The manifesto for Teva made an argument and ended on a promise. This document is that promise kept.
That manifesto, Teva: A Publication Cooperative, began from a diagnosis any serious writer will recognize. The architecture of the platform economy has stopped rewarding the work and started rewarding the feed, punishing the contemplative, the serial, and the courageous, and forcing writers of real craft into a precarity no amount of discipline can escape, because the problem is not the writer but the structure. Against that structure the manifesto proposed an ark, which is what the Hebrew word teva names, a vessel of passage built to carry writers and readers through a collapse rather than to rescue a chosen few from it. The vessel it described is a cooperative publication commonwealth, owned by the people who write for it and read it, organized around six editorial beats that run from news and investigations to history and philosophy, and built to refuse at every level the enclosure the extractive economy depends on. It would not paywall its work, because a commonwealth that hides its work behind a tollbooth practices the logic it claims to refuse. It would turn subscription into membership, so that a reader who supports it becomes an owner of it rather than a customer of it. It would cap the returns on its own capital so that no investor could compound a stake into control, and it would tithe a tenth of its revenue to a Jubilee Fund that keeps the cooperative permanently accountable to something larger than itself. And it would center, structurally rather than decoratively, the marginalized voices the publishing industry has always found reasons to keep at its margins, a commitment the manifesto named the Magdalene Imperative.
All of this the manifesto gathered into a covenant of structural commitments, each one written into the architecture rather than affixed to it as a value statement, because the manifesto understood that a commitment which carries no consequence is only a sentence in a document. What it deliberately withheld were the particulars, the specific legal, financial, and governance machinery by which those commitments become enforceable, and it said so plainly, promising a separate operational prospectus that would contain the bylaw architecture, the Covenant Note terms, the sociocratic circle structure, the Magdalene Imperative’s operational clauses, the phased incorporation plan, and the financial modeling against which the cooperative’s viability is tested. This is that prospectus.
It is a different kind of document from the one that precedes it. The manifesto was written in the register of what Teva envisions and released into the commons for anyone to read and adapt and carry outward. This document is written to be acted on, and it is addressed to the smaller and more consequential company of people who will build, fund, and govern the cooperative. Where the manifesto made the case, this prospectus shows the work, and it holds itself to a standard the manifesto’s register did not require. Its figures are verified rather than gestured at. Its central instrument, the Covenant Note, is stated as terms an investor can weigh and accept rather than as a philosophy of capital. Its financial projections are presented as scenarios with their assumptions exposed rather than as a single confident line, because a single confident line would be exactly the fabricated certainty the cooperative’s own discipline forbids. And where diligence required it, this document corrects even the manifesto’s own claims, re-examining the comparative cooperatives the manifesto cited and saying plainly which bear weight as stated and which needed restatement, because the fastest way to lose a serious reader is to let that reader find a claim the cooperative did not check.
That posture, of confidence in the design joined to candor about what remains unsettled, runs through everything that follows. This document is precise about the law as it stands and honest about the determinations that await retained counsel. It names its risks as plainly as its strengths. It would rather state a hard limit directly than let an investor discover it later. This is the posture appropriate to a commonwealth asking others to entrust it with capital and with governance, and it is, in its own way, the covenant practiced in advance, since a covenant that concealed its risks or inflated its numbers would not be a covenant at all.
The prospectus speaks to three readers at once. To the founding writer, it sets out exactly what membership in the cooperative asks and offers, the labor and the candidacy and the revenue-share on one side, the ownership and the editorial control and the protected independence on the other. To the aligned investor, whether an individual moved by the covenantal tradition or an institution working in patient and non-extractive finance, it sets out the Covenant Note in full, its capped and forgiving terms, its place in the order of payment, and its real risks, so that a decision to participate can be made on the merits. And to the prospective board member, it sets out the governance they would help carry, the sociocratic circles, the Board’s composition and its mandate, and the structural commitments they would be entrusted to uphold. Each of the three will find here what they need to decide.
The document begins where the cooperative itself must begin, with the legal form that makes everything else possible. The three classes of ownership, the capped capital, the Jubilee Fund as an indivisible reserve, and the governance written into enforceable provisions all rest on the choice of the right legal vessel and the right way to constitute it, and so the vessel is where we start. From there the prospectus proceeds through the capital instrument and how it is taxed, the way surplus is shared, the operational shape of the Magdalene Imperative, what the cooperative will cost and where its capital comes from and where it goes, how its readership and revenue are expected to grow, how it will govern itself, the Covenant Note stated as terms, the phased plan by which it will be built, and the risks it carries and what answers them. What the manifesto argued in the register of the possible, the pages that follow render in the register of the actual.
We begin with the form.
The Form the Cooperative Will Take
Teva will incorporate in California as a cooperative corporation under the Cooperative Corporation Law, the body of statute codified at Corporations Code sections 12200 through 12704, and it will elect worker-cooperative status under the provisions added by Assembly Bill 816 in 2015. That bill renamed the older Consumer Cooperative Corporation Law and opened worker-cooperative election to any cooperative that wants it, which is what makes a single entity capable of holding the three classes Teva requires.
Those three classes are the heart of the structure. California law permits a cooperative to issue memberships carrying different rights, privileges, and conditions, and to authorize more than one class, which is the statutory anchor at section 12420 for everything that follows. The worker-members, meaning the authors, editors, and employees who contribute labor, will hold control of the cooperative, as the worker-cooperative form requires. The Covenant-Members, meaning the reader-supporters, will form a distinct patron class holding real equity, a share of surplus, and a bounded governance voice. And the capped-return investors will enter through the category the statute calls the community investor, a person who is not a worker-member but who holds a proprietary interest in the cooperative.
That community-investor category is precise about one thing in particular, and the precision works in Teva's favor. Under section 12253, a community investor's voting power is limited to approval rights over a narrow set of structural events: a merger, a sale of major assets, a reorganization, or a dissolution. It does not extend to the right to propose actions. This is the mechanism by which outside capital can hold a real stake and a real, bounded voice without ever acquiring the power to redirect the cooperative away from the people who build it. The manifesto promised that no investor would own the future of the commonwealth. The statute is how that promise becomes enforceable rather than aspirational.
Surplus and reserves follow the same logic. Earnings the cooperative assigns to its unallocated capital account may be put to any corporate purpose, and the indivisible-reserve mechanism the statute contemplates is the legal home for Teva's Jubilee Fund. The tithe is not a gesture layered onto the accounts. It is a reserve written into them.
One hard limit deserves to be stated to capital directly, because it shapes how the raise will be conducted. California gives cooperatives a securities exemption for selling memberships and shares, but AB 816 set the per-investor ceiling on that exemption at one thousand dollars. That figure is built for community crowdfunding, not for patient capital at the scale Teva will seek. The exemption is therefore not the instrument through which the Covenant Notes will be offered. The Notes will be issued under a separate and appropriate securities framework, whether federal Regulation Crowdfunding, California's own limited-offering and limited-advertising exemptions under Corporations Code section 25102, or an intrastate offering confined to California investors, depending on the profile of the capital that comes to the table. The realistic architecture, the one the cooperative is building toward, places the cooperative entity and the capital offering alongside each other rather than forcing the whole raise through a carve-out that was never sized for it. The Sustainable Economies Law Center, whose practitioners wrote much of the working analysis of California cooperative law, has been clear that a multi-stakeholder cooperative fits comfortably within this statutory mold. The care required is in the capital layer, not in the cooperative form.
The Covenant Note and How It Will Be Taxed
The Covenant Note is the instrument that makes Teva's relationship to capital different in kind from both a loan and a conventional equity investment. An investor commits capital aimed at a return capped at one and one-half times principal over a seven-year term. Performance can close the Note early, so capital that backs a flourishing cooperative is repaid faster, which is the thing a loan structurally refuses to reward. The cap is what separates it from equity, since no investor participates in the upside beyond the agreed multiple. And at the seven-year horizon a Shemitah clause forgives any unpaid remainder and closes the investment, while the equity returns to the cooperative commons regardless of repayment status. The release is simultaneous and structural rather than charitable, which is precisely what answers the old objection that unilateral forgiveness merely shifts the loss onto the forgiver.
Honesty with capital requires saying how the tax authorities are likely to see this instrument, because intent does not govern the outcome and the cooperative would rather its investors hear the analysis from us than discover it later. The capped return and the fixed maturity cause the Note to read, most probably, as debt rather than equity, and more specifically as a contingent-payment debt instrument. Instruments of that kind are governed by the noncontingent bond method under the Treasury regulations, and that method can impute interest to an investor on a schedule, which means an investor may owe tax on imputed income before the corresponding cash arrives. This possibility, sometimes called phantom income, is the single most important matter the cooperative will disclose to every Covenant Note holder before a dollar changes hands.
The forgiveness event at year seven carries its own question, and the structure chosen will determine the answer. If the Note is treated as ordinary debt and the cooperative is simply released from the remaining balance, that forgiven amount can become cancellation-of-debt income to the cooperative. If instead the investor's residual interest is, by the Note's own design, a contribution to the cooperative's capital or a recovery feature modeled on the recoverable grant used widely in impact and faith finance, the analysis moves away from cancellation income entirely. The cooperative intends the latter, and the Note will be drafted so that the return-to-commons is a pre-agreed contribution rather than a discretionary act of forgiveness, since the difference between those two framings is the difference between a clean instrument and an avoidable tax liability.
