For more than a decade, the global CoopYouth Movement has contributed our positions and visions to the mainstream movement through the creation of assembly spaces, collective statements, direct actions, educational programming, and - our organizational home - the ICA Global Youth Network. We thought it was now time for another step; to share much of what we have collectively learned with the movement at-large. It is a pleasure and a privilege to introduce you to this toolkit. This is the achievement of a great deal of work and reflection within the international CoopYouth Movement this century, and it fairly represents a maturation of our movement and the evolution of cooperative thought.
We designed this toolkit to support any group of youth around the world to be able to create, maintain, or develop a cooperative in a way that effectively addresses the unique issues they face. Those of us involved in coopyouth organizing over the past fifteen years have experienced both the inherent strengths of the cooperative model, in addition to the many philosophical quandaries and practical challenges the application of the model can present. That collective knowledge tacitly shapes this toolkit, though the bulk of its insights comes directly from a globally-representative group of coopyouth that agreed to be interviewed for this toolkit. This toolkit reviews situations youth cooperators may encounter in the scope of cooperative practice, and various methods to respond to given situations in a way that maintains your integrity to the Cooperative Identity and ensures your cooperative’s sustainability and success. While the toolkit was written for and by youth, the wisdom it provides is relevant to cooperators of all age, not just coopyouth.
As a global CoopYouth Movement, we see ourselves as a “facilitator” between generations of cooperators - young and old. We want to connect elder cooperators to coopyouth so they understand both our concerns, as well as appreciate all we have innovated within cooperative philosophy and practice; we want to share with them the cooperative tools and knowledge we have developed through years of concerted effort. With regard to concerns, we know the current global economic system is not sustainable, and that a more cooperative system won’t happen “by chance” - we must intentionally organize the younger and older generations to transform the current system through the use of the democratically-run, human-centered, and ecologically-sustainable cooperative model. This is not a task we can do alone.
We hope you will receive this toolkit as a peer-to-peer offering from the current generation of the CoopYouth Movement, with the goal to spirit along cooperative philosophy and practice in the present and future from the perspective of youth. To this end, we intend to continue to expand the toolkit and treat it as a living record of coopyouth philosophy and practice. We encourage you to participate in this important documentation work by contributing your own coopyouth insights to be integrated into the toolkit in the future.
In cooperation - Sebastien Chaillou, ICA GYN President (2017-2021)