Tomatoes on the roof, ferns on the walls… The Desjardins Group, Canada’s leading cooperative financial group and the fifth largest in the world, is taking the principle of sustainability to heart and introducing ground-breaking environmental initiatives at all levels – literally. The roof of a bank might be one of the last places you’d expect […]
Pulling Nigerians Out of Poverty
Nigeria, the “Giant of Africa”, has the continent’s largest population and economy, now worth over $500 billion thanks in large part to its oil reserves. This wealth, however, has not stopped 60% of Nigerians living in extreme poverty, nor youth unemployment being close to 80%. Peter Obiorah, president of the De Parach Multipurpose Co-operative Society, […]
De Parach Multipurpose Cooperative Society Limited
The cooperative’s mission is to promote agriculture among the youth of Nigeria, in order to boost their economic status and self-reliance, and also to assist women with little or no income, especially single mothers and widows, through its empowerment programmes.
Case study – A Quiet Revolution: Co-operative schools in the UK
Executive Summary This case study discusses the growth of a new co-operative sector in England during the past ten years which has been one of the movement’s success stories. The development of more than 700 schools as multi stakeholder co-operatives has been aptly described as ‘a quiet revolution’. Moreover, this ‘revolution’ has occurred during the […]
Cooperativa Obrera Limitada de Consumo y Vivienda
Cooperativa Obrera is a consumer cooperative with cooperative supermarkets located in 53 cities in Argentina. It is one of the cooperatives with the most members in Argentina and employs over four thousand people, making it the second largest consumer cooperative in Latin America.
Case study – Habitat participatif in France: the case of H’Nord (Bordeaux)
Executive Summary H’Nord is an eco-neighbourhood housing redevelopment project under construction within the Des Chartrons district in the northern part of Bordeaux. The project started when, in 2004, three long standing residents of the neighbourhood began to think about how to exploit a vast industrial area left abandoned for several years in their neighbourhood. […]
Habitat participatif in France: the case of H’Nord (Bordeaux)
Executive Summary H’Nord is an eco-neighbourhood housing redevelopment project under construction within the Des Chartrons district in the northern part of Bordeaux. The project started when, in 2004, three long standing residents of the neighbourhood began to think about how to exploit a vast industrial area left abandoned for several years in their neighbourhood. […]
Sustainability: inbuilt in the cooperative model
In 2013 the global representative body for the global cooperative sector, the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), decided it was time to take action on sustainability. Oft used as a term to describe cooperatives, the ICA wanted to understand in great detail in fact how appropriate and accurate the term “sustainable” was to describe the cooperative […]
San Francisco Bay Area Coops: A Photo Journey
Out at the edge of the Western United States, the San Francisco Bay Area is home to dozens of unique, cooperatively-owned businesses. California has long engendered hopes and dreams of epic proportion and lured prospectors seeking wonder and wealth. In the 1840s the world heard a rumor that gold lay in California’s northern hills. Cooperatives […]
Participation: The Glue That Binds
Every week, the members of the Shallalà Honey Producers cooperative in southern Ethiopia must walk seven or eight kilometres to attend their regular meeting. The Italian consumers’ cooperative Coop Adriatica has 1.16 million members, making an Annual General Meeting for all an impossibility. All over the world, cooperatives face different challenges in ensuring that their members can have their […]