By Kenzie Love
Lichen Community Systems was founded in 2024 by four people dedicated to growing the practice of community-led design. Building on the principle of “nothing about us without us”, community-led design goes beyond consultation and co-creation. It supports technologies and systems that are designed by, accessible to, and ownable by communities. The Co-op’s founders were inspired to create Lichen due to the growing disconnect they felt between design work and traditional governance models.
“All of our members have been working in the space of digital accessibility and inclusion for a very long time,” says cofounder Michelle D’Souza. “We got to the point where we were enjoying the types of work we were doing, but we wanted to work in a different way. We had started to be involved with co-operatives and working in that way appealed to us, so we decided to incorporate ourselves as a worker-led cooperative.”
Digital inclusion is important to Lichen’s members, D’Souza says, because they believe that people should be able to interact with society in the ways they want to, and accessibility is a key part of that. For people with disabilities, however, such access is often limited, something D’Souza seeks to change through Lichen’s work.
“For me, it’s important to make sure our work is centered in providing that access as much as possible, and on the terms that people want it,” she says.
The worker co-op model was therefore a natural fit for Lichen, says cofounder Colin Clark. While co-operativism aligns with principles of community-led design such as consensus building and direct decision-making, he hadn’t always found this alignment in other spaces he’d worked in.
“You have to stop and reflect on ‘how do we work?’” he says. “‘How is our work structured? How do we govern ourselves?’ And for me, anyway, cooperativism was a way to resolve some of those complexities by making sure that those who do the work are the ones who lead and own it.”
The Co-op’s name reflects this approach, inspired by some collaborators who had compared the technology and software development process to the way in which lichen spreads: slow, deliberate, and collaborative. Clark acknowledges this presents challenges at times, but he definitely prefers it over a more hierarchical structure.
“It’s sometimes a little bit slower, because you have to be deliberate,” he says. “You have to stop and collectively consider what everybody wants and needs. But having been a boss and struggled with it, for me, it’s just a huge, huge relief.”
Looking forward, Lichen’s members hope to collaborate more with other co-ops to design inclusive digital systems and put out training materials to other organizations on digital accessibility. And while they would also like to see the Co-op grow, they plan to do so in the style of their namesake: in an organic and natural way.