Photos: Consumer Cooperative Group
Consumer Cooperative Group is a multi-family real estate investment cooperative that’s Black-owned, funded, and controlled by Tanen Andrews, a lifelong entrepreneur, and his wife, Tomica Hogg-Andrews. Consumer Cooperative Group aims to tackle the racial wealth gap through indirect ownership of real estate by issuing equity stock directly to the people.
The cooperative will represent the financial purchasing power of its members/investors as a single financial investment vehicle.
Andrews founded the cooperative to help a neglected and under-served market of retail investors. These retail investors are categorized as non-accredited and they make up 98% of the market and yet have been denied access to financial wealth opportunities in early start-ups.
“The wealth gap is artificial; if we can remove the manipulation through our cooperative, it will aid in the democratization of our financial system, equitably to this new market of non-accredited investors and their communities through 100% pure crowdfunding,” Andrews expressed.
The cooperative is based on something the couple has dubbed Cooponomics, which is a play on the words cooperative and economics. This method creates a financial network of like-minded individuals who pool their capital resources together in exchange for equity stock. Stock that investors will utilize to build a secure financial foundation instead of incurring debt with the traditional model that has been forced upon those without any other resources.
Andrews plans to take Consumer Cooperative Group public by directly listing it on the New York Stock Exchange American, which would be the first Black founded, Black-owned, Blacked controlled and Black funded cooperative to be publicly listed and traded since Bob Johnson of BET Holdings in 1991.
“Together, we can keep our wealth & transfer it to our future generations,” he said.
