In our early days, a newspaper article described Cause+Affect as the agency that “makes the good, cool.” It was a pretty casual comment, but it did capture something real. We were helping organizations that cared about the world show up with the same confidence as ones that were more profit focused.

That concept brought the Co-operative Auto Network to our door.

They’d started years earlier with a radical idea. What if a small group of neighbours simply shared a few cars? No company. No profit motive. Just efficiencies organized through a co-op structure. It had worked fairly well, and what began as a handful of activists sharing beat-up Civics turned into an organization serving hundreds of members across Metro Vancouver.

Their leadership saw what was coming. Carsharing had evolved from a hack into an industry, and real businesses were gaining ground around them. Zipcar had just entered the Vancouver market with venture capital backing, sleek branding and none of the ideological constraints that came with their values-led governance. If they wanted to survive, they needed to get serious about how they showed up.

But getting serious felt dangerous.

For many on the board, marketing was a bad word. It was the language of capitalism and corporations. Of dressing things up to sell more. Working on their brand felt like the first step toward selling out. These were the concerns of the founders and early members who’d built something on principle, who had watched plenty of organizations start with values and end up ruled by the bottom line.

We’d been brought in to help them navigate that tension. Our job was to prove it was possible to compete without betraying who you are.

The answer, we believed, started with their name.

The Resistance

“Co-operative Auto Network” told you everything about what they were. Structure, function, model. It was honest and completely forgettable. Try fitting it on the side of a car, or saying it in casual conversation. Try competing with market-driven “Zipcar” when your name sounds like a government agency.

When we take on naming projects, we are almost always looking for a name that begins a story or opens a door. Most of the carsharing sector was following Zipcar’s lead: descriptive, functional, action-based. Once every competitor followed the same pattern, they would all blend together.

This organization was different and so we decided to take a somewhat unorthodox route. We proposed a name that meant absolutely nothing.

No description of the service. No reference to cars or sharing or cooperation. Just a short, clean word that was easy to say, easy to read on a car door as it passed, and completely empty of meaning.

We walked into a room full of people already terrified of losing their identity and told them their new name would carry none of it. Everything they valued, everything they’d built, everything that made them different from Zipcar. None of that would live in the name.

“What’s a Modo?”

“Is that a thing?”

“Is that a way of being?”

“That’s weird.”

“It doesn’t tell people what we do.”

The Argument

The name was theirs and nobody else’s. It was theirs to shape into whatever they wanted it to be. Every decision they made would tell the world what their name meant. Where they located cars. How they treated members. What they did with revenue. Who they hired. How they showed up in the communities they served. If successful, decades of choices would give this name unmistakable meaning.

This was the beginning of Modo.

It was a nickname of sorts. It emerged from the concept of a multimodal lifestyle, the idea that carsharing wasn’t the only point, it was one element of a richer way of living. Biking, walking, transit, carshare, all woven together.

It was an organization, but perhaps it was also a philosophy. Are you Modo?

The vote passed narrowly. Several board members made it clear they’d voted yes while believing we were absolutely wrong.

The Other Problem

The name was only half the identity problem. While we were attempting to solve it, a bigger one was brewing. A significant contingent of the membership was anti-car. Not ambivalent about cars. Actively hostile toward them. They saw themselves as part of the environmental movement, and cars were the enemy. Driving was a concession, something you did reluctantly and felt guilty about.

Which creates an interesting problem when you’re a car company.

It came to a head in a meeting where the energy in the room had turned almost confessional. Members talking about driving the way people talk about eating badly. Sheepish. Apologetic. One member actually said she felt guilty every time she booked a vehicle.

I finally said what needed saying: “You know you’re a car company, right? If you make your members feel bad about driving, this business is not going to work very well.”

The room went quiet, and not the comfortable kind.

But the point needed to land. Their environmental values were real. Their concern about climate impact was genuine. And those values were actively undermining the service that delivered on them.

Ownership was the problem. Every car in their fleet replaced multiple privately owned vehicles. Every member who shared instead of owned meant fewer cars manufactured, fewer parking spaces consumed, fewer resources extracted. The environmental impact was reduced by making sharing easy, accessible and normal.

Once we reframed from anti-car to post-ownership, everything opened up: how they talked to members, how they marketed the service, how they thought about growth. Every new member meant fewer privately owned cars on the road.

What Twenty Years Built

Modo launched in 2008, just as the financial crisis hit. Then the competition arrived in force. Zipcar with venture funding. Car2Go backed by Daimler. Evo with newer vehicles and coloured roof racks. They all had bigger budgets and flashier marketing.

Modo just kept doing what it had always done.

They never compromised their co-op structure for faster growth. When investors approached, they said no. They prioritized neighbourhoods that needed service over neighbourhoods that promised higher returns. They invested in electric vehicles before it was economically obvious. They paid staff fairly. They held member meetings where anyone could question board decisions. When they made mistakes, they owned them publicly.

This behaviour was never dramatic, and it rarely made headlines. It was just daily choices, year after year after year.

What Happened to the Competition

By 2020, Zipcar shut down Vancouver operations entirely. Car2Go closed completely the same year. Evo has since scaled back significantly.

The well-funded competitors who entered with superior resources couldn’t sustain what Modo sustained. You can’t buy twenty years of showing up and keeping promises.

What Modo Became

Today Modo is one of Vancouver’s most recognized community brands. The blank slate filled in slowly, painted by thousands of choices that all pointed in the same direction.

The board members who resisted the name weren’t wrong to worry. Names do carry weight. Meaning flows from actions to names. Nike didn’t become associated with athletic excellence because “Nike” means victory. Apple didn’t become synonymous with innovation because apples are innovative. Modo became a trusted community brand because they followed their values with consistency, and meaning followed.

The Company Modo Kept

Modo attracted remarkable company. Members who genuinely believed in what they were building. Staff who could have made more money elsewhere. Community partners who valued their cooperative model.

That’s what stewardship looks like when you actually do it. Your community, that self-organizing collective you’ve catalyzed, is collectively sensing whether something authentic is happening or whether it’s sophisticated theatre.

All of them are asking the same question, even if they don’t articulate it: “Can I trust this organization with my belief, my investment, my association?”

Stewardship is the daily work of answering yes. More about this in my next article.

—Steven

P.S. If you're curious about Modo, they're still at modo.coop. Still a co-op. Still member-governed. Most of the companies that tried to replace them are gone.