At the cobblestoned corner of 4 Norte and 4 Oriente, 400 indigenous women sell their work. Embroidered shirts, jewelry, paper hangings and other traditional handcrafts fill shelves and line walls. Craft shops are no rare thing in the historic downtown of Puebla, Mexico and tourists flock through the streets clutching plastic bags stuffed with gifts […]

In the late 1970’s Martha Angélica Quezada died. A 17 year old Nicaraguan, Quezada was killed in the fight against the Samosa dictatorship. In 1979 a group of mothers, widowed in the revolution, formed a cooperative in an attempt to support their families. They named the cooperative in honor of the girl. More than thirty […]

Founded by nine young unemployed women in 1990 in Scalea, a pretty town along the Calabrian coast, the Idea 90 social cooperative quickly became a local leader in childcare provision. It now works with public authorities and many businesses in the local area to provide a range of services, mostly for children (nurseries, summer schools) […]

More than 1 billion people worldwide are members of co-operatives, and on first glance, that staggering fact seems to have no geographic bounds. There are an astounding number of co-operative members from countries as far-ranging as Singapore (where they make up half of the country’s population) to Germany (that counts a quarter of its population […]