Co-op Leaders Consider Future as International Year of the Co-op Nears

October is co-op month. It is also when the National Cooperative Business Association Cooperative League of the USA (NCBA CLUSA), the US national co-op association, hosts its annual Cooperative Impact conference in Washington, DC.

This year, the United Nations declared that 2025 would be the International Year of Cooperatives; it has done so only once before, in 2012. The formal designation comes on the heels of a 2023 report by Secretary General António Guterres. The report identified cooperatives as a key means to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, intended to be achieved by 2030. Although the UN itself has acknowledged that “only 17 per cent of the SDG targets are currently on track, with nearly half showing minimal or moderate progress, and over one-third stalled or regressing.” Cooperatives, however, UN officials hope, might be able to help nations better achieve these targets because they combine economic and social goals.

The economy of the future must be a social economy—that is, an economy rooted in social values and community ownership.

At the conference, participants explored how to use the UN designation to elevate co-op sector visibility, what the future of cooperatives might hold, and how to use co-ops to advance sustainable development goals. More broadly, conference speakers asked hard questions about how co-ops can live up to their values and principles—to build scale and advance core cooperative goals of self-help and economic empowerment.

An International Movement

One novel aspect of the 2024 conference was its focus on co-ops throughout the Americas, with many co-op leaders from outside the United States joining the national gathering to share their perspectives.

For instance, at the introductory plenary of the conference, Dr. José Alves de Souza Neto—a Brazilian who serves as president of Cooperatives of the Americas, which represents co-ops throughout North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean—offered his bullish views on the future of cooperatives.

In Quebec…co-ops were responsible for 15 percent of the province’s GDP.

In his remarks, Alves de Souza Neto declared that the economy of the future must be a social economy—that is, an economy rooted in social values and community ownership. Co-ops, he noted, have a unique role to play in making this vision a reality.

Paula Narváez Ojeda, Chile’s UN ambassador, also addressed the conference. Narvaéz Ojeda emphasized the “fundamental” role of public policy in supporting cooperatives and remarked on the importance of institutionalization and participatory decision-making.

In the United States, co-ops play a much larger economic role than is commonly acknowledged. For example, a report this year that focuses solely on the nation’s 100 largest co-ops reported total revenues of $325 billion, which is more than 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Credit unions—cooperative banks jointly owned by 141 million US depositors—have nearly $2.3 trillion in assets.

Yet US co-op figures, significant though they are, pale in comparison with international numbers. In Quebec, Canada, Jean-Philippe Marcoux, CEO of SOCODEVI—a Quebec-based group that supports co-op development internationally—reported that roughly 77 percent of the province’s population were co-op members and that co-ops were responsible for 15 percent of the province’s GDP.

José Julián Ramírez Ruiz, executive director of FIDECOOP, a co-op development group that supports emerging co-ops in Puerto Rico, and Ana Riquelme, president of the Confederation of Cooperatives of Paraguay, reported very similar share of the economy for their cooperatives. Paraguay, notes one account, is a small country of 7 million people and “a cooperative giant.”

What can be done to create conducive environments that can support and sustain co-op ownership? Marcoux, Ramirez, and Riquelme all emphasized that co-op investment in the co-op sector has been key. For instance, in Paraguay, Riquelme said that co-ops, by law, must set aside 10 percent of profits for a co-op education development fund. Riquelme added that part of the country’s commitment to cooperatives is to invest in co-op education; children in Paraguay start learning about co-ops in the first grade.

In Quebec, Marcoux highlighted the role played by provincial associations—including the provincewide co-op council, CQCM (Conseil québécois de la coopération et de la mutualité), which has a mission to promote co-ops—as well as support for co-op education and advocacy. In Puerto Rico, Ramirez similarly noted that Commonwealth law mandates that one percent of co-op profits be invested in new co-op development.

Asking Hard Questions

What might the US co-op movement learn from the achievements of cooperatives outside the United States?

At the conference, longtime US Department of Agriculture Cooperative Services branch chief Jim Wadsworth noted that an estimated 78 percent of US co-ops in operation today are more than 50 years old. That’s “phenomenal longevity,” he noted. At the same time, it seems possible that this remarkable business stability may have bred passivity when it comes to investing in the next generation of cooperatives.

As University of Wisconsin Center of Cooperatives executive director Courtney Berner has pointed out in NPQ, the types of cooperatives being developed have shifted. Between 2016 and 2019, 47 percent of new cooperatives documented by Berner and her research team were worker co-ops—even though only a decade before, in 2010, under 1 percent of all US co-ops were worker-owned. The new co-ops are also much more diverse in their racial makeup, with most member-owners being people of color and 38 percent of Latinx descent specifically.

At the conference, Alex Stone, executive director of Cooperation Works!, a nonprofit association that helps educate co-op developers, presented her research findings. Her questions: What is the potential investment capacity of established co-ops? And what would it take for them to act on that capacity to support new co-op development?

Stone noted that the 100 largest co-ops, also known as the “Co-op 100,” are just one-third of 1 percent of the nation’s 30,000 cooperatives but are responsible for generating roughly half of all co-op revenues. And co-ops as a whole in the United States are responsible for a little more than 2 percent of GDP.

Looking at financial reports of just the Co-op 100, Stone calculated that if US co-ops contributed 3 percent of net profits (as in Italy) to a co-op development fund, that would generate at least $244 million a year. By contrast, Stone noted that the largest direct US federal program for co-op development offered $5.8 million in grants in 2024.

Notably, in most countries where co-ops dedicate a share of profits to co-op development, they do so largely—although not entirely—because that has been implemented as a legal requirement. Based on interviews she conducted with leaders at five Co-op 100 businesses, Stone was optimistic that developing a sector-based voluntary fund might be possible, suggesting that common interest might be found in business marketing advantages and co-op philosophy.

Building for 2025 and Beyond

At the conference kickoff, Ariel Guarco—the Argentine president of the International Cooperative Alliance and author of the 2020 book Cooperative Principles in Action (Principios Cooperativos en Acción)—said he hoped that, with the UN designation of 2025 as the International Year of the Cooperative, cooperatives could seize the opportunity to offer a “different vision of how things should be.”

People at the conference often fell short of articulating future ideals, however, as the limited follow-up to Guarco’s provocative question produced conversations that were more technocratic than visionary. At a session that was held near the end of the conference, billed as a “C-suite Huddle,” the group sought to brainstorm elements of what might be included in what NCBA-CLUSA communications director Elizabeth Lechleitner called an “awareness and advocacy” toolkit. A separate session asked attendees to brainstorm how their own co-ops might help advance at least one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and encouraged attendees to create action plans to engage their communities and prepare for the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives.

In a closing session entitled “Envisioning the Future,” Doug O’Brien, president of NCBA CLUSA, moderated a panel that featured this year’s inductees to the US Cooperative Hall of Fame. This year, O’Brien noted, marked the Hall of Fame’s 50th anniversary.

When O’Brien asked panelists to name an audacious goal for the co-op movement, one of the inductees, Vernon Oakes, host of the Everything Co-op podcast and radio show, began by discussing the need to deepen member education. Co-ops, Oakes argued, themselves could be vehicles for the co-op education of their own members—in the United States a group of well over 100 million people—many of whom may be unaware they are owners of a cooperative. (For instance, this is true of many credit union member-owners.)

But the audacious goal that Oakes settled on was different. Citing a recent report, Oakes noted that the number of US worker co-ops had increased to 1,300. “Why not a goal of five times that in three years?” Oakes asked. “What would it take to have 6,500 worker co-ops?” Oakes challenged attendees, setting a vital goal for the US co-op movement to achieve in the years to come.