The Escorts of Berlin are Building Their Own Collectively-Owned Agency

We’re coming out of the shadows.

A group of sex workers in Berlin, Germany is founding the first worker-owned escort agency in Germany, if not the world. It will also be the first all-gender escort agency any of us have seen.

Here’s the link to the campaign:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-worker-owned-escort-agency-in-berlin–2/x/30227643#/

While sex work is legal in Germany, we continue to be exploited by bad bosses, who take advantage of shame and stigma; and regulations whose discriminatory theoretical foundation hasn’t yet caught up with legalization.

We have big dreams of building a safe and lucrative working space for the sex workers in our community—and maybe someday across Germany, or perhaps even further—to collectivize and make our own working conditions, our own democratic business practices, and an organization governed by our own beliefs that what we do is not shameful—indeed, it’s nothing short of healing, transformation, and sheer sexual magic that we offer our clients.

But we can’t do it alone. Founding a business (a registered genossenschaft) requires a lot of work—in visioning, crafting statutes, making a business plan, marketing, and, most of all, filling out a tower of paperwork in bureaucratic German. As marginalized people hustling to survive after an economically ruinous pandemic, we are already living on the margins.

By donating to this campaign, you are funding us to take a month away from the hustle and grind so that we can build this thing and build it right: a strong institution that will provide for and shelter sex workers for generations to come. All we ask is to keep the wolves from the door and the bill collectors away long enough to found—finally—the first sex-worker-owned collective escort agency that any of us have seen.

Once we are registered as a business, we expect to be able to find startup funding. However, between now and then, we need support to be able to really accomplish this.

In addition, there is a steep fee to join most escort agencies, as workers must often pay the cost of the initial photo shoot and other expenses. We don’t want to create a financial barrier to entry or a predatory contract with our workers. From your generous donations, we will also create a fund for workers who want to join us but need the costs of adding them to the website covered. This is important because many of us are emerging from Covid-19 times with absolutely nothing but an urgent need to work; and a desire to work in an equitable, safer setting.