Beautiful image shared by KRED – Modern Digital Banking for Cooperative Credit Societies
The cooperative sector is broad, containing organizations across sectors: bakeries, child care companies, coffee shops, pizzerias, dairy farms, bookkeeping companies, and more! What gives these organizations a common language and values? The Rochdale Principles are the basis for every cooperative. As we’ll explore in later posts, these principles may be modified or expanded, depending on the group’s needs. Centering a group around these basic seven principles is one of the key requisites to join the cooperative movement. So let’s go through them!
Slides are generously provided by students from Cloyne Court at the Berkeley Student Cooperative and art by Alfred Twu (www.alfredtwu.com).
When taken together, these seven principles guide responsible, equitable and participatory businesses that prioritize democracy, people, and sustainability over profit-maximization. In future blog posts, we’ll feature each one in a deeper dive.
For now, to learn more about the Rochdale Principles and how cooperatives utilize them, check out some of these great resources provided by members of the cooperative ecosystem.
Cultivate.coop in their own words is a libary of information about cooperatives, and it is also home to the Cooperative Education Network.
The International Cooperative Alliance has great information on Cooperative Principles as does the United States’ national organization, NCBA CLUSA, on their site.
You can also watch this brief video interpretation of “The Story of the Rochdale Pioneers” (<5 minute video on Youtube) or a Tedx Talk (~18:30 min) by Melanie Shellito, “Why the cooperative model is a revolution” to learn more about these principles as they developed in history and how they showed up to empower Melanie at a time when she felt like she had few options.
These seven principles guide every cooperative – when you commit to these, you join a movement of people all over the world, working together for economic and ecological sustainability. For example, many African countries have strong cooperative networks and we’ve included a link here to a youth group in Kenya explaining just that: “cooperatives are the best – leave the rest!”
The next time you participate in an organization, ask yourself, how many of these principles does this organization embody?
What’s your favorite cooperative principle? Comment below or write in to us.
In solidarity,
Matt & Elissa