If you could put a human age to the cooperative movement, what age would you give it? If you’re concerned about the lack of young professionals in your cooperative or on your board, you may be inclined to say that the cooperative movement is entering its golden years and is ready to go into retirement when all of your Directors, members, and the majority of your workforce does. I look at it a very different way. From my perspective, I think that the cooperative movement is entering young adulthood (in this instance I refer to 20-35 year olds, not the genre of books The Hunger Games falls into). I know that I’m speaking from a very subjective place, but hear me out.
The cooperative movement is going through the same challenge as I am: Looking within and building interpersonal relationships so as to better grow. There are many ways that cooperators could interconnect and grow, the possibilities are about as boundless as our imaginations and yet something holds us back from making this happen. Credit Union Service Organizations (CUSOs) are organizations owned by credit unions in order to provide goods and services that individual CUs cannot effectively offer, but they are still underused considering the large number of functions they can serve. Groups like the Cooperative Fund of New England have developed a Cooperative Capital Fund to help provide much needed equity-like investments to coops without compromising their inherent structure. A group called Principle Six connects consumers with a large and growing variety of coop-sourced products. In the Pioneer Valley, where I live, my credit union is part of a group of cooperatives that is starting the Valley Cooperative Business Association, a group promoting cross sector collaboration on the regional level. These are all great starts, but there’s a lot of work left to be done.
There is nothing corporations currently do that cooperatives can’t eventually compete against. I hope we source virtually everything from beer to mobile wallet solutions from cooperatives someday. The best part is that by offering these services cooperatively, we will have the ability to stay true to the concepts that make cooperatives so attractive to so many of us – an interest in more than just the bottom line, accountability to membership, concern for the community, member economic participation – all while lowering the total cost of goods and services and increasing efficiency, making cooperatives more viable and valuable for those who aren’t completely gung ho about them. Now is the time – consumers see the benefit in brands, products, and services with social purpose. Do you really think that if we had the same leverage and reach, we wouldn’t be preferable to corporations? There are many steps in between here and there, and they begin with building inter-cooperative relationships and establishing stronger cooperative bonds across all of our sectors. By doing so, we will get to know our movement a little better, so that it can enjoy its “young adulthood” in style.
I’ll be working for it. Will you join me?
[Guest Post by Sean Capaloff-Jones, who is part of the Cooperative Trust network, and works for Hadley, MA based UMassFive College Credit Union, a credit union and a charter organization of the Valley Cooperative Business Association.]