None of this is novel territory, which should reassure rather than concern aligned capital. The capped, self-liquidating structure has close cousins already in use. The demand dividend, developed at Santa Clara University's Miller Center, repays investors from profits above a revenue threshold and stops at a pre-set multiple. Revenue-based financing with a cap does the same against a share of revenue. The Drivers Cooperative, to take one documented example, raised capital that returns two and one-half times principal through a quarterly share of revenue, structured explicitly as revenue-sharing debt with a defined cap and a candid statement of the risk that lenders may never fully recoup. The recoverable grant, offered by Fidelity Charitable and others and described at length in the major impact-investing legal deskbooks, supplies the forgiveness tail. For Teva's own members, as distinct from its investors, the cleanest domestic precedent is Subchapter T of the tax code, the regime under which cooperatives have long issued patronage allocations and redeemable member capital, requiring that at least a fifth of each patronage refund be paid in cash. The Covenant Note is a careful assembly of recognized parts rather than an untested invention, and the cooperative is retaining tax counsel to fix each part in place before issuance.
How Surplus Will Be Shared
The question of how surplus moves through the cooperative is, in the end, the question of whether Teva will favor the group or the individual, and the cooperative tradition has spent more than a century answering it in favor of the group. Three bodies of practice inform how Teva will share what it earns.
The Italian social cooperatives, recognized in law since 1991, require that a substantial portion of annual surplus, in practice between 30 and 70 percent, be placed in indivisible reserves that cannot be distributed even when the cooperative dissolves, and that a further small share flow to national solidarity funds that seed the next cooperatives. This is the purest legal expression of collective capital over individual payout, and it is the tradition in which Teva's Jubilee tithe belongs. The Quebec solidarity cooperatives, which unite worker members, user members, and supporting members in a single entity, settle surplus to reserves first and, by design, withhold from their supporting members the right to take surplus as dividends, which keeps the capital-holding class from extracting at the expense of the workers and users the cooperative exists to serve. And Mondragón, the Basque federation that has carried worker ownership to industrial scale across seven decades, holds the ratio between its highest and lowest pay within a narrow band, capped near six to one against a figure that runs to several hundred to one in comparable firms elsewhere, while directing the majority of member-cooperative profit back into reinvestment and a tenth to the surrounding community.
Read together, these point Teva toward a single coherent design rather than a menu of options. The cooperative will take the Jubilee tithe and a mandatory reserve before any distribution occurs, share the remainder among worker-members and Covenant-Members in proportion to their patronage rather than in flat equal portions, and bind its compensation within a published and deliberately tight ratio. Equitable distribution, meaning distribution weighted to contribution and need, sits closer to the cooperative tradition and to Teva's own covenantal commitments than mathematically equal distribution does, and it is the approach the cooperative is building toward, with the precise ratios and patronage formulas to be fixed in the bylaws before the first surplus is ever divided. The live platform cooperatives confirm that this is workable rather than theoretical. Stocksy allocates the great majority of its distributable surplus to its contributing artists in proportion to their prior-year earnings, and the Drivers Cooperative distributes through patronage earned by work performed, neither of them by equal division.
Making the Magdalene Imperative Structural
The manifesto insisted that the Magdalene Imperative be operationalized architecturally rather than decoratively, and the discipline required to keep that promise has a name in the scholarship. Sara Ahmed, in On Being Included, her study of how institutions handle diversity, calls the documents and statements that organizations produce about inclusion non-performatives: speech acts that do not bring about what they name. She draws the precise distinction Teva must respect, between an institution pledging a commitment and an institution being bound by one, and she warns that writing an admired equality policy is too easily mistaken for actually achieving equality, so that the document comes to stand in for the effect it was meant to produce. This is exactly the failure the manifesto named when it spoke of diversity statements that lived and died in onboarding decks. Ahmed supplies the diagnosis. The cooperative form supplies the cure.
The cure is to give the Imperative teeth that a statement can never have, and the cooperative will do this in three connected ways. It will reserve seats in its governance circles for the constituencies the Imperative names, and those seats will carry binding votes elected by and from those constituencies rather than advisory standing, because a reserved seat that cannot sway a decision is itself a non-performative. Where a constituency is numerically small, the cooperative will weight class voting so that the most numerous members cannot perpetually outvote the rest. The Artisans Cooperative offers a working template here, dividing whole-membership votes among its classes in fixed proportions and restricting board elections to each class, precisely so that smaller constituencies retain real power while still remaining subject to the collective. And the cooperative will commit a commissioning priority and a dedicated budget line, drawn before general surplus is calculated, to the writers and scholars the Imperative centers, rather than leaving their inclusion to whatever remains after the ordinary work is funded.
The need for this is not abstract. The publishing industry Teva is answering remains, by its own most rigorous self-survey, overwhelmingly homogenous. The Lee and Low Diversity Baseline Survey found that just under three-quarters of the people working in publishing, reviewing, and literary representation identify as white, a figure that has moved only slowly across a decade of stated intentions. PEN America's study of the same industry makes the structural point that matters most here, which is that diversity is not settled by who sits on staff or who receives a contract but by pay, by advances, by retention, by marketing, and by whether stated commitments have produced measurable change. Teva will therefore bind the Magdalene Imperative not to a statement but to numbers, entrenching it in the articles and bylaws, publishing an annual equity audit against defined thresholds, and attaching defined governance consequences when those thresholds are missed. A commitment that carries a consequence is a commitment. One that does not is a sentence in a document.
What It Will Cost to Begin, and Where the Capital Comes From
Teva will begin lean, because every worker-owned publication that has lasted began lean and stayed that way on purpose. The instructive case is 404 Media, four journalists who each put in a thousand dollars, lived on their own savings, and reached the point of paying themselves within months on subscription revenue alone. The cooperative will not romanticize that thinness, since working at risk is a cost borne by people, but it will keep the discipline behind it, that the surest path to durability is a cost base small enough that modest revenue covers it and a refusal to spend ahead of what the readership can sustain.
The seed is a single Covenant Note of one hundred thousand dollars, carried on the terms the prospectus has already set out, a return capped at one and one-half times principal over seven years, the Shemitah forgiveness at the end, and the equity returning to the commons regardless. Because the founding writers are paid in revenue-share rather than salary, the seed does not have to carry payroll, which changes what it is for entirely. It is not a bridge across a wage the cooperative cannot yet pay. It is the capital that builds the thing, funding the cooperative’s first obligations and its launch and then holding the rest in reserve, so that the writers can do the slow work of gathering a readership without the cooperative leaning on revenue it has not yet earned. What the seed buys, in the end, is time, the months and the first year or two in which a readership gathered around serious work can grow large enough to sustain the work, and the next section accounts for exactly where the seed goes to buy it.
The cooperative needs little beyond the seed to begin, but the sources it can reach to grow past the beginning are themselves part of its case, because they are sources a conventional venture-funded publication cannot touch. The first is the cooperative-finance ecosystem, the network of non-extractive loan funds that exists precisely because cooperatively owned businesses do not fit a conventional lender’s boxes. Shared Capital Cooperative, a national lender that is itself a cooperative, runs a Worker Ownership Loan Fund created with the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives and lends to worker co-ops across sectors, a co-op becoming a member in order to borrow. Seed Commons and its founding member The Working World operate a national network of non-extractive funds whose repayment logic echoes the Covenant Note’s own, since payments to the fund come from the enterprise’s surplus rather than from fixed interest and at least half of any profit stays with the borrowing business. The Local Enterprise Assistance Fund lends with the same worker-ownership focus. None of this is charity, and none of it is the venture money the cooperative is built to refuse. It is capital that already shares Teva’s understanding of what an enterprise is for.
The second source is the journalism-funding world, which has reorganized itself over the last three years in ways that favor almost exactly what Teva proposes to be. Press Forward, a coalition led by the MacArthur and Knight foundations, has committed more than five hundred million dollars over five years to local news and had moved roughly four hundred million through more than a hundred funders by late 2025. Its stated priorities include closing inequities in journalism coverage and practice, which is the Magdalene Imperative in a grantmaker’s vocabulary, and it has specifically funded shared services for worker-owned media, the very pilot Defector credited in its most recent annual report. Within that ecosystem sit the NCRC Community Development Fund’s Media Resilience Fund, a low-interest and flexible loan program built for news outlets that ordinary lenders treat as high-risk, and LION Publishers, which Press Forward funded to give independent newsrooms financial-management and human-resources expertise. The cooperative will pursue these in sequence rather than scattershot, beginning with the capacity-building grants and the low-interest media loans that fit a young publication.
The third source is the patient and faith-aligned capital the manifesto already named, the impact investors, religious trusts, and non-extractive finance institutions for whom the Covenant Note is not a compromise but the point, and it is here, in additional Notes on the same capped and forgiving terms, that any raise beyond the seed would be assembled. The cooperative will say plainly what those further Notes would be for, which is to deepen the reserve, to fund additional titles from Teva Publications, and to seed the Jubilee Fund more generously, rather than to cover operating costs the seed and the growing revenue already meet. It will not raise more than its work requires, because over-raising would load the commons with more capped obligations than the structure needs and would betray the same principle that caps the returns in the first place.
On California’s own programs, candor serves the cooperative better than optimism. The state’s small-business and workforce funding is real and substantial, but most of it flows as technical-assistance and training money channeled through established centers rather than as operating grants a young publication can draw on directly, and the larger workforce grants carry matching requirements and sector priorities that do not map onto a startup publisher. The cooperative will treat California’s Technical Assistance Program and its small-business development centers as sources of advice and capacity rather than as a line of revenue, and it will not represent state funding to investors as more than it is.
A word on tax, stated plainly because a prospectus should never imply a benefit it cannot deliver. A worker cooperative operating under Subchapter T is not tax-exempt. Its advantage is structural rather than a credit or an exemption, that surplus returned to members as patronage is deductible to the cooperative and taxed once, at the member level, which avoids the double taxation an ordinary corporation pays, provided at least a fifth of each patronage allocation is paid in cash. The Jubilee tithe and the mandatory reserve shape what is distributable before any of this applies. There is no special worker-cooperative tax credit to claim, and the cooperative will not pretend there is. The tax story is the single taxation of patronage and the deductibility of real member distributions, and that story is enough.
