Appalachian Center For Economic Networks (ACENet)
June Holley, Founder and President (E-Mail: jholley@tmn.com)
Amy Borgstrom, Executive Director (E-Mail: amyb@seorf.ohiou.edu)
94 N. Columbus Road
Athens, Ohio 45701
(614) 592-3854
(614) 593-5451
Web: http://acenetworks.org

Organized more than a decade ago as the Worker Owned Network (WON), this organization began as a conscious effort to import the Mondragon model of worker-owned businesses from Spain to Appalachian Ohio. Like the model ICA Group in Boston, its small staff worked one-on-one with workers at businesses in danger of closing, helping them negotiate and establish worker owned businesses to take control of the business and keep it healthy.

That's where Amy Borgstrom came into it: As an Ohio University student and sometime worker at Casa Nueva, an Athens restaurant that stood in danger of closing when its debt-burdened owner literally left town overnight, she participated in an employee stock ownership plan that turned the eatery into a worker-owned business, one that is now one of Athens' most popular restaurants and a major employer with 40 people on the payroll. Borgstrom, in turn, realizing that she enjoyed working with businesses more than working in a restaurant, joined WON's board and, a few years later, became executive director as it changed its name to ACENet and shifted its mission.

Although WON succeeded at its original intent, establishing a number of businesses including a crafts cooperative and a firm that made recumbent bicycles, its organizers concluded that providing technical assistance to worker owned businesses was labor intensive, expensive, and could only help one business at a time. Looking again to Europe for another, more efficient community-economic development model, they found one in Northern Italy and Denmark: Flexible Manufacturing Networks. This model, adapted to ACENet's 10-county Appalachian Ohio region, continues to this day, and it has accomplished significant victories (including, among many honors, a Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award). Flexible Manufacturing Networks, expressed in simple terms, gather existing and new small businesses in emerging specialty markets and establish a mechanism under which they work jointly yet individually to support each other for mutual benefit, building strength out of many small pieces, either through joint marketing efforts or actual shared production facilities.

Working out of three small gray industrial buildings in a commercial strip on the outskirts of Athens, ACENet operates a small-business incubator with room for 18 small businesses and support services including computers, bookkeeping and receptionists. Small businesses start at a very low rental, well below market rates, then pay more as they thrive and grow, eventually working toward spinning off into their own independent quarters. Revenue from the incubator makes this portion of the ACENet program entirely self-supporting.

Its flexible manufacturing networks focus on three broad market areas determined by the community's resources and needs: (1) Specialty foods, with several small businesses working together in a new facility just now approaching completion, complete with office space, a modern institutional kitchen and a bright, spacious retail floor. (2) Wood products, taking sustainable advantage of the region's rich and surprisingly unspoiled timberlands. Originally focused on the narrow market niche of providing wood components intended to make mobile homes accessible to handicapped residents, the Future Wood Project is currently broadening its efforts. (3) Computer services, a field in which local residents with a reasonable amount of training can earn significant wages in a high-demand workplace.

To support these flexible manufacturing networks, ACENet also provides: