions about where charitable donations go.

The cooperative runs as a representative democracy. Operational decisions belong to management. Larger strategic questions — mission, bylaws, membership criteria, whether to open a new location, whether to dissolve or sell — go to the elected board and, where required, to the full membership. The board meets monthly and quarterly, and all-member meetings happen at least twice a year, with additional sessions when something time-sensitive requires broader consultation.

Financial transparency is built into the model. Anyone, member-owner or not, can attend meetings and receive financial materials. Making the numbers genuinely accessible has been ongoing work — one approach that landed well was a pie-chart breakdown of exactly where the cost of a single latte goes, from café labor to roasters to packaging to insurance.

Also a Union

This is the part of the Gimme! story that tends to surprise people: their baristas are unionized, and last year their production and roasting staff voted to join the same union. Claire notes that the union cooperative model is far more common in Europe, and that Gimme! is among the larger union co-ops operating in the United States.

Running both structures requires care: being clear about what is a member benefit, what is a union-negotiated benefit, and what process governs which decision. Their decision matrix has a specific section for this. It is genuinely complex. Claire frames it as consistent with what the organization already believed — that the people doing the work deserve real standing in how it operates.

From Bean to Bag

Gimme!’s internal commitments extend outward through their sourcing, their packaging, and their wages.

They are certified by Fairtrade America and have been working since around 2021 to move their entire coffee line to Fairtrade organic. The final product to complete that transition was their decaf, converted last year. Fairtrade certification means paying both a minimum price floor and a premium — currently around 20 cents per pound of green coffee, expected to rise to about 25 cents. Gimme!’s purchases generated more than $51,000 in Fairtrade premiums in 2024 alone. That money goes directly to projects chosen by the farming cooperatives themselves: solar programs, school construction, new certifications, climate-resilient farming practices. Fairtrade International certifies only cooperatives, which means every Fairtrade coffee Gimme! sells originates from a worker-owned organization — cooperative to cooperative across the entire supply chain.

On packaging: Gimme! previously used compostable bags, but when Ithaca’s industrial composting program stopped accepting that material category, the team researched alternatives and landed on BOPE film — recyclable at grocery store film drop-off locations. The decision was grounded in studies comparing the actual environmental impact of different materials, not in marketing. Compostable bags that can’t be composted, they found, aren’t necessarily better than recyclable bags that can actually be recycled.

On wages: Gimme! is a certified living wage employer. In Ithaca, that currently means just over $25 an hour. Claire describes the ongoing tension of being simultaneously a neighborhood gathering place and a values-forward specialty roaster in a city with significant economic inequality — and the constant effort to hold both without pricing people out.

What You Learn by Living It

Claire joined Gimme! in 2014 as an admin assistant, with a background in archaeology and food systems — the ancient kind. She has learned logistics, coffee markets, forward contracting, and cooperative governance largely on the job, and describes the education as genuinely formative.

Her most honest reflection on the conversion: involve the cooperative lawyer earlier. The transition team made commitments to employees at all-staff meetings that later turned out not to be permissible under cooperative law. Walking those back was difficult, and it taught Claire something she considers one of the real lasting outcomes of the process: how to communicate transparently by distinguishing, in every conversation, between what is certain, what is being pursued, and what is still under investigation.

She also reflects on the pervasive misconception that a worker cooperative means everyone votes on everything — a picture she finds both inaccurate and exhausting. The actual model, she says, is designed to invite participation at every level while still allowing management to function. You can change your flour supplier without calling a member meeting.

What’s Coming

This summer, Gimme! relocates from a cramped kiosk on Cornell’s campus to a larger space in the adjacent building. They are in the tasting stages for canned cold brew and specialty instant coffee — high quality, portable, the kind of thing you wish you had in an airport. And they are looking at purchasing their roastery property between Ithaca and Trumansburg, currently still owned by Kevin, as a step toward building real long-term equity.

An Open Invitation

Claire closes with something genuinely useful for anyone the episode has made curious: reach out. Gimme! will tell you how they did the conversion, who helped them, and what grants were available. Cooperation among cooperatives is, after all, the sixth principle on the list.

Gimme! Coffee operates five cafés in Ithaca, New York, and roasts coffee at a facility between Ithaca and Trumansburg.

Resources & Links

• Gimme! Coffee
• Fairtrade America
• U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
• Cooperative Principles (ICA)
• Fairtrade Premium Projects

The Practically Real Team

• Ithaca Local Economy Lab
• Jake Gribschaw — Technical Advisor — LinkedIn
• Stacey Cornelius — Associate Producer — Agency of Words
• Sonia Simone — Content Strategist — Remarkable Communication
• Erin O’Shaughnessy — Creative Consultant
• Yen Ospina — Artist — yenospina.com
• Carsie Blanton — Musician — carsieblanton.com