Where the Capital Will Go
A prospectus that asks for capital owes its investors a precise account of where the capital goes, and Teva’s account is unusual in a way worth stating plainly. The order in which the cooperative spends its raise is itself a statement of what it is. The first claim on the capital is not the cooperative’s own needs but the world’s, and only once that obligation is met does the money turn to building the thing. The raise funds four things, and they are best understood in that order, with real figures rather than ranges, because the cooperative has done the arithmetic.
The first use of the capital is the Jubilee. Before the cooperative spends a single dollar on itself, ten percent of whatever is raised is set aside to seed the Jubilee Fund, so that the tithe Teva promises on its revenue is practiced first on its capital. On the hundred-thousand-dollar seed this is ten thousand dollars committed to debt cancellation, Magdalene grants, and mutual aid from the first day, and on any larger raise the allocation grows in step, because the tithe is a percentage and not a fixed sum. This is the most important line in the budget, and the cooperative places it first on purpose. A commonwealth that tithed its earnings but kept its founding capital whole for itself would be practicing the very deferral the manifesto refuses, the promise that generosity begins once the building is comfortable. Teva begins it before the building is built.
The second use is the legal and corporate work of bringing the cooperative correctly into being, budgeted at roughly ten thousand dollars. The state filing fees are trivial, on the order of a hundred dollars to file articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State and twenty-five dollars for the initial statement of information, with the eight-hundred-dollar minimum franchise tax waived in the first year and owed thereafter. What the budget pays for is the counsel required to do three difficult things well: drafting the articles and bylaws for a multi-class cooperative, with worker-members, Covenant-Members, and community investors each carrying distinct rights and with the sociocratic governance and the Magdalene reserved seats written into enforceable provisions; structuring and papering the Covenant Note as a security, including its tax characterization and its contribution-to-capital forgiveness; and qualifying the offering under the right exemption, the Regulation Crowdfunding or California intrastate path. Ten thousand dollars is a careful figure rather than a generous one for work of this complexity, since a multi-class cooperative carrying a securities offering can cost considerably more at private-firm rates, and the cooperative will hold its estimate by seeking the counsel that exists specifically to make cooperative formation affordable. The Sustainable Economies Law Center works directly with new worker and consumer cooperatives, and several California law schools, including the business and community-enterprise clinics at Berkeley and UCLA, run free or sliding-scale legal clinics built for exactly this kind of launch. The cooperative will pursue that mission-aligned and clinical counsel first and treat private-firm hours as the fallback rather than the default, and it will treat any cost above the estimate as the first call on its contingency, because under-resourcing the legal work is the one place where spending too little becomes the expensive choice.
The third use is the website, budgeted at roughly ten thousand dollars for the first year, five thousand for the initial setup and design and about five thousand for the first year of the content-management systems the publication runs on. This is higher than the bare cost of the underlying software, which is cheap by design, because it includes the real work of making Teva read like the serious publication it intends to be rather than a default template, and the cooperative would rather state the fuller figure than understate what a credible launch costs. The platform is an open, creator-owned stack rather than a rent-extracting one, providing the website, the newsletter, the membership system, and the paid tiers while taking no percentage of revenue, and its ongoing cost rises only in modest steps as the readership grows, since such platforms price by member count. The five thousand a year is a recurring cost rather than a one-time one, so in the years after launch it is met from revenue rather than from the raise. To it the cooperative adds a small recurring allowance for payment processing, since the card processor takes its percentage of every membership and every tip regardless of platform.
The fourth use is the cooperative’s first book, budgeted at roughly ten thousand dollars. Teva Publications will inaugurate its catalog with Commonwealth: An Excavation of the First Century, by Jeremy M. Prince, a co-founder and Editor at Teva, produced properly rather than rushed onto a print-on-demand template. A first offset run of five hundred copies at United States trade size comes to roughly sixty-five hundred dollars including shipping, at a production cost near thirteen dollars a copy that falls steeply on any larger run, and professional editing of the manuscript adds roughly three thousand dollars, so ten thousand dollars produces and edits the first five hundred volumes with a small margin for the ISBN and the incidental costs of bringing a book to market. Producing the first book this way matters for more than the book. It is how Teva proves from the beginning that the publishing house the manifesto described is real and not deferred, it is the cooperative’s first act of physical publication and so its first entry into the archive that outlasts any platform, and it is the first demonstration of the terms on which Teva publishes, with the author retaining copyright, with the surplus the book earns flowing back to the Jubilee Fund and the commons rather than to a distant shareholder, and with Covenant-Members receiving the printed volume at the cooperative’s actual cost. That the inaugural author is a co-founder is stated plainly here rather than obscured, and the book is published on exactly the cooperative terms that will govern every Teva title after it, which is what keeps it a contribution to the catalog rather than an extraction from it.
Taken together, these four uses come to roughly forty thousand dollars against the hundred-thousand-dollar seed, the ten-thousand-dollar Jubilee tithe and the roughly thirty thousand across the legal work, the website, and the first book, to which the cooperative adds a sensible contingency against the surprises every young organization meets and against the chance the legal work runs beyond its estimate. The cooperative could begin on less, holding its starting costs between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars if every figure landed at its lower bound, but the seed is sized deliberately to fund the four uses and still leave roughly half of itself held as reserve and runway, even after the contingency, because a commonwealth that spent its founding capital to the floor would have built fragility into its first year. This is the whole reason the raise is modest and the reason the cooperative will not raise more than its structure requires. Because the writers are paid in revenue-share rather than salary, the capital does not carry wages through the years of building the readership, the single largest cost in any conventional publishing venture and the line that would otherwise have forced a raise many times larger. The capital buys the cooperative’s first act of generosity, its correct legal foundation, the platform its work will live on, and the first book that work will produce, and then it holds the rest in reserve. What it buys above all is time, the freedom for the founding writers to do the slow and serious work the feed structurally punishes, for long enough that a readership gathered around that work can grow large enough to sustain it, which is the entire financial thesis and the same one the manifesto argued in a different register, that the architecture is the problem and that a different architecture, patiently capitalized and rigorously modeled, can carry writers and readers through weather the extractive model was built to profit from.
How the Readership, the Membership, and the Revenue Will Grow
Everything in the revenue model rests on a chain of three conversions, and the discipline of the model is that each link is a stated assumption drawn from a verified benchmark rather than a number chosen to reach a conclusion. Readers become free subscribers. Free subscribers convert to paying Covenant-Members at some rate. Covenant-Members pay some average amount within the pay-what-you-can band. Multiply the three, add tips and grants, and the revenue follows. Change any assumption and the whole model moves, which is exactly the property an investor should be able to test.
The conversion assumption is the load-bearing one. Across the public data, the median free-to-paid conversion on the dominant newsletter platform sits near three percent, with most publications falling between two and five percent and only about one in five clearing five percent. Niche and high-intent publications do better, with specialized topics converting in the four to ten percent range and the strongest mission-aligned audiences reaching eight to eleven percent. Teva has reason to expect the higher end of the normal band rather than the median, since its readers are gathered around conviction rather than recommendation algorithms, and conviction is the highest-intent acquisition there is. It also has reason for caution, since the manifesto’s refusal to paywall removes the most common lever publications use to drive upgrades. The model therefore does not assume the optimistic case. It runs three.
The price assumption is steadier. The cooperative’s band runs from $9.99 to $24.99 a month, and the average paid newsletter charges about ten dollars a month, which sits at the floor of Teva’s band. Pay-what-you-can pricing clusters toward the lower bound, because most people choose the lowest comfortable contribution and a minority deliberately pay more to carry others, which is the Magdalene logic expressed in the price field itself. A defensible blended assumption is therefore a monthly average modestly above the floor, in the range of twelve to fourteen dollars, with the cooperative able to lift that figure over time as members come to understand that paying toward the top of the band is how the common table stays common. The model uses a thirteen-dollar blended monthly average, roughly one hundred fifty-six dollars a year, and flags it as the single number most worth revisiting once real members exist.
From those two assumptions the membership target falls out arithmetically. The cooperative’s revenue goal is five hundred thousand dollars a year, and if memberships are to provide the larger part of it, say four hundred thousand with the remainder from tips and grants, then at one hundred fifty-six dollars a year the cooperative needs roughly twenty-five hundred to twenty-six hundred paying Covenant-Members. The honest question is what free readership that implies, and here the conversion assumption does its work. At a strong niche conversion of eight percent, twenty-five hundred members require a free list near thirty-two thousand. At five percent, near fifty thousand. At the three percent median, near eighty-five thousand. None of these is a launch figure, and all of them are reachable on a multi-year horizon, which the closest comparable proves, since Defector reached more than forty thousand paying subscribers and crossed three and a quarter million dollars in revenue within its first year, then stabilized near forty thousand subscribers and roughly four and a half million in revenue by its fourth, on a niche audience and a subscription-first model with no paywall. Teva’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar goal is a fraction of what a single worker-owned publication has already shown a committed readership will sustain.
The path to that goal is best understood as three scenarios rather than a forecast, and the cooperative will present them as such to every investor, because a single projected line would be exactly the fabricated certainty its own rules forbid. In the conservative scenario, conversion holds near the three percent median and the blended price near the floor, the free list grows steadily but unspectacularly, the cooperative reaches a few hundred Covenant-Members and a five-figure membership revenue in its first year, the writers’ revenue-share is correspondingly small at the outset while the seed’s reserve carries operations and the readership builds, and the five-hundred-thousand-dollar goal arrives in year four or five. In the base scenario, conversion settles in the four to five percent range a high-intent niche audience supports, the blended price lifts toward the middle of the band as the membership culture matures, the cooperative reaches roughly a thousand to fifteen hundred members by the end of year two, the revenue goal comes into view in year three, and the writers’ share grows in step. In the stretch scenario, the conviction-driven audience converts at the eight percent the strongest niche publications reach, tips and a successful grant cycle add a meaningful second line, and the goal arrives inside two years. The cooperative will plan against the conservative case, present the base case to capital, and treat the stretch case as upside it does not depend on.
