Our Story

The Vancouver Cleaning Cooperative (The Cleaning Coop) was founded out of our lived experiences of exploitation, discrimination, patriarchy, and capitalism. We started as three women who wanted to do better for ourselves and for others in the cleaning industry.

We first met working together and even though we come from very disparate backgrounds, we became fast friends. We realized it wasn’t just each other we could help out of these oppressive circumstances, there was something more for us to do. We invited other racialized women to join us and discovered that by working together, we could overcome barriers within our own lives. 

We decided to build an enterprise of our own, and now, as business partners, we are focussed on building a workers cooperative and a community in the midst of a broken industry. 

We are establishing ourselves as an equitable and empowering employer and paying living wages.

We want to set an example of how a worker’s cooperative can thrive as a profitable and equitable enterprise, even in an industry built on exploitation.