Cooperatives: Born and Bred for Hard Times

Credit default swaps, TARP, Ponsi schemes, too-big-to-fail investment banks; our news is full of economic concepts many of us hadn’t heard of before. With all the dire forecasts and hand-wringing over “how could this have happened” and what the “right” solution is, as parties line up accusing each other of being “corporate” or “socialist,” I’m [...]

Building a Co-operative Economy Together

A co-owner of mine recently shared an interesting interaction. A woman came up to her at a co-op event that we were sponsoring and said that she had been a passionate Equal Exchange supporter in our early days, but assumed that after nearly 25 years we had sold out to grow or survive.
Given the current [...]

Types of Cooperatives

Cooperatives are often formed to provide their members with goods and services or economic benefits not provided by the marketplace. Thus, co-ops operate a wide variety of businesses. All are owned and run by the people they serve. Here are a few examples:
Consumer Co-ops like the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society may operate food stores, pharmacies, [...]

Cooperative History

Today’s cooperatives trace their origins to England’s Industrial Revolution. In the first half of the nineteenth century, living conditions were extremely harsh for working class people in the textile milling towns of northern England. Mill workers labored long hours under dangerous working conditions for low pay.
Plagued by unending poverty, they were forced to buy food [...]

Co-op Principles and Values

The International Cooperative Alliance, established in 1895, is considered to be the final authority for defining cooperatives and the principles by which they operate. The organization has made three formal statements of cooperative principles over the past 100 years in an effort to keep them relevant to the contemporary world. At its 100th anniversary meeting [...]

What is a Co-op?

We all have childhood memories of parents, teachers and others encouraging us to work together. A co-op is what “working together” looks like all grown up. From the outside, many co-ops look like any other business, since a co-op provides products and services like conventional businesses do. But it’s what goes on behind the scenes [...]