Two revenue lines sit alongside membership and deserve their own honest weight. Tips, set at a five-dollar minimum and a twenty-five-dollar maximum per article and open to every reader rather than to members alone, are best modeled as a real but secondary and volatile line, the kind of thing that can lift a strong month and should never be counted on to cover a fixed cost. The cooperative will track tips from the first month and build nothing essential on them. Grants are larger and lumpier still, able to fund a particular project or a year of shared services but arriving on the grantmaker’s schedule rather than the cooperative’s, which is why the model treats grant income as project capital and bridge funding rather than as recurring revenue. The recurring engine is membership. Everything else is ballast and lift.
Because the writers are paid from revenue rather than from a fixed wage, this growth is not the path to covering a payroll but the path along which the writers’ own compensation rises, the readership’s contributions converting directly into the revenue-share the founders earn and, in the order the term sheet sets, into the distributions that carry the Covenant Notes toward their cap. The same growth that pays the writers is the growth that repays the investors, which is the alignment the whole structure was built to produce, a cooperative in which the readers, the writers, and the patient capital all do better as the work finds its audience, and worse only if it does not.
How the Cooperative Will Govern Itself
Teva will govern by consent rather than by command, and the architecture of its governance exists to hold two things safe at the same time: the editorial independence the manifesto promised every writer, and the real but bounded voice of every class that holds a stake in the commonwealth. The method is sociocracy, a system of consent-based, circle-structured governance whose lineage runs back through Quaker decision-making practice and which has been refined over the last century into a working discipline for organizations that mean to coordinate without dominating. The cooperative does not adopt it as a fashion. It adopts it because consent governance is the only form that can keep capital from steering the work, keep the loudest voice from capturing the room, and keep the writers in charge of what they write, all at once.
Consent is not consensus, and it is not majority rule, and the distinction is the whole point. A proposal does not require that everyone embrace it warmly, which is the standard consensus sets and rarely meets, and it does not pass merely because more than half prefer it, which is the standard majority rule sets and which licenses the permanent defeat of a minority. A proposal passes under consent when no member holds a paramount objection, meaning a reasoned argument that the proposal would harm the circle’s ability to meet its aims or that the member could not work within it. Decisions are made in rounds, where each member speaks in turn and no one dominates, and an objection is treated not as obstruction but as information, a signal that the proposal can be made stronger before it is adopted. The working test is whether a proposal is good enough for now and safe enough to try, which keeps the cooperative moving without forcing anyone to swallow a decision they have genuine reason to refuse.
Because disagreement is information rather than failure, the cooperative will build in a mechanism that its prior work already named, a consent health check. When a member consistently withholds consent or finds themselves persistently out of step with the circle’s decisions, that pattern will trigger not a vote to override them but a compassionate inquiry, a restorative conversation that treats sustained disagreement as a possible failure of the group to integrate one of its members rather than as an individual to be outvoted and forgotten. This is the covenant expressed as procedure. Hesed does not dissolve when a member objects, and a commonwealth that reaches for the override mechanism the moment someone disagrees has already begun to practice the extraction it claims to refuse.
The work itself will be organized into circles, each with a defined domain of authority over which it decides by consent. At launch, with seven founding writers, there will be a single Editorial Circle holding all six beats together, since more circles than people would be an organizational chart pretending to be a cooperative. As the writer corps grows, that circle will subdivide into beat-circles nested beneath an editorial coordinating circle, in the actual shape of the work rather than the administrative shape inherited from a twentieth-century newsroom. Alongside the editorial work will sit a Coordinating Circle responsible for the cross-cutting operations the publication depends on, meaning the platform and its development, the finances and the open books, the administration of Covenant-Membership, and the stewardship of the Jubilee Fund. And above both, in the legal sense the statute requires, will sit the Board of Directors.
What keeps this structure confederated rather than hierarchical is the way the circles connect, which sociocracy calls double-linking. Each circle is joined to the circle above it by two people who are full members of both, one carrying the operational lead and one chosen by the lower circle to represent it upward, so that authority and feedback travel in both directions and no circle can issue commands the circle below it had no voice in shaping. The Editorial and Coordinating Circles are double-linked to each other and to the Board in exactly this way. The effect is that decisions are made by those who will have to live with them, which is the principle the manifesto named when it described a distributed power structure rather than a chain of command.
Onto this structure the three classes map cleanly, each with the rights, the responsibilities, and the limits its stake implies. The worker-members, who are the writers, editors, and any employees, hold control of the editorial and operational circles, decide by one member and one vote within their class, and contribute not capital but labor, which is their stake and their standing. The Covenant-Members own genuine equity, share in surplus, vote on the enterprise-level decisions that shape the cooperative’s direction, and elect representatives to the Board, but they do not sit inside the editorial circles, because the work of deciding what Teva publishes belongs to the people who do the writing. The community investors, who hold the Covenant Notes, receive their capped return and hold a real proprietary interest, but their governance voice is the narrow one the statute defines, an approval right exercised only over a merger, a sale of major assets, a reorganization, or a dissolution, with no right to propose any action and no power to direct the work. This is the firewall that lets the cooperative take patient capital without ever letting patient capital take the cooperative.
The protection this buys, and the one the writers should weigh most heavily, is editorial independence. Because editorial decisions live entirely within the Editorial Circle, they sit outside the reach of the investors, who have no editorial voice at all, and outside the reach of the Board and the wider membership, who govern the enterprise but not its pages. This is how the manifesto’s refusal of a house line becomes structural rather than merely promised. There is no position police because there is no body positioned to police positions, and a guest writer can publish an argument the worker-members personally find mistaken because no one outside the Editorial Circle holds the power to stop them and the Editorial Circle has bound itself to artistic and intellectual freedom as a matter of covenant.
Membership in each class begins and ends in its own way, and these mechanics will be written into the bylaws. A writer becomes a worker-member without contributing any capital, since labor is the contribution, by serving a candidacy period of three months and then being admitted to full membership by the consent of the Editorial Circle, which functions here as the editorial board. A worker-member leaves by resignation, or, in the rare case of removal for cause, only after the restorative process the consent health check describes has been attempted in good faith, because a covenant does not expel before it has tried to repair. A Covenant-Member’s standing begins the moment a reader takes up a pay-what-you-can membership, which converts a subscription into ownership, with the enterprise vote and the board-election right that ownership carries, and it ends when the membership lapses or is set down.
The Board of Directors is the body the law requires to govern the corporation, and its composition will reflect the whole commonwealth rather than any single part of it. It will hold seats elected by the worker-members, seats elected by the Covenant-Members, and the reserved seats the Magdalene Imperative requires, so that the constituencies the Imperative centers hold binding votes rather than advisory presence. The Board governs the enterprise, meaning the budget, the capital raise, the strategic direction, the oversight of the Jubilee Fund, and the major financial and structural decisions, but it does not govern editorial, which remains with the Editorial Circle. Where a decision rises to the level of a whole-membership vote, on a fundamental matter or in the election of the Board itself, the votes will be weighted by class on the model the Artisans Cooperative has proven, so that the Covenant-Members, who will in time vastly outnumber the worker-members, cannot perpetually outvote the writers, and so that the reserved constituencies retain real protection rather than nominal inclusion. The community investors hold no Board seat and no general vote, only the narrow class approval the statute grants them over the structural events named above. Board seats will carry defined terms, and the cooperative will stagger and rotate them deliberately, because leadership that calcifies is leadership on its way to capture.
The Board’s first act, mandated and time-bound, will be to set the calibrations this prospectus has deliberately left to the people who will govern. Within a window written into the bylaws, the founding Board will fix the exact constituencies and number of the reserved Magdalene seats, the precise share of commissioning drawn before general surplus, and the specific thresholds of the annual equity audit together with the consequences that follow when a threshold is missed, and it will set the eligibility criteria by which the Jubilee Fund makes its disbursements for debt cancellation, for Magdalene grants, and for mutual aid, with the first audit beginning in the cooperative’s first year. The mechanism is committed here, in writing, and only the dials are left to the Board, which is the right place for them, because the dials should be set by the people the structure binds and ideally with the affected constituencies in the room rather than chosen for them in advance. A governance that named its own first task and bound itself to a deadline is a governance that meant what it wrote.
The Terms of the Covenant Note
The section above explains what the Covenant Note is and how the tax authorities are likely to treat it. This section states what it offers, as terms an investor can weigh and accept, so that no one commits capital on the strength of the philosophy alone.
A Covenant Note is purchased at a minimum of $2,500, with larger commitments accepted in whole multiples of that amount, and it entitles its holder to a total return capped at one and one-half times the principal committed, paid over a horizon of seven years. There is no other yield. The holder will receive distributions toward that cap and nothing beyond it, and once the cap is reached the Note is fulfilled and closes, whether that arrives in the seventh year or sooner.
Repayment is performance-based rather than scheduled, which is the feature that ties the investor’s return to the cooperative’s flourishing rather than to a calendar the cooperative cannot control in its early years. Teva will make distributions toward the cap when surplus allows, and it makes no promise of a fixed annual payment it might be unable to meet while the readership is still being built. In the years the cooperative does well, the Notes are repaid faster and the holder reaches the cap sooner. In lean years, distributions step down toward zero and the unpaid portion carries forward against the cap rather than compounding against the cooperative. The instrument rewards patience and rewards performance, and it never punishes a lean season with a debt that grows in the dark.
