Who they are

In a city full of “cooperators,” the Interpreters’ Cooperative of Madison (ICM) remains the longest surviving language cooperative in the United States. Of its founding members, just one remains an active member of the co-op, Steve Herrick, who also served as the co-op president for many of its years. Since 2009, ICM has provided interpretation and translation for nonprofits, schools, small businesses, and public agencies in the area. Since the pandemic their reach nationally and internationally has expanded significantly with the rise of remote simultaneous interpreting. While the co-op members have observed that many other groups have chosen to specialize in one language, early on ICM embraced a “more is more” approach. They pride themselves on the linguistic diversity of their members and associates, and are willing to source linguists for just about any language. Amongst members, Hmong, Ukrainian, and Spanish, among others, are spoken. 

Over the years, much of the co-op’s operations developed organically, through trial and error, and the commitment of co-op members to find a way to support each other and their clients. One of the things that unites the co-op in its mission, is the commitment to create an alternative to capitalist business models. As a cooperative, ICM members identify inherently as part of the labor movement, and trace their beginnings back to a local workers’ center. Many of their early clients were unions and the co-op was very active in the efforts to oppose former governor Scott Walker’s crusade against organized public sector workers in the state. When Walker and his agenda won, the co-op felt the ripple effects as their largest client, a union, dissolved. 

 While at one point growth seemed antithetical to this alternative approach, the co-op takes the perspective now that growth can also mean increased access to dignified jobs for more people. Right now, most members juggle work with the co-op alongside other jobs. However, Steve says more stability can actually allow for a less transactional, warmer relationship in the workplace, since people aren’t as worried about how they will support themselves. As they pursue just growth, their goal is “to build a place where we can be happy and hopefully make other people happy too.”

How it all came together

In the mid aughts, Steve Herrick arrived back in Madison, Wisconsin after living in Nicaragua and being involved with the fair trade movement there. He thought to himself how there should be “fair trade for everything” while he began working locally as a Spanish-English interpreter. He eventually realized there was such a thing - it was worker-owned co-ops! During this time Steve began interpreting for the Workers’ Rights Center of Madison. The Center was pivotal to the formation of what would become ICM. At the time, many of the workers that the center served were Spanish-speaking. One of the staff, Patrick Hickey, provided Steve with the list of Spanish interpreters the Center worked with, who became the first recruits for the co-op. The Center agreed to support the co-op and from 2009-2017 served as the group’s fiscal sponsor and a member of the Center’s staff took care of the administrative side of the work. 

During the years in which ICM was forming, Steve remembers gathering inspiration from a group of interpreters based in Mexico, Tlatolli-Ollin, who he had the opportunity to meet with in Mexico City. After picking one of the interpreters’ brains over lunch, Steve walked away feeling like what they wanted to do in Madison was possible. He knew there would be a steep learning curve, which Tlatolli-Ollin’s members also experienced, but it was possible.  One of the children of a Tlatolli-Ollin interpreter even went on to become one of ICM’s co-founders. Amazingly, around the same time, Tlatolli-Ollin inspired a delegation of workers and organizers visiting from the Highlander Center for Research and Education in Tennessee. After experiencing the excellent work of Tlatolli-Ollin’s interpreters while engaging in transnational dialogue at the US-Mexico border, Highlander recognized the need for training up skilled social justice interpreters who could work adeptly in an organizing contexts and birthed a movement of language justice workers in the US South. 

While the ICM’s founding members were Spanish-English linguists, the co-op quickly brought on other members, like Hmong interpreter/translator Phil Yang, who worked in languages common in the communities they served. ICM had the great fortune of organizing itself in a city where there was already a flourishing co-op culture. Many of the co-op’s founding members had never run a business before, and Steve describes a steep learning curve, especially as many of the members held down other jobs and had young children in ICM’s early years. Members of other local co-ops, like Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing Cooperative and Union Cab Co-op, donated significant time to helping ICM navigate things like by-laws, marketing and bookkeeping. In 2017, after being cocooned by the Workers’ Center for so many years, the co-op finally broke off to incorporate independently. In the years’ since, ICM has continued to benefit from the help of the cooperative movement and reciprocally support other emerging co-ops.