A Pawtucket workers cooperative paves the way for new models of care and pay equity

A welcoming atmosphere greets LUNA visitors

This reality is what led Gallagher to conceive the idea for LUNA. “I really believe in lived experience and identity-based groups, so that was where I started,” Gallagher says, noting that existing peer groups are often led by people who don’t share the lived experiences of those attending the groups.

Though Gallagher and Boulais originally envisioned the cooperative o ering both clinical and peer support, they ultimately decided to focus exclusively on the latter, welcoming both those with clinical and self diagnoses.

LUNA plans to o er numerous peer counseling groups both in person and virtually, including a gender and neurodivergent group and a Jewish and neurodivergent group. There will also be several rotating clubs, such as a disability justice book club, art club, and foraging and outdoor mindfulness club. A gender-a rming virtual workshop that took place earlier this year run by worker-owner Sy Bedrick was featured in Allure.

Collaborating with other local organizations, LUNA will also o er events and training programs to businesses and professionals on creating more disability-inclusive environments and support for neurodivergent individuals.

As the first cooperative for disabled workers in the country, LUNA is forging a path in developing a business model, seeking ways to ensure all employees – including recipients of disability income – are paid equitably. Restrictions imposed on supplemental security income (SSI) make this di cult, as recipients don’t qualify for benefits if they possess more than $2,000 at any given time, e ectively making it impossible for SSI recipients to build savings.

LUNA has been developing ways to get around these policies in order to pay cooperative member-owners for their work. With two member-owners on SSI and two not, Gallagher explains, the group has collaborated to ensure that needs of every member are met.

“We’re trying to find ways to work with individuals who are disabled and not on disability who need to make money in order to survive as well as people who are on disability who have a lot of barriers in order to survive in this world,” says Gallagher. “We want to make sure that they’re also receiving the same funds that everybody else does, but we’re not impacting the benefits that they receive through the state.

This means o ering stipends or paying into retirement accounts, which does not impact disability income. LUNA also wants to ensure every worker is paid $30 an hour regardless of how they’re collecting their income.

“We’re really pioneering this,” explains Gallagher. “We’re trying to develop it in a way that makes sure everything we’re doing is legal and that we’re filing our taxes right. That’s what’s taking us a lot longer because there’s not a lot of people with expertise on this.” Not even benefits counselors in the state, they add, have a lot of know-how on these practices because of how new the business model is.

Though LUNA is in many ways the first of its kind, its team hopes they can be a model for similar organizations and cooperatives in the future, both in peer-support for neurodivergent individuals and setting a precedence for paying disabled workers equitably.

To learn more about LUNA Care Community’s services, visit LUNACommunityCare.org, or find their fundraiser for programming at GiveButter.com/LunaCommunityCare#