Grassroots Organizing As Democratic Learning: Community Governance Development In a Resident-Led Worker Cooperative In South Korea

Background and Purpose: Government-funded community development programs have long been criticized for reproducing top-down structures that limit meaningful participation among residents of low-income, disinvested communities. In South Korea, such programs have increasingly sought to cultivate resident-led worker cooperatives as pathways toward neighborhood revitalization and community self-determination. Yet the process by which community members develop the democratic capacities—deliberation, negotiation, and shared accountability—necessary to sustain grassroots organizing remains poorly understood. This study examines how residents of Hwajeon, a low-income neighborhood in Goyang City supported by a government-funded community development program, built participatory governance capacities through the formation of a worker cooperative. We ask: how do residents in disinvested communities learn to practice democratic decision-making, and what conditions support the development of shared ownership and collective self-governance as community assets?

Methods: Using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design, the principal author facilitated eight workshop sessions between August and September 2022 with approximately ten members of the Hwajeon Cooperative, a resident-led organization formed in 2021 amid a longer history of community conflict and disinvestment. CBPR was chosen as a methodology that itself enacts democratic principles—centering co-learning, shared interpretation, and community ownership of findings. This paper focuses on two sessions in which participants collectively assessed local small business conditions and developed shared business models, processes that required sustained negotiation of competing interests, values, and visions for the cooperative's future. Data were gathered through field notes, audio recordings, participant-produced documents, and circle process discussions, and analyzed thematically with findings returned to participants for collaborative interpretation.

Results: Three dimensions of democratic capacity development emerged from the data. First, participants moved from individual task orientation toward a shared sense of community accountability, articulating explicit concern for procedural legitimacy—one participant stated that "only with real legitimacy can we create value." Second, the cooperative became a site of learning to navigate conflict: members negotiated the tension between personal conviction and collective compromise, recognizing that grassroots organizing sometimes requires "being political" and accepting outcomes that diverge from individual preferences. Third, participants developed emerging norms of shared governance—common understandings about decision-making, mutual responsibility, and collective stewardship of community assets—that formed the foundation of cooperative self-regulation. These capacities emerged not from formal instruction but through the lived experience of working through disagreement toward shared purpose.

Conclusions and Implications: This study positions resident-led worker cooperatives not merely as small business development vehicles but as spaces where residents of disinvested communities practice and internalize the capacities that sustain participatory self-governance. Supporting cooperative development in low-income neighborhoods is itself a form of democratic investment—one directly aligned with social work's commitments to self-determination, community empowerment, and the common good. Social workers and community practitioners are well positioned to facilitate the relational and deliberative conditions under which residents build the collective capacities needed to govern shared resources and advocate for their communities.