Youth Realities & Responses

COOPERATIVES REFERENCED

CONFLICT & EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT EDUCATION 

Red Root (Worker, Philippines) explicitly educates its members in emotional and conflict management, and they have found that training effectively depersonalizes conflicts that arise - insofar as it unlinks conflict in their cooperative space from conceptions of conflict as resulting from individual malice or personal failing. The basic understanding that is shared by members as a result of their emotional education is that conflicts are usually disagreements or misunderstandings - which are normal and okay, rather than intentional interpersonal harm. Further, the emotional reactions people have to disagreements or misunderstandings are what escalate and drive dysfunction in responding to riffs that are part of working and living with other people. Ultimately, because the cooperative understands the origins of conflict and the effect emotions have on conflict, no disagreement or misunderstanding is a deal breaker in their group, as they share the same values that persist despite disagreements, misunderstandings, and emotions.

Consensus-Based Conflict Resolution

Red Root (Worker, Philippines) has instituted a method for responding to conflicts when they occur that is also a tenet of consensus decision-making – they return to their base values and review them together in the context of the issue. This process maps onto their collective emotional education training that revealed conflicts in their group are always manageable, given that they share core values and are committed to the same ends. In order to be prepared to undertake this consensus-based method when conflict happens, the shared values need to have already been well articulated and written down (like the Cooperative Identity), so they are easy to refer to and remain accountable to them even in the presence of strong emotions or communication challenges. Having a moment to re-acknowledge shared commitment to core values can help facilitate people differentiating their emotional reaction to something in the moment from how they feel about their work, their relationships with other members, and their cooperative in the longer term.

Cooperative Values for Survival

Woodcraft Folk (MSC, UK) related that many of their members had been involved in establishing and maintaining mutual aid programs (e.g. food distribution) in their local communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than the technical skills of authoring governing documents or bookkeeping prompting their participation, it was remarked that the likely reason why so many members immediately and “naturally” connected with their community to create infrastructure to withstand the health crisis was due to the internalization of cooperative values. Rather, their cooperative education and experience had impacted them on an emotional and moral level, that now directs how they move within the world and how they engage with the people around them. 

CRISIS RESPONSE 

Vio.me (Worker, Greece) manufactures ecologically sustainable cleaning products and readily conceptualizes their work as part of making society function, in both the absence and presence of crises. To this end, they explicitly chose the activities of their cooperative to be goods or services that the world genuinely needs and will continue to need even without capitalism. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, this ethic played out in a very real way; they viewed themselves as being specially situated to help their community survive the health crisis by providing much needed disinfectant and sanitation products, as well as teaching their community how to make these things on their own - which does not make “sense” to do in a capitalist context. They saw the pandemic not as an opportunity to profit, but as an opportunity to serve. By being an enterprise that focuses on producing things people truly need, their cooperative remains relevant and vital no matter what crisis or opportunity demands a response.

Overall, most of those interviewed mentioned that their cooperative expressed the belief that crisis was a time to be as compassionate and flexible as possible. This flexibility extends even to the point of ceasing operations in order to care for each other - to making what are conceived of as “bad” financial decisions within capitalism; rather than being rigid in expectations of each other and thereby prioritizing the financial survival of their enterprise over the wellbeing of the people in it.

Crisis Funds & Financing

Red Root (Worker, Philippines) set aside savings for emergencies and crises, as mandated by their federal government. When that fund was depleted in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, they used their strong relationships with a financier to take on debt financing to complete some of their projects that they otherwise would not have been able to fund due to the slowdown of work and income. These options are not available to most cooperatives in the world, however, when possible, dedicating a portion of surplus to an emergency fund is a good practice. Such a fund, too, can be used as a measure of the cooperative’s financial fitness to take on debt from lenders, if additional external funding is needed.

Cooperatives Must Change As Needs Change

Two of the cooperatives interviewed, Alchemy (Worker, USA) and Youth Cooperative Hub (MSC, South Africa) evolved new products and services in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The new offerings both helped their customers through the pandemic and kept the cooperatives solvent when they were forced to halt some of their main income generating activities. The Youth Cooperative Hub began producing personal-protective-equipment, including some of its textile working members beginning to manufacture fabric face masks. Alchemy, shortly before the pandemic hit, had softly launched a coffee subscription program that delivered bags of coffee to people at their homes on a regular basis. The program was developed by one of the cooperative’s founders as part of their legacy when departing the cooperative earlier in the year, and it was not immediately embraced by the membership or their market. However, once their locality was placed under strict stay-at-home orders, the subscription program took off and became the cooperative’s main source of income while their retail storefront was closed.

Importance of the Individual

Crises impact people disproportionately, so it is imperative that cooperatives adjust to allow for members to participate according to their individual needs and abilities as they change in the face of crisis. The initial focus of a cooperative in a time of crisis is to meet the varied needs of its members, other enterprise concerns are lower priority. “First people, then cooperatives” (Arizmendiarrieta, 1999, 14). Three of the cooperatives interviewed – Gencisi (Worker, Turkey), Sheffield Student Housing Cooperative (User, UK), and Red Root (Worker, Philippines) – all altered their requirements for participation explicitly and proactively at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the allowances that were made (e.g. allowing for non- or late- payment of dues) had not been used by any members at the time of the interviews, but the cooperatives felt it was important to make those changes collectively, first, before an individual person needed the changes and was forced to “ask” for a personal allowance. There are many reasons, even irrational ones, why individuals might feel uncomfortable asking for what they need in a time of crisis; they may experience feelings of guilt or shame for needing “more” or “differently” than other members. As a result, proactively making space for the needs of members allows people to feel fully supported and to not unfairly perceive themselves as a “burden,” rather to understand that there is a crisis and any struggle within that context is not a personal failing.  

RELATIONSHIPS CAN SAVE US 

At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of those interviewed reported that sustaining contact and communication with all members was a natural step they took when many workplaces or meeting places were shut down or shifted to online. Master Minds (Producer, Botswana) has a small membership, so the group assessed their contagion risk to be minimal and chose to continue meeting regularly in person in order to both sustain the cooperative and to stay in close contact to support one another in a time of hardship. Gencisi (Worker, Turkey) continued meeting with one another online, and benefited so greatly from this practice that they extended it beyond their membership to support others. The cooperative began hosting Instagram Live sessions to which they would invite other cooperatives and affinity groups to discuss how everyone was managing the realities of the pandemic, as well as share things they had learned about how to work better remotely or in isolation. Youth Cooperative Hub (MSC, South Africa) supported their cooperative members by applying for international crisis funds that they then passed through to their members that needed financial support, as many of their individual members did not have the resources to apply on their own. This work was in addition to the work the cooperative did to help some of its members pivot its offerings to goods or services relevant in the pandemic context (e.g. producing PPE). Without Youth Cooperative Hub supporting the various coopyouth enterprises throughout their region, many of the cooperatives would have ceased to exist as a result of the pandemic, and the Cooperative Movement would have lost a large contingent of youth members.