Where the Note sits in the order of payment is defined and disclosed, because an investor is entitled to know what stands ahead of them. Operating costs and any senior secured debt the cooperative carries, including loans from the cooperative finance funds described later, are met first, as the ordinary obligations of keeping the publication alive. The Jubilee tithe and the mandatory reserve are taken next, because the cooperative’s commitment to the world outside it and to its own durability is not subordinate to investor return. The Covenant Notes are then served, ahead of any patronage distribution to members, so that investors are repaid before the worker-members and Covenant-Members take a share of surplus. Only after the Notes have received their distribution for the period does patronage flow to the membership. The investor is repaid before the owners profit, which is the proper order, and the investor is repaid after the cooperative has honored its costs, its tithe, and its reserve, which is the covenantal order.
At the seven-year horizon the Shemitah clause closes the matter. Whatever portion of the cap remains unpaid at the end of the term is forgiven, the Note is closed, and the investment is complete, regardless of how much was returned. An investor who is repaid the full one and one-half times before year seven and an investor who is repaid only a part of it both arrive at the same place, a closed Note and a fulfilled covenant, because the cooperative will not carry a perpetual claim and will not let one carry it. The equity the Note represents is held for the seven-year term and returns in full to the cooperative commons at the end of it, again regardless of repayment status, so that no investor ever holds a permanent stake in the future of the commonwealth. This is the structural meaning of the cap and the forgiveness together, that capital enters as a partner for a defined season and then releases its claim, rather than compounding into ownership and control.
The forgiveness will be drafted, as the tax section describes, so that the release of the unpaid remainder reads as a contribution to the cooperative’s capital rather than as the discretionary cancellation of a debt, which is the difference between a clean instrument and an avoidable liability. The investor should understand the year-seven release as a feature designed into the Note from the beginning, not as a default or a failure, and the Note’s documents will say so plainly.
A holder’s governance rights are the narrow ones the statute defines and the governance section describes in full. A Covenant Note carries no seat on the Board, no vote in the editorial or coordinating circles, and no voice over what Teva publishes. It carries only the community-investor approval right over a merger, a sale of the cooperative’s major assets, a reorganization, or a dissolution, exercised as a class and without any right to propose such actions. An investor in Teva is buying a capped and forgiving return and a real but bounded protection against the cooperative being sold or dissolved out from under them, and is buying nothing that would let capital steer the work.
The Notes are not freely tradable. A holder may transfer a Note only with the cooperative’s consent and only in a manner consistent with the securities laws under which it was issued, which means an investor should enter expecting to hold the Note through its term rather than to sell it into a secondary market that will not exist. In exchange for that illiquidity, the holder receives the full transparency the cooperative practices, the same open books published monthly to every member, so that an investor can verify at any time where the cooperative’s money goes and how their own repayment is tracking against the cap.
The Notes will be offered under a securities exemption matched to their low minimum and their intended holders, most likely federal Regulation Crowdfunding or California’s intrastate crowdfunding provisions, which fit a broad base of smaller, mission-aligned investors better than the private-placement exemptions built for a few large ones. Those exemptions carry their own per-investor limits and disclosure requirements, which the cooperative will observe and which it will explain to each investor before they commit. The Notes will not be registered securities, and the offering will be accompanied by the risk disclosures such an offering requires.
The last term is the most candid one. A Covenant Note is an investment in a young cooperative publication in a difficult industry, and it carries real risk of partial or total loss. If the readership does not grow as the model envisions, distributions may reach only a fraction of the cap before the Shemitah clause closes the Note, and in the event the cooperative fails, an investor may recover little or nothing. The capped return is modest by design, and it is not a premium paid for safety. It is the shape of a partnership in which the upside is deliberately limited so that the mission cannot be captured, offered to investors who want their capital to build something it could not build inside the extractive economy, and who understand that building it is not without risk. The cooperative states this plainly because a covenant that hid its risks would not be a covenant at all.
How Teva Will Be Built
Teva will come into being in stages, and the order of those stages is deliberate, because some of the work can begin immediately while some of it must wait on the slow and careful legal work that cannot be rushed without being ruined. The cooperative will move quickly where it can and patiently where it must, and it will let the community begin to form before the paperwork is finished, on the manifesto’s principle that the sea does not wait for a perfect boat.
The first stage, occupying roughly the next three months, is the founding confederation. Before Teva is incorporated, before a single Note is formally issued, the seven founding writers gather as a confederation and begin to act as one, in the same posture the Continental Congress took when it convened without anyone’s permission to grant it standing. During this period the writers keep publishing where they already publish, on Substack and their own newsletters and wherever their audiences already are, and they begin to bring those audiences toward the shared identity that Teva will become, so that the readership starts forming before the cooperative formally exists. This is also the stage in which the foundational work is set in motion. The cooperative retains its counsel and begins the drafting of the articles, the bylaws, and the Covenant Note documents; it settles the details of the revenue-share framework by which the founding writers will be compensated; it closes the hundred-thousand-dollar seed Covenant Note that funds the legal work; and it begins building the platform on which the publication will live. The legal and securities work begins first and is treated as the critical path, because it takes the longest and everything formal depends on it.
The second stage is incorporation and the opening of the offering, and it follows as soon as the legal work is in hand. The cooperative files its articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State as a cooperative corporation and elects worker-cooperative status under Assembly Bill 816. It adopts the bylaws that carry the multi-class structure, the sociocratic governance, and the committed mechanism of the Magdalene Imperative. It seats its founding Board. It admits the seven founders as worker-members, the three-month candidacy applying to the writers who join afterward rather than to those present at the creation. And it qualifies and opens the Covenant Note offering under the chosen exemption, the Regulation Crowdfunding or California intrastate path, so that community investors beyond the seed can take up Notes and the founding raise can be assembled in full. By the close of this stage the cooperative legally exists, its governance is constituted, and its capital is open to those who would share in building it.
The third stage is launch, which the cooperative intends to reach by the end of 2026 and sooner if the work allows. The publication goes live in the form the manifesto described, freely readable and unpaywalled, organized around the six beats, with the founding writers publishing under the Teva masthead while keeping the channels they arrived with. Covenant-Membership opens at the same moment, so that a reader who wishes to become an owner-member can do so at the pay-what-you-can rate, and reader tipping opens to everyone. With the cooperative now operating, the Board takes up its first mandated task, fixing within the window the bylaws define the exact constituencies and number of the reserved Magdalene seats, the precise share of commissioning, the thresholds of the annual equity audit and the consequences attached to them, and the criteria by which the Jubilee Fund will disburse.
The fourth stage is the first year and the years that open out from it, when the structure built in the earlier stages begins to do its work. The first equity audit takes place within the first year, as the Board’s mandate requires, measuring the cooperative against the Magdalene thresholds it set for itself. The first Jubilee disbursement follows once revenue and the tithe allow, turning the tithe from a line in a document into debt cancelled and aid given. The first patronage distribution to the membership follows once there is surplus to distribute, after the costs, the senior debt, the tithe, the reserve, and the Covenant Note distributions have been met in the order the term sheet sets. Through this period the central work is growth, the patient building of the free readership toward the tens of thousands the model envisions and the steady conversion of readers into Covenant-Members, supported where the cooperative qualifies by the cooperative finance funds and the journalism grants the funding section named. And further out, beyond the horizon this prospectus is chiefly concerned with, lie the expansions the manifesto promised, the move into sound and moving image, the independent publishing house, the physical printing and pressing, and the cooperative spaces where the publication meets its readers in person, each to be undertaken as the cooperative matures and only on the same cooperative terms that govern everything before them.
The timeline is ambitious, and the cooperative will say so plainly rather than pretend the work is smaller than it is. Reaching launch by the end of 2026 depends above all on the legal and securities work moving on schedule, which is why that work begins in the confederation period and is given priority over everything else. But the design carries its own protection against delay, because the editorial life of the publication and the gathering of its readership can begin in the confederation stage, before incorporation is complete, so that a slip in the legal timeline postpones the formal launch without stalling the community that launch depends on. The boat is being built while the tide is already coming in, which is the only honest way to build one.
The Risks, and What Answers Them
A document that asked for capital while hiding what could go wrong would betray the same candor the rest of this prospectus has tried to practice, and a covenant cannot be built on a concealed risk any more than on a concealed cost. So the cooperative names its risks plainly, and names alongside each one what stands against it, because the honest measure of a venture is not whether it has risks but whether it has reckoned with them.
The central risk is that the readership does not grow as the model envisions. Everything in the revenue thesis depends on building a free readership into the tens of thousands and converting some defensible fraction of it into paying Covenant-Members, and there is no guarantee the cooperative reaches that scale, or reaches it as quickly as the base case assumes. This risk has several faces. One is discoverability, the difficulty every independent publication now faces in reaching readers through search engines, social platforms, and a web increasingly polluted by machine-generated noise, a difficulty the worker-owned publication 404 Media has named as its single greatest challenge. Another is the sensitivity of subscription revenue to the wider economy, since readers who lose work cut discretionary spending first, and both Defector and 404 have reported waves of cancellation in hard months from subscribers who said plainly that they valued the work but could no longer afford it. What answers this risk is partly that the model is proven rather than speculative, since Defector reached more than forty thousand paying subscribers and several million dollars in revenue on a niche audience and 404 reached sustainability within months at the exact team scale Teva proposes, and Teva’s revenue goal is a fraction of what either has shown a committed readership will sustain. It is answered further by the cooperative’s lean cost base and its revenue-share compensation, which together mean that small revenue covers the operation rather than leaving a payroll the cooperative cannot meet, so that slow growth delays the cooperative’s flourishing without threatening its survival. The conviction that gathers Teva’s readers is also the highest-intent acquisition there is, which is the structural reason to expect conversion at the stronger end of the range rather than the median.
