This piece is part of an ongoing series on women entrepreneurs addressing community and economic development needs through small-scale manufacturing.

It was a cool Saturday morning in Santa Ana, California, earlier this year. At the corner of Walnut and Daisy, an urban farm displayed rows of beautiful carrots and greens. Shipping containers – turned into coffee-shop business space – were painted in blues, oranges, and greens. Community artists speaking English and Spanish gathered at the center of the area to add the finishing touches to an artisan production shed.

Ana Urzua, executive director of Cooperacion Santa Ana, looked out at the nearly completed construction. Ten years ago, this had only been a dream.

In 2015, when the city announced plans to widen two large streets of Santa Ana and began purchasing neighboring homes and storefronts to demolish, Urzua was part of a community coalition that knew they would need to organize against it innovatively. The displacement was a major problem, and the neighborhood had little to no voice in these development plans. Urzua, who served as the sustainability coordinator at Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities, a 10-year program to improve conditions of health through community engagement and policy and systems change, got to work with the initiative’s Right to Remain and Thrive Workgroup. They laid the foundation to launch a community land trust and a cooperative business incubator to enable the people of Santa Ana to determine their own future.

Urzua’s work, which relies heavily on strong community organizing, deep partnerships, and a willingness to try new solutions, demonstrates how a land trust can be used to stabilize neighborhood-serving commercial spaces and how cooperative businesses can complement that strategy to help residents determine their own financial future.

The need was great and growing. Downtown’s Calle Cuatro, or Fourth Street, had been buoyed by Mexican and other Latin American immigrants into a thriving economic district, and the Fiesta Marketplace was an outdoor market filled with Hispanic vendors, music, food, and craft products. Urzua remembers visiting the market with her family for the best polvorones rosas, a pink sugar cookie, and corn tamales. But in the early 2010s, the property owners and the city began pushing for new investment in the area, rebranding Calle Cuatro as the East End and redeveloping the marketplace property for other uses.

In 2015, the crisis became clear when the city announced a major road-widening project that would displace families and a number of local businesses along Bristol Street and Warner Avenue nearby. Proponents argued that a wider road would ease traffic and allow new bike lanes. Opponents pushed back that the neighborhood residents were not sufficiently consulted on the plans, only displaced.

Urzua had learned about the power of organizing as a teenager, from learning son jarocho music at a neighborhood cultural center along with participating in protests for better wages and working conditions for farmworkers who supplied Taco Bell and other fast-food chains across the country. “I brought a t-shirt back from each protest, so I could explain to my younger brother and sister what we were fighting for,” she recalls. So, when she heard about these plans, she took action. Alongside other community organizers, she began showing up at city hall, speaking up at meetings to protest the decision, and winning new sunshine laws to ensure that the community would be involved upfront in future development discussions.

By 2016, the community had claimed a victory: the land acquired for street widening would not be put up for sale. But much of the damage was already done. The city had acquired 37 properties and cleared them of homes and businesses. In response, Urzua and other neighborhood leaders launched a community land trust to enable community members to create real estate that served neighborhood needs.

Here’s how the land trust works. Instead of new development driving up rents and pushing out current business tenants in favor of national chains, the community land trust model helps the neighborhood determine its future by controlling parcels of land, creating and retaining affordable space for local businesses, and ensuring their heritage remains a focus for the community. Although it took a few years to create the infrastructure and financing for the trust, the first trust’s property, La Colemna, launched this month with events to bring that heritage and community energy together.

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But the land trust was just part of the solution. As a teenager, Urzua had seen neighbors struggle to make ends meet, and she knew that building agency in the community meant not just having a say in future development but also improving working conditions and access to livable wages. During community visioning meetings that she facilitated as part of the Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities initiative in 2015, community residents laid out a vision for worker cooperatives to build their own power. This was the next step.

Inspired by the success stories of community members who pioneered cooperative ventures in El Salvador, Urzua joined the efforts towards an informal savings and credit cooperative in Santa Ana. Soon after, she hosted a five-session workshop on worker cooperatives facilitated by a cooperative movement leader from New York. Then, in 2016, she took a trip as a Fellow with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economy (now Common Future). As executive directors of cooperative development organizations from Massachusetts, Ohio, and Mississippi shared their experiences, Urzua understood that this was what her community needed.

A cooperative business model is one where the business is made up of members, all of whom share an ownership stake and decision-making powers. All members share in the risk and the profit from the business, and all participate in making decisions about wages, goods, prices, and more. Business models like these not only help ensure dignified working conditions but can also help stabilize businesses in lower-income areas by enabling people to pool resources, experience, and risk.

By 2019, Urzua launched Cooperacion Santa Ana: an incubator to help locals gather and launch businesses using the cooperative model. In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of mothers and neighborhood leaders answered the call, not only to become trained in contact tracing and other critical responses but to launch, as community-health and outreach workers, the first worker-owned cooperative of Cooperacion Santa Ana’s program, called Radiate Consulting Orange County. Then came Careshare OC, a nanny-owned cooperative in 2021, followed by SALSA, a cooperative for regenerative urban agriculture, and La Milpa Cafe, a coffee shop cooperative in 2024.

Now in 2025, their vision is coming to life – with SALSA cultivating produce for the community, La Milpa’s storefront housed in the renovated shipping containers, plus a workspace and a gallery for Duugich Art, a local Mexican woven-materials artisan and his team. The centerpiece is a stage for community events and office space for the land trust. The cooperatives now run the space alongside THRIVE Santa Ana, the land trust. Ready to create the next group of ventures, Urzua has also launched the newest cohort of the cooperative introductory curriculum with 10 business teams for a 12-week program.

Urzua remains excited to help community members see themselves in a new light. “There’s so much leadership, organizing, and movement-building emerging from young people in Santa Ana,” Urzua says. “I was one of them, and I hope our work inspires a new collective community of folks to do more.”

This post was originally published on Next City.