The cooperative business model advances economic, social, and environmental progress and demonstrates versatility and resilient. Even though nearly two billion people around the world are members and/or directly impacted by cooperative enterprises across virtually every sector, the value of the model remains relatively unknown. Here are three things that make cooperatives different and some ideas for communicating such uniqueness to new and existing members.
Contagious cooperativism
As many citizens and consumers expect more ethical and environmentally responsible behaviour from organizations, many companies are adopting some of the cooperative values and principles, or projecting them by “values-washing”, to differentiate their enterprise from the competition. The Harvard Business Review is even championing “coopetition” as a force for efficiency and collaboration across the global economy, which mirrors the principle of cooperation amongst cooperatives. For-profit businesses around the world are doing their best impressions of the cooperative model, albeit with very selective incorporation of the values and principles in their everyday practices.
Cooperatives are defined by their unique ownership structure and have baked-in commitments to educating members to enable economic participation and environmental activism, but the movement isn’t awesome at promoting these unique features of the cooperative model.
Ownership
A good question to ask about land, platforms, and value creation is “who owns this?”. I live on the West Coast of Canada, where much of the land is unceded territory of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam people. To say the least, owning a home or selling public land in my community is a complex reality. Balancing free speech with public safety on social platforms is also complex. For Organic Valley cooperative, a Wisconsin-based organic dairy farm, ownership is much simpler (and a little crazy):
By applying a cooperative model to the scale of the web, there’s an enormous opportunity to democratise wealth and power and create tools that are better aligned with our common interest. In many ways, it’s an exciting and provocative way of rethinking both corporate governance and human organization.
Collective community ownership in tech is more than an altruistic aspiration, it can be good business. Co-ops keep wealth within communities, are more responsive to community needs, and are remarkably resilient businesses.
Robey predicts that “in the next decade, we should expect to see more companies rethinking ownership and platforms that exist to serve communities, rather than the other way around.” Be it a farm or a platform, communicating community-ownership is something that cooperatives can do to powerfully differentiate themselves from conventional, investor-owned enterprises.
Member economic participation
In addition to its differentiation of shared, or community, ownership, the cooperative model expects member-owners to contribute equitably and democratically to the capital of their cooperative, which means that members allocate surpluses (or “profits”) to benefit members, not outside shareholders, in proportion to their transactions with the cooperative.
This value proposition elevates self-reliance, long-term-resilience, and distributed capital, as opposed to speculative return on investment. While not easy to crisply and convincingly articulate, especially to folks who are new to the cooperative model, economic participation from members is a uniquely cooperative trait. This said, “stakeholder capitalism” is emerging as an expectation from citizen-consumers around the world, which is reflected in policy proposals such as the Green New Deal or consumer-watchdogs pressuring companies like Adidas, The Gap and lululemon to curb “fast fashion” practices. People are expecting organizations to build back better, which, according to The Guardian’s Mariana Mazzucato, requires leaders of industry and government to re-think the global economy: “Covid-19 is a major event that exposes the lack of preparedness and resilience of the increasingly globalised and interconnected economy, and it certainly won’t be the last. But we can use this moment to bring a stakeholder approach to the centre of capitalism. Let’s not let this crisis go to waste.”
Cooperatives can and should assert themselves into this re-imagination of how we create and measure value in our economies and societies.
Information, education, training
Human beings love learning about themselves while being nudged toward the products, services, and experiences that match our needs and wants. From tourism to circular fashion to financial services, customers (or members) are expecting more personalization from businesses and folks are delighted when an experience surfaces insights and learnings. For example, Patagonia connects stakeholders with environmental conservation initiatives in their communities, which advances climate action while surfacing personal and community awareness for their customers.
From the inception of modern cooperativism, lifelong learning has been a foundational priority – the Rochdale Pioneers created a library to enhance literacy among members and in their community. Citizens are craving and/or will require education that enables economic, social, and environmental literacy to deeply understand and engage in conversations about taking climate action and advancing racial justice. Cooperatives are uniquely positioned to take this longstanding principle and adapt it to modern societal learning needs.