At the edge of the Edgewood boardwalk trail in Madison, WI, two friends held space to discover our next professional step. We knew what we did not want as survivors of the non-profit industrial complex in a so-called “progressive town.” We did not wish for the oversight of individuals who did not understand the work and did not want to be supervisors. It was surrounded by nature, that we began imagining an egalitarian structure for a business grounded in values of love and co-liberation, centered in our shared humanity. A place in which we could also grow and learn from one another.

We contacted a couple of other colleagues, and a cooperative was born. Our strategic visioning session proved we had the balance we needed to co-create a women-led business. nINA Collective Cooperative, a name inspired by the revolutionary activist Nina Simone and a tribute to the Yoruba Indigenous people of West Africa. Ina means fire in the Yoruba language, a pivotal element in transformational processes.

We co-created the nINA Collective Cooperative in 2019 and launched two weeks before the global pandemic, with a vision to facilitate individual and collective transformation. The Cooperative has become a laboratory where we prototype and model practices centered on justice, humanity, and belonging. We partner with individuals and organizations committed to transforming their practices and systems to actualize a vision of liberation.