The Consortium Sol.Co. – Sicilian Social Enterprise Network works to achieve integration, promotion, interaction and quality assurance of social work throughout the territory. In June 2010, through an open tender, the Consortium was awarded a ten-year management contract of a property confiscated from the mafia. The property is now called “Youth Hills” and will be […]
Youngest cooperative in Lower-Austria supports members and the region
Nearly every tourist who visits Lower Austria stops for a pleasant stay in Wachau. The unique cultural landscape around the Danube is characterized by steep vineyards, which are edged from natural stone walls and bordered by apricot trees. Wachaus wine is famous all around the world. The apricot trees excite visitors in the springtime with […]
Insuring the world’s soya beans
Paraguay is sometimes referred to as Corazón de América, or the Heart of America. While it has before boasted the fastest growing economy in the globe a large proportion of Paraguays population derives its income from agriculture, much of it from subsistence farming. Paraguay is also an important producer of soya beans, being the sixth […]
Out of crisis rises P&V
When the P&V cooperative insurance group decided to double in size through the purchase of the brokers channel of INGs Belgium operations, it didn’t realise the Global Financial Crisis was about to descend upon it. If anything demonstrates the resilience of the cooperative insurance model, that moment was it. It took place on the eve […]
P&V Group
The P & V Group is a cooperative insurance group that was founded in 1907 with the aim of offering as many people as possible fair protection. Over the years, the group has grown steadily. Each brand and distribution channel which forms part of the P & V Group has their own identity. However, they […]
SSVMN dominates insurance in Costa Rica
It was a rural schoolteacher, Alejandro Rodríguez, who first raised the idea of a social institution in Costa Rica. The year was 1920 and the country was fresh from the unhappy reign of military dictator General Federico Tinoco Granados. After Granados was overthrown, the unpopularity of his regime led to a considerable decline in the […]
The slow steps to change a way of thinking
In rural Nepal 81 per cent of women are victims of domestic violence. Nepal is home to the worlds tallest mountain, Everest. In Nepal, widows are termed bokshi and are cast out as witches. Nepal boasts one of the most beautiful expanses of nature in the world. In Nepal, a woman is raped once every […]
Patti Carpenter, Entrepreneur and ACDI/VOCA Volunteer, on the Value of Women in Cooperatives
With her keen sense of Western consumer preferences, Patti Carpenter, president and creative director of New York Citys Continuum Home, Inc./Carpenter + Company, works with artisans in emerging markets to design products that can be produced using indigenous forms and methods, and then she pitches them to such well-known retailers as Bloomingdales. Through organizations like […]
Unimed: For Many an Unrealistic Dream
In the mid-1960s, Brazil had a mercantile-based medical system that limited free choice and, for many doctors, stood in the way of their dreams of professional excellence and justice. Some medical professionals began to envision an alternative structure for health care: the cooperative. This was an unprecedented idea for the medical field in Brazil and […]
Watthan Artisans work by hand
The members of the Watthan Artisans Cooperative like to say they focus on their abilities, not their disabilities. The treacherous period under the control of the Communist Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in the late 1970s left the countrys economy teetering. Pol Pots infamous killing fields were mass graves. The number of Cambodians who […]