Solidfund exists to build worker power.
Many small contributions can create big change. We are a member-led organisation dedicated to supporting workers in owning and controlling their own livelihoods and workplaces. By pooling regular and one-off contributions from supporters, we’re doing something practical about worker cooperators’ lack of access to mainstream money and support.
Members pay in regular contributions, from £1 a week. The money goes into a single pot, and members decide how to redistribute it.
Since we started, we’ve made more than 100 distributions totalling £215,000 - fuelling worker cooperation in the UK and beyond.
Quite simply, you pay money in, you pay money out where it’s needed most – and things change. Solidfund is rooted in the here and now of defending jobs, improving working lives and sustaining worker cooperatives – and we’re also part of a movement that challenges exploitation, redistributes power, demonstrating that another way of organising work and the economy is not only possible, but already happening.
We run with the principles of solidarity
All our discussions, proposals and decisions happen online happen online by the members on Loomio, a worker co-op owned platform. Members don’t just contribute money - they make decisions together on how it gets used, and shape the direction of Solidfund.
- Open membership. Anyone who supports worker solidarity can join
- One member, one vote. Power is not proportional to money
- Collective decision-making. Members decide together how resources are used.
For now, we are an unincorporated collective. Our money is banked in trust by Industrial Common Ownership Finance Ltd (ICOF).
Where does your money go?
Members’ contributions turn solidarity into material power. The money you contribute does not come back out as private gain. It stays in the movement, coming to the aid of worker cooperators that need help.
We give simple, practical support in the form of money for people who want to start, develop or strengthen a worker cooperative. We don’t give ‘grants’, or lend money secured on peoples’ houses and assets. We just distribute it where it’s needed.
Rescue finance
We’ve been able to step in fast when a co-op had a critical cashflow gap, or needed to recover quickly from a physical setback like a fire or flood. Banks and insurers are often too slow, or flatly uninterested.
Connection and movement-building
We’ve sponsored worker co-op events and gatherings like Worker Co-op Weekend, local and industry sector meetups - for instance with bursaries or money for childcare - so that more workers can share experience and build trust. We’ve supported emergent worker co-op organisations, like the workers.coop federation in the UK and a new all-Ireland network.
Worker education and training
We’ve supported the training of new worker co-op organisers and advisors, for instance by covering costs for workers on the Barefoot course, and covered costs for things like worker exchanges between different worker co-ops, developing resources and tools like the ‘Beyond Conflict’ training tool.
International solidarity
Workers everywhere are under the same system, and we’re all connected. So while we’re based in the UK, we’re internationalist. Solidfund supported workers in Italy who occupied their factory with a plan to convert it to socially useful, ecological and accountable production, and worker cooperators in Gaza as the genocide drove them apart and threatened their lives.
Nothing off limits
The members decide. Our long-term ambition is for Solidfund to become a powerful, worker-governed investment vehicle which can help worker co-ops to fully finance their plans when even traditional co-op finance institutions won’t take the risk, or indeed take control of private businesses, converting them into worker co-ops and sharing wealth through collective ownership.
We're serious about stopping the destruction of people and planet by private capital. Worker control and collective ownership are central to that effort.
Worker cooperatives are not just better businesses providing decent work, dignity and collective security. They’re part of a wider, self-determined effort by workers and working class communities to democratise the economy, reclaiming work from useless or harmful toil, hierarchy and exploitation.
In worker co-ops:
- Wealth is created collectively and controlled collectively
- Power over work, pay and conditions rests with workers themselves
- Surplus is reinvested for shared benefit and community purpose, not siphoned off.
Around the world, worker co-ops have shown themselves to be more resilient, more egalitarian and more rooted in their communities than profit-first businesses. They point towards an economy based on cooperation rather than competition, stewardship rather than extraction.
The democratic economy does not build itself. It needs shared infrastructure, political confidence - and material solidarity.
Join us and build worker power