Katlyne Armstrong and Seán McCabe
“What if we owned the local economy like we own Bohs?” This question scrolled across pitch-side at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium where over 20,000 fans turned out for the League of Ireland match between Bohemians and St. Patrick’s on the opening weekend of the 2026 League of Ireland season. The question gets to the core of the mission of the Bohemian Cooperatives – a grassroots effort to bring the promise of community wealth building to Dublin, and an effort modelled on Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives.
Across the country, communities are feeling the mounting pressures of social and climate breakdown, from cost of living increases and housing scarcity to deepening inequalities and disruptive weather events. At the same time, the promise of a just transition has not materialised. Households experience climate action as an added expense in an already pressured economy, while the solutions that could cut emissions, build adaptive capacity, and enhance standards of living are inaccessible to those who would benefit most.
Based in Phibsboro in northside Dublin, the Bohemian Cooperatives aims to tackle climate change and inequality together, ensuring the transition delivers tangible, local benefits: good jobs, lower household costs, and a stronger social fabric created by a democratic stake in the local economy.
Why a football club?
Since our foundation in 1890, Bohemians football club has been a fan-owned club, essentially, a cooperative. Our existence demonstrates that democratic ownership can compete, even within a landscape dominated by corporate wealth. We believe that, by building the right coalitions and a plurality of ownership, our cooperative model can catalyse a cooperative local economy and a just transition.
Football itself holds a cultural power that extends far beyond the 90 minutes played on the pitch. The Football for Climate Justice project, led by Bohemians and delivered with seven other clubs and associations across Europe, found that supporters feel a stronger connection to their club than to their local community. It is this deep connection to a club that brings people together from different backgrounds, social classes, political perspectives, and ages. The love and commitment for a club are passed from one generation to the next, creating a shared identity rooted in place and belonging.
This highlights the unique potential held by football clubs in the transition to a fairer future. By playing to its strengths and drawing on its broad networks of partners, football provides a powerful vehicle for transformative change. At Bohemians, we believe football can be a force for good. All our work, whether focused on social inclusion, education, or climate justice, aims to improve and make a material, positive difference in the day-to-day lives of our members, fans, and wider community.
Building culture and capacity
We recognised early that building a cooperative culture requires a very intentional approach. To do this, we established the Spark, a three-year cultural change initiative that began in 2021 and was funded through the Community Climate Action Programme. Working with 13 local and national partners , we developed a set of education programmes and shared community prototypes, to provide an entry point for people to get involved, to learn about cooperative action, and to put our learnings into practice.
Central to this work was Spark Skills, an eight-week programme in bike mechanics, energy efficiency and off-grid solar, delivered in partnership with the City of Dublin Education and Training Board, that aims to do more than simply boost skills. Grounded in a Freirean pedagogical model, the lessons attempt to impart a deeper sense of confidence in the learners and inspire a greater understanding of their agency within the community. We are currently running our 16th and 17th cohorts of Spark Skills, with close to 180 community members having passed through the programme. There are roughly another 200 people on the waiting list for a spot, and we are in the process of expanding the programme to include wind energy, green building and 3D printing for repair.
In addition to Spark Skills, we developed a free afterschool programme, in collaboration with Junior Achievement Ireland, and delivered it with 120 children in 16 schools and youth clubs around the inner city and Dublin 7. The Spark has also created shared community resources, through a library of things, a community-supported agriculture project, and a children’s bike library, and brought people together through a wide range of events, like forums, potlucks, and meitheals that helped to transform a disused space in Phibsborough Tower into a vibrant hub for the community.
Grounded in community wealth building
While The Spark has concluded, the mission has not, and we are now entering a critical second phase, moving from building culture and capacity to a start-up phase where we will develop the economic infrastructure to support a cooperative ecosystem rooted in community wealth building.
Community wealth building is an economic model grounded in the simple principle that communities should hold a real stake and have a real say over the economy shaping their lives. Instead of allowing wealth and power to flow outwards, it focuses on retaining and circulating wealth locally, by shifting ownership and control of assets into the hands of communities.
