Sabine Dabady and members of Repaired Nations and Root Volume pose with the wooden deck and pergola, part of an outdoor kitchen they built at a recent job site.
USFWC visited Cooperative Work-Based Learning Program participant Sabine Dabady at a Root Volume build & design cooperative job site in Oakland, CA. Sabine told us how their search for an accepting and affirming space for trans and nonbinary people to build home repair skills led them to Repaired Nations’ Cooperative Work-Based Learning Program, and their work with Root Volume.
OAKLAND, CA — In October 2021, I was really excited to move into my own studio for the first time in my life, but realized that I had a lot of difficulty doing home improvements. I asked a friend at the time if I could help her to do home repair projects to build my confidence and skills.
One day she called me to refurbish her dresser. We needed some tools, so we went to the hardware store. After 10 minutes of being talked to without being heard, we left. I remember being in the parking lot and asking my friend, “What would it be like to have a hardware store that was run by women and gender variant folks? What if they held workshops? What if you could learn at the hardware store?”
Any strong business idea addresses a need and fills a gap. Initially I told myself “Sabine, stop it. What do you know about tools or hardware stores?” but it kept coming back to me. And that was the important idea that I started thinking about a lot and didn’t go away.
As I started to build more of this business idea, I took some classes from Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative and I’ve been taking classes at Laney Community College in carpentry and this semester I started woodworking.
One of my classmates was Mia Jackson, one of the founders of Repaired Nations who had just launched their Cooperative Work-Based Learning Program, so I applied and here I am today as a graduate.
First, we did the Return to Black Wall Street simulator, then the Collective Courage book club before the work-based internship. There’s something to be said about the importance of finding courage for how you live your life to not be guided by fear, but to be guided by courage in spite of fear.
When I started the program, I was really excited about the internship from the jump to get more clear about what it means to work in a cooperative environment. You can’t build connections with other people doing the work outside of the work, right? You gotta get in it.
I was really fortunate to do the work-based internship with Root Volume, a cooperatively-led landscaping and design company in the Bay Area, focused on small builds and gardens with a more diverse than I’m used to queer and trans group of folks.
Cam McCuskey shares their experience with freedom of self-expression as a worker-owner at Root Volume worker co-op since 2019:
“Root Volume is a workplace where people are encouraged to be themselves. There is freedom and power in the trust we place in each other. We are a small crew. We work hard, but we also place a lot of value in building gardens correctly and patiently. The physical nature of the work lends itself to goal-setting and tangible achievements, which I think provides a really strong foundation for humor, love, and genuine connection to shine through as we all build this business together. As a nonbinary trans person, I haven’t felt safe in other traditional construction environments where I’ve worked in the past. I’m so grateful to have been held by Root Volume, through everything from gender-affirming surgery to a day when I’ve come to work grumpy. Especially with the current legislative climate in this country, I need this sanctuary space at work more than ever. I am loudly myself at work, which is so rare, and that gives me strength to be loud about who I am in all other areas of my life.”
Root Volume was a really important place for me to be because again, I’m trying all the time to fight my imposter syndrome, but it shows up. There are a lot of women and gender variant folks who I think by nature are not included in building or engineering or designing and I appreciate the way Root Volume really accepted me showing up as who I am and were willing to teach me and guide me. I think the collective piece, the feeling of not being by myself, is really critical to why cooperatives are a model worth pursuing.
I’m recognizing how lonely and how unsupported sometimes it could feel going as a solo entrepreneur, and that I don’t want to do that if I want to have this idea come to life. It feels both more difficult and also more exciting to be able to develop a business idea with trust and a team building it and doing the work.
My goals are to continue to build more woodworking and carpentry skills, to be able to build more confidence so that I could approach tools and different techniques with more ease. I’m trying to maximize all my time, to learn and build at the same time and am really glad that Root Volume exists because I’m not sure what decision I’d be making now without having had that experience.
