Happiness Sharing Mart Co-operative is the first supermarket in Korea to be operated by a workers’ cooperative. This start was initiated by people who were involved in campaigns against the special law regarding the development of Jeju Island and the construction of the Jeju Naval Base in Gangjeong village. They established their Happiness Sharing Co-operative […]
Other Avenues for Solar
The Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco is an oasis. Nestled along the Pacific Ocean is this relaxing surfer town, with a tranquil neighborhood feel that’s unique in the city. For 40 years, a worker-owned cooperative grocery store called Other Avenues has been serving the Outer Sunset community with local, organic foods and sustainable lifestyle […]
Halandri Parents Social Cooperative Enterprise
Halandri Parents SCE is a Social Cooperative Enterprise created by the need to offer childcare services to preschool and school-age children and their families. The founding members are parents who met at the parents’ committee formed in 2011 to oppose the shrinking of preschool education in the municipality of Halandri in Athens, Greece. Meanwhile, Greek […]
Saving money with on-site deposit service in Benin and Mali
Do you find it hard to save? Now imagine you only earn $1.25 a day and that the banking infrastructure is very limited. This is what many inhabitants of Benin and Mali, West African countries of 10.3 and 14.5 million people respectively, experience every day. Savings being the driving force of independence and development,Développement international Desjardins […]
Promoting Health and Inclusion in an Aging Population
Japan is the world’s oldest country: in 2012, more than 24% of the population were aged 65 or over. This demographic trend is bringing significant public health and welfare challenges, but health cooperatives are leading the way in promoting preventative healthcare and encouraging social inclusion within communities. The Japanese Health and Welfare Co-operative Federation (HeW […]
Bringing Rural Development Through a Multipurpose System
Half a century ago, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, with rural life particularly harsh. In the aftermath of the Korean War, devastated communities were suffering from chronic food shortages. A government-led push created an agricultural cooperative system to revive the rural economy, eradicate poverty and improve the socio-economic status […]
OASI: Accessible tourism for everyone
Promote and render accessible to everyone the Po Delta – a relatively unknown, but unique area, with beautiful nature and a fascinating history. This is the objective of OASI Società Cooperativa, a social cooperative founded in July 2012 in Porto Tolle (Rovigo) by cooperators with decades of experience in the nature-based tourism sector and by […]
Sustainability: Built 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 […]
Desjardins unveils the tallest indoor living wall in the world
The new Desjardins building in Lévis houses the tallest interior living wall in the world with more than 11,000 individual plants artfully arranged according to colour, texture, pattern and size covering a 15-storey wall of the new building at 150 rue des Commandeurs, in Lévis. The artwork, “The Currents”, was designed by Green over Grey, […]
The Jardins of Desjardins
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 […]