For the investor specifically, the risk is the one the term sheet already stated plainly and this section restates without softening, that the Covenant Note is capped, illiquid, forgivable, and exposed to real loss. An investor may be repaid only a fraction of the cap before the Shemitah clause closes the Note, may be unable to sell the Note into a secondary market that will not exist, and may, if the cooperative fails, recover little or nothing. What answers this is not a promise of safety, since none is offered, but the honesty of the instrument itself. The capped return is modest precisely because the structure is built to protect the mission rather than to maximize the return, and the investor who takes up a Note does so understanding that they are buying a partnership in something the extractive economy could not build, with the limited upside and the real risk that such a partnership entails.
There is a risk in the cooperative’s dependence on a small founding group and in the demands of governing by consent. Seven founders are a small number, and the departure, exhaustion, or serious conflict of even a few could destabilize a young cooperative, while sociocratic consent and a multi-class structure are considerably harder to operate well than ordinary top-down management and can, run badly, produce paralysis rather than participation. What answers this is in part that seven is redundancy rather than singularity, a confederation in which no one person holds the whole, which is the manifesto’s reason for building a fleet rather than a single ship. It is answered further by the governance designed for exactly these strains, the consent-health-check that treats persistent disagreement as something to integrate rather than suppress, the restorative process that must be attempted before any member is removed, and the deliberate rotation of leadership that keeps the cooperative from depending on any single steward. The research on cooperative longevity is encouraging here, since the cooperatives that endure are those with strong internal education, regular common life, and clear governance, all of which Teva is building in from the start rather than bolting on after a crisis.
There is regulatory and tax risk in a structure this novel. The Covenant Note’s characterization, its forgiveness drafting, and the securities exemption under which it is offered all carry the uncertainty that attends anything new, and it is possible that counsel’s final judgment differs from this prospectus’s working analysis or that a tax authority later views the instrument differently than intended. What answers this is that the cooperative is assembling the instrument from recognized parts rather than inventing one from nothing, that it is retaining specialized cooperative and securities counsel to fix each part correctly before issuance rather than after, and that it is disclosing the open questions, including the phantom-income possibility, to every investor in advance rather than discovering them together later. The structure leaves these determinations to professional judgment precisely because they are too consequential to guess at, which is the candid posture the whole prospectus takes toward what it does not yet know.
There is dependency risk in the grants the cooperative hopes to win and in the third-party tools it will rely on. Grants are competitive and arrive on the grantmaker’s schedule rather than the cooperative’s, and a platform or a payment processor could change its terms or its content policy in ways that disrupt a publication built on it. What answers the grant risk is that the model is designed to stand on membership revenue alone, with grants treated as runway and reserve rather than as the engine, so that a grant that does not arrive shortens a margin without stopping the work. What answers the vendor risk is the cooperative’s deliberate choice of an open and portable technical foundation, software that can be self-hosted and content and audience that belong to the cooperative rather than to a platform, together with the physical-publication commitment the manifesto made for exactly this reason, that a book on a shelf cannot be revoked by a processor’s policy or demoted by an algorithm. The cooperative builds on tools it can leave, which is the only safe way to build on tools at all.
The last risk is the one that underlies all the others, that the whole model, a multi-class cooperative publishing commonwealth capitalized by capped and forgiving Notes and governed by consent, is an ambitious assembly that has not been run in precisely this configuration before. What answers it is that every component has been run before, and has worked. The cooperative form is old and proven across every sector and a century of practice. Worker-owned publications are succeeding now, in public, with disclosed numbers the cooperative has cited rather than imagined. The capped and forgiving capital instrument has close working cousins in impact and cooperative finance. The sociocratic governance is a mature discipline with a documented lineage. Teva’s novelty is in the joining of these proven parts into a single commonwealth, not in any untested part, and the prospectus has tried throughout to be honest about which is which. That honesty is itself the cooperative’s answer to the risk of novelty, because a venture that knows exactly where it is breaking new ground and exactly where it is standing on proven ground is a venture that can be trusted to tell the difference as it builds.
What It Will Mean to Say Yes
Everything to this point has been the structure: the form the cooperative will take, the instrument that funds it, the way it shares what it earns, the mechanism that makes the Magdalene Imperative binding, what it will cost and where the money goes, how its readership and revenue are meant to grow, how it governs itself, the terms on which capital enters, the stages by which it is built, and the risks it carries. What remains is not structure but decision, and the decision is a different one for each of the three people this document was written for. So we state plainly, for each, what saying yes commits you to and what it gives you in return, because a covenant entered without a clear account of both sides is not a covenant anyone should sign.
To the founding writer, saying yes means joining the confederation now, before Teva is incorporated and before a single Note is issued, and beginning to act as one of the company that will bring the cooperative into being. It does not mean abandoning the audience you have built or the platform that carries your work. It means the opposite, that you keep publishing where you publish now and begin to draw that readership toward the shared identity Teva will become, so that the community forms before the paperwork is finished. What you contribute is not capital but labor, which is your stake and your standing, and as a founder present at the creation you take up worker-membership without the three-month candidacy that later writers will serve. What you contribute beyond the work itself is your share of the common discipline: submitting your writing to the peer review every Teva piece passes through, reading your fellows’ work in turn, tithing your share to the Jubilee Fund, and practicing the cooperation the covenant asks, which is the willingness to share a masthead and argue without expelling and hold a common table while holding your own convictions. What you receive is ownership of the publication you write for rather than tenancy on a platform that can revoke you. You keep your copyright, your voice, your archive, and your audience, and your byline on cooperative work reads as Teva and your own name together, the collective platform and the individual craft at once. You hold control of the editorial and operational circles alongside your fellow worker-members, one member and one vote, and you are protected by the firewall this prospectus builds around editorial independence, so that no investor, no board, and no member outside the Editorial Circle can tell you what you may write. You share in the surplus your work helps generate, in proportion to your contribution rather than in flat equal portions, which is the revenue-share that is your compensation and that rises as the readership grows. And you belong, at last, to something built not to fold or pivot or be acquired out from under you six months after you arrive, which is the thing the manifesto promised and the thing the structure exists to make true.
To the investor, saying yes means committing capital to a young cooperative on terms that are candid about both their limits and their risks. A Covenant Note is taken up at a minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars, in whole multiples of that amount, and it entitles you to a return capped at one and one-half times your principal over seven years and to nothing beyond it. Repayment is performance-based rather than scheduled, so your capital is returned faster when the cooperative does well and steps down toward zero in lean seasons without compounding against the commonwealth, and at the seven-year horizon the Shemitah clause forgives whatever remains unpaid and closes the Note, regardless of how much was returned, so that you never hold a permanent claim on the future of the cooperative. You are repaid in a defined order, after the cooperative has met its operating costs and any senior debt and after it has taken its Jubilee tithe and its reserve, but ahead of any distribution to the worker-members and Covenant-Members, so that the investor is repaid before the owners profit. Your governance voice is the narrow one the statute defines, an approval right exercised only over a merger, a sale of the cooperative’s major assets, a reorganization, or a dissolution, with no seat on the Board, no vote in the circles, and no voice over what Teva publishes, because the whole design depends on capital that funds the work without steering it. The Note is illiquid and not freely tradable, so you should enter expecting to hold it through its term, and it carries a real risk of partial or total loss, which this prospectus states plainly rather than burying, because an investor who took up a Note without understanding that risk would not be the partner the covenant is looking for. What you receive in exchange for accepting all of this is the full transparency the cooperative practices, the same open books published monthly to every member, against which you can verify at any time where the money goes and how your own repayment tracks toward the cap. And what you receive that no extractive instrument can offer is the knowledge that your capital built something the extractive economy could not, entering as a partner for a defined season and then releasing its claim, which is the entire meaning of the cap and the forgiveness together. Saying yes begins with a conversation. The seed is a single Covenant Note of one hundred thousand dollars, and the offering opens to investors beyond the seed at incorporation, under the securities exemption matched to the Note’s low minimum and its mission-aligned holders, so the first step is to open that conversation with the cooperative about the terms, the capital stack, and the conditions under which your participation would be covenantal rather than transactional.
To the prospective board member, saying yes means taking up the stewardship the law requires and the covenant entrusts, governing the enterprise without governing its pages. You would arrive on the Board by election, from the worker-members or from the Covenant-Members, or by holding one of the seats the Magdalene Imperative reserves, and you would govern the cooperative’s budget, its capital raise, its strategic direction, its oversight of the Jubilee Fund, and its major financial and structural decisions, while the editorial work remains entirely with the Editorial Circle, beyond your reach as it is beyond the investors’ and the members’, because that separation is what keeps the writing free. You would govern by consent rather than by command, in circles double-linked so that authority and feedback travel in both directions, and you would accept a defined term and deliberate rotation, because leadership that calcifies is leadership on its way to capture, and a steward of this commonwealth serves a season and then makes room. The first work you take up is the most consequential, because the founding Board’s first mandated and time-bound task is to set the calibrations this prospectus has deliberately left to the people who will be bound by them: the exact constituencies and number of the reserved Magdalene seats, the precise share of commissioning drawn before general surplus, the specific thresholds of the annual equity audit and the consequences that follow when one is missed, and the criteria by which the Jubilee Fund makes its disbursements, with the first audit beginning in the cooperative’s first year. What you receive is not a return, because a board seat is service rather than investment, but the standing to make the cooperative’s deepest commitments real rather than decorative, to hold the structure to its own covenant at the moment that determines whether the covenant holds at all. Saying yes, here too, begins with a conversation about the role and the mandate you would carry into the founding.
These three decisions are finally one decision, made from three positions, because the structure was built so that the writer, the reader who becomes an owner, the patient investor, and the steward on the Board all do better as the work finds its audience and worse only if it does not. There is no seat at this table that profits while another loses, which is the difference the whole prospectus has been describing in the languages of law and finance and governance, and which the manifesto named in the older language of the covenant. The structure is now fully shown. Every part of it has been built before and has worked, and what remains untried is only the joining of the parts, which is to say that what remains is the people willing to join them. A proposal becomes a commonwealth when enough of those people say yes. The form is drawn, the instrument is written, the governance is constituted on the page, and the risks are named without flinching.
