In January of 2017, I began teaching ESL online part-time. At the time, I had been a warehouse manager for a few years with a community newspaper that distributed about a million newspapers every week. I immediately noticed that the industry was about capitalizing on profits not maximizing the value for students and teachers. 

I attempted to get a group of teachers to come together to cooperatively develop an excellent online curriculum that would be used as the basis of our own platform. Unfortunately, it is difficult for most teachers to devote much time to the development of the business when they are having to support themselves and their families. 

On April 6th, 2019, I started a Facebook group to discuss and plan the creation of a teachers' cooperative. On the first day, a business owner of a teaching company lead an attempted coup by offering to let the cooperative operate under her business. By legal requirements of a cooperative, the suggested arrangement was not a cooperative business, but rather the teachers would basically be recruiters for her business. Regardless, it splintered the group, and nothing developed. 

In February of 2021, another group of teachers and I attempted to start up a cooperative-style business model. We even registered the business but ultimately, one of the teachers who linked us all, had a life issue come up and resigned. One other immediately resigned too and the others ceased responding to chats nor showing up to online meetings.

So, I finally decided that to accomplish this task I would simply have to do it myself.