Social and Public Services

Social and public service cooperatives are composed of firms that provide a diverse array of healthcare, housing, transportation, and education services. Table 4-3 shows that only 841 of the 11,311 social and public service cooperatives in the U.S provided us with data. These "reporting" cooperatives have 1 million members that account for $1.7B in assets, $4.3B in revenue, nearly 100,000 jobs and >$600M in wages. Housing cooperatives dominate this aggregate economic sector in terms of the number of entities, but healthcare dominates in terms of economic activity. There are >300 cooperative healthcare providers, of which 100 collectively account for >$1B in assets and $3.2B in revenues. The healthcare subsector also accounts for the largest share of employees and members within this aggregate sector.

We report only on firms for which we have collected economic data (some firms did not respond to our requests for information), so that the data represents lower bounds regarding the full economic footprint of cooperatives in this aggregate sector. As described in the previous section, we extrapolated to the full population to conduct our impact analysis. Therefore, the sum of direct impacts in the following subsections will be larger than the corresponding aggregate variables reported here.

Table 4-3: Social and Public Services
Economic Sector Reporting Total   Estab.   Assets Revenue Wages   Employees Memberships
  (firms)       (million dollars)   (thousands)
Healthcare 192 305   305   1,109 3,290 283   73.18 961.22
Childcare 563 1,096   1,096   45 86 0.81   8.17 -
Housing1 - 9,471   9,471   - - -   - -
Transportation 13 49   49   68 290 8.60   0.50 29.08
Education 121 390   390   428 692 313   9.75 14.80
Total 841 11,311   11,311   1,650 4,358 605   91.60 1,005
Economic data is not available for the housing sector.
Figure 4-3.1: Combined Distribution of Social and Public Services Cooperatives