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

Even before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area was reaching untenable levels of inequality and dysfunction in fundamental aspects of society like housing and wealth equity — now, the pandemic has laid bare that basic needs aren’t met by capitalism as we know it. We need change. Fortunately for us — another future is possible and that future is cooperative.

The cooperative movement has existed for hundreds of years in different forms, still practiced by many Indigenous peoples all over the world. Here in the Bay Area, we have the opportunity now to live the story many of us heard when we were children and “feed the wolf” that is love, that is opportunity – that is the cooperative movement.

Two friends were talking and one said to the other, “there are two wolves fighting inside each person’s heart. One is love, the other is hate. Do you know which one will win?” His friend answered, “The one you feed.”

This story is often attributed to the Cherokee or Lenape people. Many different versions have been told and we acknowledge it is difficult to know where or how it originated. We honor the knowledge we have learned from our ancestors, especially the wisdom that has been cultivated and shared by Indigenous peoples the world over.

Like the wolves in the story, today we have competing economic systems and the one that survives will be the one we nourish with our labor, time, and money. We have launched the Bay Area Cooperative Association to help bring more focus to the solutions that collective ownership and decision-making can provide to our community’s persistent inequities.

One of our key aspirations with the Bay Area Cooperative Association is to invite everyone to participate in cooperation, even if you’ve never done it before: it’s one big co-op! We aim to expand our projects in the coming months, so sign up for our newsletter to get updates. One of our most exciting next goals is to launch memberships so that anyone can participate in one big co-op. You can donate now to help us launch more projects sooner and more robustly.

Together, we can move away from an extractive economy based on exploitative relationships that profit the few and toward a solidarity economy that centers cooperation, community co-ownership, inclusion, and democratic decision-making. With this project, we aim to amplify the efforts of all members of the cooperative movement and help build a stronger ecosystem of diverse organizations working together, with our focus on the Bay Area region.

We’re still working on a few more projects to launch, and we hope you’ll be just as excited about them as we are. In the meantime, you can sign up to receive our e-newsletter or write in to contact us with any other questions or thoughts. As co-operators, we’re always interested in hearing from potential collaborators, so don’t be shy.

In solidarity,

Matt and Elissa

We have much more to share in the near future. For now, happy 100th International Day of Cooperatives!

In solidarity,

Matt and Elissa

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