What the document cannot supply is the yes itself. That part is yours.
An Invitation to Teva
There is a Hebrew word, teva, that names the ark in the story of the flood, and it does not mean a ship in any ordinary sense. It is not a vessel built for speed or for conquest or for the open sea. It is a vessel of passage, a thing constructed for one purpose only, to carry what is alive through a season the old world could not survive into a world on the other side of it. We have taken that word for the name of what we are building, because we believe the architecture writers and readers now live inside is a kind of flood, and because we are not interested in rescuing a chosen few from it. We are interested in building something that carries everyone aboard who is willing to help build it.
The diagnosis is one any serious writer already feels in the body. The architecture of the platform economy has stopped rewarding the work and started rewarding the feed. It punishes the contemplative and the serial and the courageous, it rewards the immediate and the inflammatory and the safe, and it forces writers of real craft into a precarity that no amount of discipline can escape, because the problem was never the writer and has always been the structure. You write something that matters, you publish it into a sea whose primary currency is attention rather than truth, and you watch it disappear beneath the next thing and the next. Against that structure we are not proposing a better feed. We are proposing a different vessel entirely.
Teva is a cooperative publication commonwealth, owned by the people who write for it and the people who read it. It is organized around six editorial beats that run from news and investigations through politics and economics, religion and spirituality, art and community, science and technology, to history and philosophy, and it is built to refuse at every level the enclosure that the extractive economy depends on. It will not paywall its work, because a commonwealth that hides its work behind a tollbooth is already practicing the logic it claims to refuse. It will turn subscription into membership, so that a reader who supports it becomes an owner of it rather than a customer of it. It will cap the return on its own capital so that no investor can ever compound a stake into control. And it will tithe a tenth of everything it earns to a fund that keeps it permanently accountable to something larger than itself.
What follows is an open door, and we want to be honest about the kind of door it is. Teva is not a finished institution asking for your patronage. It is a vessel being built, in the open, by the people willing to build it, and the door is open precisely because the building is not yet done. There are still planks to lay. We are writing to you, whoever you are, because there is a place aboard sized to what you have to give, and we would rather you saw the whole structure plainly and chose it with open eyes than be persuaded by anything less than the truth of the thing.
What Holds True for Everyone
Before we describe the particular ways a person can come aboard, there are commitments that hold for every one of them, regardless of how they enter, and it is worth naming these once and clearly so that everything after rests on them.
The work is free, and it will stay free. Everything Teva publishes is readable by anyone, without a paywall, without a meter, without the quiet coercion of a tollbooth that lets you read three pieces before it asks for your card. This is not a marketing decision that a future board might reverse when the numbers get difficult. It is written into the architecture, because the entire point of an ark is that it does not check your ticket before it lets you aboard.
Support becomes ownership rather than subscription. When you give money to most publications, you buy access to a product and the relationship ends there. When you support Teva, you become a member of the cooperative that owns it, with the standing that membership carries. We have built the structure so that the people who sustain the work are the people who own the work, and the difference between a customer and an owner is the difference between renting a seat and holding one.
Capital is capped so that it can never buy control. Money is welcome at Teva, but only on terms that prevent it from ever steering the work. Every dollar of outside investment enters under a ceiling and a time limit, and at the end of that time it releases its claim entirely. No investor will ever own the future of this commonwealth, because the instruments through which capital enters were designed from the first line to make that impossible.
A tenth of everything goes outward before the cooperative spends a dollar on itself. We tithe ten percent of our revenue to a Jubilee Fund devoted to canceling debt, to grants for the writers the publishing industry has always found reasons to keep at its margins, and to mutual aid. We practice this on our founding capital before we practice it on our earnings, which means the first act of the cooperative is not to furnish its own house but to give. A commonwealth that tithed its income while keeping its founding capital comfortably for itself would be practicing the very deferral we refuse, the promise that generosity begins once the building is finished. Ours begins before it is built.
The books are open, every month, to every member. There is no version of Teva’s finances that members are not permitted to see. The full accounting is published monthly, so that anyone with a stake can verify at any time where the money goes, how the surplus is shared, and how every obligation is being met. Transparency is not a value we profess. It is a practice we perform on a schedule.
And the work is free in a second sense, which is that no one outside the people who write can tell them what to write. Editorial decisions live entirely within the circle of the writers themselves. They sit outside the reach of investors, who have no editorial voice at all, and outside the reach of the board and the wider membership, who govern the enterprise but not its pages. There is no house line at Teva and there is no position police, not because we have promised to be tolerant but because we have built a structure in which no body is positioned to police positions. A writer can publish an argument that the rest of us personally find mistaken, because no one outside the editorial circle holds the power to stop them, and the editorial circle has bound itself to intellectual and artistic freedom as a matter of covenant.
These six things are true for everyone. What changes, from person to person, is the door.
Readers
This is for anyone who wants the work and wants it to exist. It asks nothing of you but your attention, and if a piece moves you, the small generosity of passing it to someone else who should read it.
You owe Teva nothing. The work is yours to read, all of it, for as long as the cooperative endures, and we will never put a wall between you and a piece because you have not paid. If a particular essay reaches you, and you find yourself wanting to do something with the gratitude, you may leave a tip on it, from five dollars to twenty-five, and that tip goes very largely to the writer who earned it. But this is an option offered to you, never an expectation laid upon you. What you give Teva by reading it well, by arguing with it, by carrying it outward to the people in your life who are hungry for exactly this, is already a contribution to the thing we are building. The readership is not the audience for the commonwealth. The readership is part of it.
Covenant-Members
This is for the reader who is ready to stop being a customer of the work and become an owner of it.
What it asks of you is a monthly contribution, paid at whatever level within our band you are able to sustain, from $9.99 to $24.99 a month. We call this pay-what-you-can, and we mean it in both directions. If the floor is what you can carry, the floor is the right and honorable amount, and it buys you exactly what the ceiling buys anyone else. But we will also tell you plainly how the band is meant to work, because the band is itself an expression of the covenant. Most people choose the lowest comfortable contribution, which is exactly as it should be, and a minority deliberately choose to pay toward the top, not because they receive more but because they are carrying others who are paying less. That is the whole logic of a common table rendered in the price field itself. Paying toward the top of the band is how the table stays common, and we trust each member to find their own honest place along it.
What it asks of you beyond the contribution is participation in the life of the thing. As a Covenant-Member you hold the right to write a Letter to the Editor and to receive a considered response, reviewed and approved as a cohort by the editorial board so that the cooperative answers you with a unified voice rather than a single offhand one. You are invited into the deliberative life of the enterprise, and the deeper your participation, the more the commonwealth becomes genuinely yours.
What it returns to you is ownership in the full and unsentimental sense. You hold genuine equity in the cooperative. You share in the surplus that the work generates. You vote on the enterprise-level decisions that shape the cooperative’s direction, and you elect representatives to the Board of Directors who carry your class’s voice into the governance of the whole. And you receive the open books, the same monthly accounting every member sees, so that your ownership is informed rather than nominal.
There is one boundary here that we state plainly, because stating it plainly is itself part of what protects you. As a Covenant-Member you own the enterprise and you govern it, but you do not sit inside the editorial circles, and you do not vote on what Teva publishes. The work of deciding what appears on the page belongs to the people who do the writing, and it belongs to them precisely so that it can never be captured, not by an investor, not by the board, and not by a faction of the membership however well-meaning. The independence you are buying into is independence you are also agreeing to honor. You are becoming an owner of a free press, and a free press is free in part because its owners hold it at exactly this distance.
Covenant-Investors
This is for aligned capital that wants to build something it could not build inside the extractive economy, and that is willing to accept a deliberately limited return as the price of building it.
We will be more candid with you than an ordinary offering would be, because candor is the only basis on which the partnership we want can stand. What it asks of you is real, and we will not soften it. A Covenant Note is taken up at a minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars, in whole multiples of that amount. It is illiquid and it is not freely tradable, which means you should enter expecting to hold it through its term rather than to sell it into a secondary market that will not exist. And it carries a genuine risk of partial or total loss, which we state here rather than bury, because an investor who needed that risk hidden in order to commit is not the partner this covenant is looking for. There is one further matter of the same kind, which is that the tax authorities may treat this instrument in a way that imputes income to you before the corresponding cash arrives, and we will disclose the full analysis of that to you before a dollar changes hands, because we would rather you hear it from us than discover it later.
What it returns to you is shaped by the same logic that limits it. A Covenant Note entitles you to a return capped at one and one-half times your principal over a seven-year horizon, and to nothing beyond that. Repayment is based on the cooperative’s performance rather than on a fixed schedule, which means your capital is returned faster in the years the cooperative flourishes and steps down toward zero in lean seasons, without ever compounding against the commonwealth in the dark. You are repaid in a defined and disclosed order, after the cooperative has met its operating costs and any senior debt and after it has taken its Jubilee tithe and its reserve, but ahead of any distribution to the worker-members and the Covenant-Members, so that the investor is repaid before the owners profit. And at the seven-year horizon, a Shemitah clause forgives whatever portion of the cap remains unpaid, closes the Note, and completes the investment, regardless of how much was returned. An investor repaid the full amount before year seven and an investor repaid only a part of it both arrive at the same place, a closed Note and a fulfilled covenant, because the cooperative will not carry a perpetual claim and will not permit one to carry it.
