Solidarity in action: Colin Long on a lifetime of co-operation, climate justice and the power of The Bunya Fund

When you scan the Australian co-operative landscape, there is a humble and persistent leader who has been quietly making a huge impact – Colin Long. His background features a variety of roles with a commitment to solidarity being the common thread. Builder’s labourer, social worker, academic, union secretary, policy and advocacy for Victoria’s union movement, founder or co-founder of half a dozen co-ops and mutuals, Colin has spent three decades weaving solidarity into every corner of his working life.

At the Bunya Fund’s May 2025 Community of Practice session, he sat down with Antony McMullen to unpack four big questions:

1. What drives you?
2. How did your working life evolve into a co-operative vocation?
3. What is the origin story of Earthworker?
4. How has The Bunya Fund helped Earthworker’s next chapter?

Below is a synthesis of that conversation – followed by five hard-won lessons from Colin’s journey, captured in his own words.

1. What drives Colin Long?

Colin smiles wryly when asked about personal motivation. “I don’t like talking about myself as an individual,” he apologises, before tracing the thread back to his dad, who came out to Australia from Belfast. The youngest of ten, his father “had a strong sense of justice and the need to fight for the little person.” That family ethic, combined with Victorian construction sites in the 1980s and early membership of the union movement, cemented a life-long conviction: solidarity is both principle and practice.

But solidarity, for Colin, must cross lines of difference – economic, cultural, political. “How can we build communities that have a sense of solidarity across really serious difference?” That question explains his simultaneous involvement in climate campaigns, trade-union organising and co-operative start-ups: three arenas where collective effort can trump individual interest.

2. From builder’s labourer to co-operative founder: The trajectory

Colin’s CV reads a little like a somewhat gritty indie movie film script. After builder’s labouring (“a bit of plastering, brick work, electrical, plumbing – handy for life”), he became a youth worker and then a social worker, dealing with street-involved young people.

Exhaustion and the birth of a new son nudged him back to academia: a PhD in history led to a university lecturing post, research stints in Laos and Vietnam, and activism within the National Tertiary Education Union.

In 2010, he was elected Victorian secretary of the NTEU. Eight years later, he moved to the Victorian Trades Hall Council to create its first dedicated programme on climate change and just transition. Each move appears disparate at first, yet each deepened his understanding of how economic structures either harm or help communities.

That insight, gained through every career iteration, prepared him for Earthworker.

3. The Earthworker story: From vision to ecosystem

Origin (1997–2005)
Earthworker began as a loose alliance of environmentalists and unionists determined to bury the myth that jobs and environmental action are incompatible. Early plans ranged from hemp processing to a wind-turbine industry in the Latrobe Valley. “We were using the slogan ‘No jobs on a dead planet’ very early on,” Colin recalls.

Crisis and rebirth (2006–2015)
The original alliance fractured under the weight of serious conflict within the labour movement relating to native forest logging. Co-founder Dave Kerin relocated to Morwell and kept the co-operative flame alive. Earthworker moved from lobbying, protest and big ideas to actual production: why say no when you can build the alternative? The plan was to turn Everlast, a Dandenong solar-hot-water manufacturer, into a worker co-op. Supporters raised $600,000, only to see Everlast collapse days before the settlement. Forced to buy the factory’s equipment from administrators, Earthworker hauled every machine to the Latrobe Valley and started again.

Expansion (2016–2025)
Today, Earthworker is an ecosystem:

• Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Co-op – solar hot-water and emerging battery products, turnover in the millions.
• Earthworker Smart Energy Co-op – home energy-efficiency retrofits.
• Earthworker Construction Co-op – ethical building and modular pod housing.
• CoPower – a community-owned electricity (and now gas) retailer.
• Hope Co-op – asylum-seeker-led mutual aid, scholarships and social enterprise.

A General Assembly is now being designed – two elected delegates from each co-op – to set shared strategy and prevent demutualisation. A forthcoming General Services Co-op will centralise finance, HR, training and marketing.

It took 20 years, but Earthworker is proof the idea works.

4. Enter The Bunya Fund: A well-timed boost

Earthworker’s greatest vulnerability has always been thin capacity: volunteer directors juggling cashflow, compliance, IT and HR while also welding tanks or draught-proofing homes. Round 3 of The Bunya Fund targeted that bottleneck:

• Professionalising finance, funding for upgraded accounting systems and clear financial dashboards across co-ops.
• General services blueprint, specialist advice to launch the shared-services co-op.
• Governance support, mentoring for the new General Assembly structure, including model rules that lock in solidarity and make demutualisation nearly impossible.
• Supporting Earthworker Construction Co-op, accelerating its ability to take on larger contracts and train worker-owners.

Colin Long’s top five co-operative lessons

1. Solidarity is the business model

“It’s really only co-operatives that allow or encourage solidarity as a fundamental purpose of the business.”

2. Challenge false binaries

“We were trying to challenge that discourse that jobs and the environment weren’t compatible.”

3. Move from protest to production

“You spend a lot of time saying no… why don’t we stop saying no and say yes and create our own industries.”

4. Structure beats setback

“If we’d been a normal business we would have gone out of business; it’s the structure of the co-operative that allows us to get back up.”

5. Keep the long view, with a sense of humour

“Earthworker always feels like it’s on a precipice: catastrophe on one side, success on the other. We just keep inching toward success.”

Looking ahead

With the Bunya Fund’s support now embedded (building on previous support of Earthworker Construction Co-op), Earthworker’s next milestones are clear: finalise the General Assembly, launch the General Services Co-op, scale smart-energy retrofits and replicate the Construction Co-op’s worker-ownership model across new trades.

Meanwhile, negotiations with local councils and the Victorian Government could see thousands of public-housing homes retrofitted by Earthworker crews, delivering emissions cuts, lower bills and local jobs in one sweep.

Colin remains cautiously optimistic. The precipice is still there, he admits, but the footing is firmer:

“We’re generally moving closer to the absolute-success side of things, and that’s good.”

For anyone dreaming of a fairer, greener economy, Earthworker’s journey – and The Bunya Fund’s timely intervention – offer a roadmap paved in solidarity, patience and persistent hope.