our roots
We are a nonprofit cooperative movement-based bookstore and social center located in West Philadelphia with roots in independent book publishing, education, community media and journalism, and organizing.
OUR Mission
Making Worlds is a nonprofit cooperative bookstore and social center that promotes collective knowledge, skills, and visions of liberation from our communities. By distributing literature and other resources, as well as fostering a vibrant cultural programming space, we aim to strengthen neighborhood and Philadelphia grassroots organizing for people to care and support each other and make worlds of liberation possible. Through diverse political and cultural education initiatives, we promote learning from each other and the intersecting histories and futures of community organizing and movement building of Indigenous, Black, and Brown people and others resisting oppression worldwide.
Our vision
We are committed to building an inspiring space for all who embody and share the principles of a better world built through grassroots, community-powered movement building.
We are a community space that centers intersectional, disability, trans, gender nonconforming, and sex-worker affirming feminisms and supports liberatory social movements. We aim to support and build powerful movements within our neighborhoods and communities facing displacement, deportation, and incarceration due to the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and imperialism and collectively resist gentrification, ethnic cleansing, border control, prisons, neoliberalism, genocide, and fascism within a world imperiled by capitalist-driven climate catastrophe and militarization.
We center a commitment to building good relations with each other and the world around us. We welcome and encourage you, members of our community, to shape our growth and programming efforts.
We envision a liberated Philadelphia that builds on the revolutionary history of the city and organizes towards a just city. We believe that deepening our commitments to abolition and decolonization can position the communities of West Philadelphia and the city around us to challenge exploitation and oppression and participate in creating a resilient society that is equitable, cooperative, and free. With inspiring literature and visionary programming, we are deepening our political education, cultural consciousness, and interconnections now so we can learn to thrive in the ecological and political landscapes of our collective future.
OUR COOPERATIVE
What is a cooperative? A cooperative is defined in the Statement on the Cooperative Identity as
“an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”
Making Worlds is a cooperative worker-self directed nonprofit governed by a collective ethos of decision-making by full and active members of the Cooperative.
Our cooperative values and guiding principles of membership include: honesty, trust, humility, mutualism, reciprocity, balance, open communication, empathy, colearning, self-reflexivity, and discernment; which allow us to develop the skills required for collective stewardship, democratic participation, and shared responsibility.
We adhere to the cooperative values and principles as promulgated by the International Cooperative Alliance. We are proud and active members of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance and the US Federation of Worker Cooperativese.
Members constitute a self-directed group responsible for the design and stewardship of daily operations, management, financial sustainability and well-being, for the efficient and responsible running of our bookstore and social center activities. Cooperative members direct strategy, policies, and tactics in adherence to our mission.
As a nonprofit, there are no "property ownership” rights that adhere to individual members, but rather, the responsibilities (including risks and rewards) of “stewardship” of the project’s mission in common. Prospective members are invited after a trial period (typically, six months of full-time work) to apply for Cooperative membership based on ability, compatibility, and availability, as determined by the existing Cooperative. When a new candidate member has successfully completed an adhesion process and is nominated by full consensus, they become a Cooperative member in full and assume responsibility as an equal steward of the project.