Dublin City Council recently passed a Community Wealth Building Strategy, which sets a direction of travel for the city – we want to meet this opportunity by creating and fostering an ecosystem of worker- and community-owned cooperatives that will meet the demand created by localised public spending. By identifying opportunities for partnership with “anchor” institutions, like hospitals, schools, councils, and universities, it is hoped the community wealth building approach can redirect spending and investment into the local economy. The cooperative ecosystem will then enable communities to move beyond reliance on short-term funding streams for local enhancement by instead creating wealth locally and ensuring it stays there and works for the people who live there.
Learning from successful models
Community wealth building isn’t a new idea. In June of last year, with support from Community Foundation Ireland, we visited two successful community wealth building models in Mondragón, Spain and Cleveland, Ohio to explore how they might inform a Dublin-based approach that intertwines community wealth building and climate justice.
Emerging from Catholic social doctrine and post-war reconstruction, Mondragón Corporation in the Basque country in northern Spain has over 70 years of experience. Today it comprises over 90 enterprises, employs over 70,000 people, and generates approximately €11 billion annually, demonstrating the long-term viability of a cooperative ecosystem at scale. To those working and living in Mondragón, this model is not some utopian experiment, as we were repeatedly told “we are normal people,” but rather a response to real economic and social challenges.
In Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperatives learned from Mondragón but adapted to a different context. Unfolding from decades of economic decline, industrial offshoring, and racialised disinvestment, Evergreen was founded in 2008 and set out to dismantle entrenched intergenerational poverty and build equity for low-income households. Rather than focusing on individual enterprises, it built an ecosystem: a business services unit provided centralised support in areas such as HR, accounting, and communications; three worker-owned cooperatives created local employment, including a particularly successful laundry; and a fund for employee ownership established a pathway for successful businesses to transition to worker-ownership.
These are just two examples of community wealth building in practice. Closer to home, Preston City Council adopted community wealth building as its economic strategy in 2012 and began collaborating with anchor institutions to link public procurement toward local suppliers and employment. In the first four years, £75 million was directed into Preston-based suppliers and the city became one of the strongest in Lancashire for local employment relative to its population. Meanwhile, in Scotland, a Community Wealth Building Bill has just passed and could lay the foundation for deep transformation across the country.
Across the board, the story is similar – insecure work, low wages, underinvestment, overstretched services, and limited influence in decisions. Community wealth building offers a response, but change requires a combination of practical implementation, movement-building, and supportive national policy. With Dublin City Council recently adopting community wealth building as a central pillar of its economic strategy, the moment is ripe to build on international experience and translate these lessons into a model that will work for Dublin.
Building the movement
At the end of April, we will be launching our Community Wealth Building Strategy Document. This strategy will cover a three-year period from 2026 to 2028 and will seek to lay the foundations for a hub-and-spoke cooperative ecosystem. The hub will be a shared services unit that enables the nascent cooperatives, or spokes, to have a better chance of survival by achieving economies of scale and shared resilience.
The strategy will also expand our education and training programme, seek support for seeding the initial cooperatives in the ecosystem, and aim to establish a worker-ownership fund, which would enable the purchasing and conversion of existing businesses to cooperative models.
This all comes with a hefty price tag, and we are currently working to establish relationships with donors and other actors who can support bringing this system into existence. Beyond resources, there are two significant areas where shifts in the landscape would make the realisation of a community wealth building model more feasible.
The first is legislatively. Our current cooperative legislation is older than the state itself. It needs to be updated and modernised and, while the long overdue Cooperative Societies Bill promises to do just that, it seems to never have sufficient support to make it onto the legislative timetable – despite having no real opposition.
The second is a popular campaign in support for more democratic local economies. Community wealth building is a movement for genuine change, and it asks fundamental questions. Who holds the control, where does wealth flow, who benefits? We feel how our economy is failing to work for us. Growth has been concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands while more of us face rising precarity.
Community wealth building provides a practical framework for reclaiming the economy and can be a convening platform for social movements across Ireland – whether its housing, food, energy, migrant rights, climate, or any area striving for the common good – into a collective project for democratic and economic transformation.
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