The United Nations designated July 4, 2009, as the
International Day of Cooperatives. The theme of this year's observance was
“Driving Global Recovery Through Cooperatives”.
The Corporation dominates daily; the Cooperative is less known. While the
corporate model tends to be global, remote and profit-oriented, the cooperative
is more local and people-centred. Cooperatives provide strong alternative
business models and institutional diversity for resilience, particularly in
times of distress.
A Cooperative is a mutual self-help society, “an autonomous association of
persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural
needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled
enterprise”. It is not a charity, nor is it not-for-profit, but doing business
at a fair wage and price with any surplus at year's end distributed to
customers/workers/members.
One of the earliest cooperatives, the Weaver's Society, was formed about 250
years ago in Fenwick, Scotland, to sell discounted oatmeal to local workers. Its
services expanded to include assistance with savings and loans, emigration and
education. Today we find housing cooperatives, agricultural cooperatives,
consumer's cooperatives, and banking cooperatives, to name a few.
Cooperatives are united by a sense of social responsibility and concern for the
community in which they operate. “Common to the whole cooperative movement are
the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and
solidarity”. One of the lessons to be learned from the history of the movement
is that by identifying common interests and uniting them with deep values,
people make a difference in their own lives, the lives of those around them and
in the world.
The Secretary General of the U.N. declared: “Cooperatives deserve greater
support. The economic model of cooperatives is based not on charity but on
self-help and reciprocity. In countries hit by the credit crisis, the
cooperative bank and credit union sector expanded lending when other financial
institutions had cut back, easing the impact...on the most vulnerable.”
Like other groups, to be stable and effective, Cooperatives need leaders and
members who embody serenity, imagination, creativity, initiative and wisdom, the
development of which underlies the work of New Acropolis in its person-centred
Philosophy training.