Your governance voice is the narrow one the law defines, an approval right exercised as a class over a merger, a sale of the cooperative’s major assets, a reorganization, or a dissolution, with no seat on the board, no vote in the circles, and no voice over what Teva publishes. This is not an oversight. It is the entire design. You are buying a capped and forgiving return and a real but bounded protection against the cooperative being sold or dissolved out from under you, and you are buying nothing that would let capital steer the work. The capped return is modest by intention, and it is not a premium paid for safety. It is the shape of a partnership in which the upside is deliberately limited so that the mission cannot be captured, offered to people who want their capital to build something it could not build anywhere the return was uncapped, and who understand that building it is worth the risk that it might not be built. In exchange for accepting all of this, you receive the same full transparency the cooperative practices, the same open books published monthly to every member, against which you can verify at any time where the money goes and how your own repayment tracks toward the cap.
Guest Writers
This is for the writer who has something to say and wants to test the water before committing to more.
What it asks of you is a single strong piece, and the willingness to submit it to the same peer review that every piece published under the Teva masthead passes through. We read each other’s work here. A guest essay is read by the editor whose beat it belongs to, and where it crosses into more than one beat it is read by the editors of each, and it is published when the work is ready rather than when a clock says so. That review is not a gate designed to keep you out. It is the discipline that makes the masthead mean something, and it is the same discipline the founders submit their own work to without exception.
What it does not ask of you is that you give up anything you have already built. We practice what we call the fleet doctrine, which holds that a writer is not a single ship to be absorbed into ours but a vessel in a fleet sailing alongside. Keep your own Substack, your blog, your newsletter, your social presence, every channel and every reader you have gathered by your own labor. We ask only that when your work appears at Teva, you bring it to those channels and let the readers who already trust you find their way toward the commonwealth.
What it returns to you, even for a single piece, is real. Your essay is published under the Teva masthead and under your own byline together, the collective platform and the individual craft at once. You keep all of the tips your work earns, minus only a ten percent contribution to the Jubilee Fund and the standard payment-processing fee, so that the gratitude your readers feel flows very largely to you. You keep your copyright, your archive, and your voice, entirely and without qualification. And you find a path, should you want it, because guests who return and sustain a rhythm of roughly one piece a month are exactly the writers we cultivate into Covenant-Writers, with everything that fuller membership carries.
Covenant-Writers
This is for the writer ready to make Teva a standing part of their working life, and to take up not only the craft of it but the ownership.
What it asks of you is a real and recurring commitment to the work. We ask that you produce roughly one article a month at the standard the cooperative holds, that you take your turn in the peer review of pieces that cross into your domain so that the collective discipline is genuinely collective, that you act as a host in the comment sections of your work and report what violates the community’s terms, and that you tithe your share to the Jubilee Fund as everyone aboard does. This is the common discipline, and it is the price of the masthead meaning what it means. None of it is heavy on its own, and all of it together is what makes Teva a publication rather than a pile of essays.
What it does not ask of you, here as everywhere, is that you abandon what you have built. The fleet doctrine holds for members as fully as for guests. Keep your own platforms, your own audience, your own name as it stands in the world, and let your Teva work draw your readers toward the shared identity the cooperative is becoming rather than away from the identity you already have. We are not asking you to dissolve yourself into us. We are asking you to sail alongside.
What it returns to you is the thing the whole structure exists to make true, which is ownership rather than tenancy. As a Covenant-Writer you become a worker-member of the cooperative, after a candidacy period of three months for those who join after launch, and as a worker-member you hold control of the editorial and operational circles alongside your fellows, one member and one vote, no matter the size of anyone’s audience or the seniority of anyone’s name. You are protected by the firewall the structure builds around editorial independence, so that no investor, no board, and no member outside the editorial circle can tell you what you may write. You keep all of your tips, minus only the tithe and the processing fee, exactly as a guest does. And you share in the surplus that the work generates, in proportion to your contribution rather than in flat equal portions, through a weighted distribution in which each Covenant-Writer carries one share of the income pool, a share that rises in real terms as the readership grows. You are paid, in other words, not a wage handed down but a portion of a commons you co-own, and the portion grows as the commons does. Above all, you belong at last to something that was built not to fold or pivot or be acquired out from under you six months after you arrive, which is the thing the platform economy structurally cannot offer and the thing this structure exists to provide.
Editors
This is for the writer-steward ready to take responsibility not only for their own work but for an entire domain of the publication’s coverage.
What it asks of you is stewardship in the fullest sense. As an editor you take charge of one of the six beats, and you ensure that your domain produces one high-quality piece every week, which you may write yourself or commission from a guest. Each beat is assigned a day of the week to carry the site’s primary feature, so that Teva publishes one definitive piece a day from Monday through Saturday and keeps Sunday as a shared day of rest, and your task is to see that your day is honored. To hold that rhythm you maintain a queue of pre-qualified and edited essays, so that if a particular piece slips its deadline the feature date is still met from the queue rather than left empty. You convene with your fellow editors when a piece crosses beats, forming the ad hoc committee that reads such work together and signs off on it before release, because a deeply political exposé that touches religion and economics belongs to all three editors and not to one. You share in the collective responsibilities of the editorial board, the unified memoranda and special issues, the formal reports to the board and the investors, and the cohort responses to the Letters that Covenant-Members write. And you serve as a mentor, cultivating guest contributors and developing them into the recurring Covenant-Writers who sustain the publication’s depth over time.
What it does not ask of you is any more surrender of your own work than we ask of anyone. The fleet doctrine holds at every level of the masthead. Keep your platforms and your audience and your name, and let your stewardship at Teva sit alongside the rest of your working life rather than consuming it. This is, for now, a committed freelance role and not a full-time one, designed to scale alongside the publication as it grows, and our intention across the long transition is to bring the founding editors into full-time stewardship of a thriving cooperative as the model proves itself, rather than to ask for a full-time commitment before the structure can honor it.
What it returns to you is everything a Covenant-Writer receives, and more in proportion to the greater stewardship. You hold worker-membership and the control that carries, one member and one vote in the circles. You keep your tips minus the tithe and the fee. You are protected by the same editorial firewall. And you share in the surplus through the same weighted distribution, in which an editor carries two shares to a Covenant-Writer’s one, in recognition of the broader responsibility the role holds. The weighting is not a hierarchy of worth. It is a measure of contribution, and it rises for everyone as the readership grows. What you receive beyond the share is the standing of a person shaping the spine of a publication rather than renting space on a platform that can revoke you, and a hand in building a structure designed to outlast the algorithms that punish exactly the slow and serious work you will be stewarding into the world.
The Founding Board of Directors
This is for those willing to carry the governance of the whole commonwealth, and to be entrusted with upholding its commitments rather than merely admiring them.
What it asks of you is genuine responsibility for the enterprise. The Board governs the budget, the capital raise, the strategic direction, the oversight of the Jubilee Fund, and the major financial and structural decisions that shape the cooperative’s course. It is the body the law requires to govern the corporation, and its composition is meant to reflect the whole commonwealth rather than any single part of it, with seats elected by the worker-members, seats elected by the Covenant-Members, and the reserved seats the cooperative’s equity commitments require, so that the constituencies most easily marginalized hold binding votes rather than advisory presence. What the Board explicitly does not govern is editorial, which remains entirely with the editorial circle, because the firewall that protects the writers protects them from the board as fully as from anyone.
We will tell you plainly what the founding Board’s first work will be, because we have deliberately left it to the people the structure binds rather than deciding it in advance. Within a window written into the bylaws, the founding Board will fix the calibrations the prospectus left open: the exact constituencies and number of the reserved equity seats, the precise share of commissioning drawn before general surplus is calculated, the specific thresholds of the annual equity audit together with the consequences that follow when a threshold is missed, and the criteria by which the Jubilee Fund makes its disbursements. The mechanism is committed in writing. Only the dials are left to you, which is the right place for them, because the dials should be set by the people the structure binds and ideally with the affected constituencies in the room.
What it returns to you is the particular weight of constituting something durable. Board seats carry defined terms, deliberately staggered and rotated, because leadership that calcifies is leadership on its way to capture, and the structure is built to prevent its own ossification. You will not be building a position for yourself. You will be building a vessel meant to outlast every individual aboard it, including you, and the reward is exactly that, the knowledge that you helped lay the keel of a thing constructed to carry people through long after the hands that built it have let go.
Acting Without Permission
The structure is drawn. The governance is constituted. The math is clear, and it is published rather than promised. What remains is not a question of whether the thing can be built, because the closest comparable publications have already proven that a committed readership will sustain work like this at a scale well beyond what we are asking for. What remains is the building itself, which is happening now, in the open, by the people willing to put their hands to it.
We take some encouragement from history here, from the moments when people stopped waiting for permission from the structures that governed them and simply convened to build the thing those structures would never have authorized. We are not waiting for the platform economy to reform itself, because it will not, and we are not asking the extractive model to make room for an alternative, because it cannot. We are doing what people have always done when the old architecture stopped serving the life inside it. We are constructing a new one, plank by plank, and inviting aboard everyone willing to help.
This is the work the feed structurally punishes, the slow and the serial and the courageous, and we believe a different architecture, patiently capitalized and rigorously built, can carry writers and readers through weather the extractive model was built to profit from. The vessel has a name that means a thing built to carry the living through a flood. It is being built now. There is a place aboard sized to what you have to give, and the door is open while the building is still underway, which is to say the door is open now.
How to Say Yes
If you have read this far and found the door that fits you, here is how to walk through it.
For all inquiries, in any capacity, send a direct message on Substack to Jeremy Prince of The Archive of the Ebyonim, or write to Ebyonim@ProtonMail.com.
Tell us who you are and which door you are walking through. Whether you are a reader ready to become a Covenant-Member, a writer ready to send a first guest piece or to take up a standing role, aligned capital considering a Covenant Note, or someone willing to help carry the governance from a seat on the founding Board, that is where the conversation begins. The vessel is being built. We would be glad of your hands.