About the group 

tilde Language Justice Cooperative, based in Durham, NC,  provides English-Spanish interpretation and translation, and offers capacity-building through workshops and consulting. tilde is made up of a core group of members, who primarily earn their living from the language justice work of the co-op, along with a wide pool of contractors who support the work. Uniquely, tilde Language Justice Cooperative also has a sister organization, the non-profit tilde Education Fund (tEF). The non-profit organization [insert from colibrí materials about tEF]. 

Like many groups, tilde began with a group of language workers, however, in the last few years, they have brought on a co-op member who focuses on operations work and a language services manager who is an employee of the co-op. 

How it all began

tilde Language Justice Cooperative was officially born in 2017, after conversations among local language workers going back to 2011. North Carolina, and in particular the Triangle Region, are rich in language justice history and leadership. In the early 2000s, Alice Johnson led multilingual capacity building at El Centro Hispano, and later pioneered the transformative language justice work that Roberto Tijerina came to lead at the Highlander Research and Education Center. Many in North Carolina benefited from close proximity to and investment from Highlander during that time, including the Center for Participatory Change based in Asheville, NC. Beneficiaries and leaders in this work were among those who began discussing the idea of a worker-owned language justice cooperative based in and around Durham. Additionally, many of the founders of tilde had rich experience in the cooperative movement and knew that the model appealed to them more than a non-profit or collective. 

The workers at tilde were already engaged in language justice work, but were interested in the cooperative model as a way of ensuring a sustainable livelihood for themselves. Co-founder, Ron García-Fogarty remembers that at the time, “the demand for interpreting for language services was starting to increase, but there were still a lot of organizations that really didn't put a lot of money into that…it seemed like it would be hard to make a living off of it because organizations weren't really prioritizing it that much.” Prior to the decision to officially incorporate as tilde Language Justice Cooperative, Ron remembers that the examples of Caracol Language Cooperative (based in New York) and the Interpreters’ Cooperative of Madison which were both active at the time also signaled that “something was working” and that the model of worker-owned cooperatives held great potential for language workers.

Lessons and reflections

When tilde was founded, the worker-owners had very little business experience, and had to learn as they went. Over the years, the co-op has found that having a clear division of labor, such as having a dedicated finance committee, and bringing on people just as passionate about operations as they are about language justice has been critical in being able to sustain their work. With templates and support from their sibling North Carolina language justice cooperative, Centzontle, tilde invested heavily in the creation of their operating by-laws. Taking their time with creating a thoughtful set of by-laws allowed them to clarify their values and codify what it looked like to live those values as a cooperative. 

Since the founding of the tilde in 2017, the cooperative has seen some of its worker-owners move on and have brought in a new cohort of worker-owners, including translator, educator, and social media maven, Dania Santana. Dania joined after having worked in journalism and the mainstream translation sector. She recalls how much more supportive it felt to work as part of tilde’s translation team than in her previous language work engagements. As the cooperative grows, she says, they are always striving towards creating a “workers paradise,” where language workers may thrive. They also take their role seriously within the language justice world as a cooperative, and feel “a big responsibility” to succeed, but furthermore to support others as they build their own co-ops, and set an example as an alternative way to make a living as language workers.  

Disclosure: Allison Corbett, one of the authors of this project, is employed by the tilde Education Fund for work on their sponsored project Colibrí Academy for HIV & Language Justice.