Youth Realities & Responses

COOPERATIVES REFERENCED

STATEMENTS REFERENCED

REPRESENTATIVE VS. PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 

Coopyouth interviewed expressed a variety of ways in which they created a participatory cooperative culture, which extends far beyond the bounds of any conventional notions of “governance.” A truly democratic cooperative is representative of all members and enables all members to participate in every function of the enterprise. Democracy was achieved by coopyouth on a cultural level through the institution of specific processes, rejection of overly rigid structures, and sufficient documentation of how leadership does and does not look.

General Assembly as Leader

One of the simplest ways to avoid the potential pitfalls of representative governance structures and centralizing staff structures that consolidate power is to forego them entirely. Vio.me (Worker, Greece) begins each day with an in-person general assembly that includes all members and encompasses all aspects of the cooperative’s function. They uphold that “the leader of the cooperative is the Assembly,” which effectively represents and engages every member of the cooperative. Alchemy (Worker, USA), similarly, has evolved over time to prefer all-member meetings over any more complicated or distributed form of leadership coordination. They came to prefer all-member meetings after years experimenting with other options that they found to ultimately be incongruent with their cooperative culture and workflows.  

Resisting Conventional Leadership

Many of those interviewed reported that, within their cooperatives, if power and leadership roles are not explicitly defined, members will default to operating as though they are working within a conventional organization and/or leadership framework. In practice, this can look any number of ways, for example - members will refuse to initiate a discussion or activity, as they are waiting for and expecting that a Chairperson, staff member, or other person with a more formal title or role to do so for the group. Within the ICYC (Network, Asia-Pacific), this defaulting to conventional leadership models manifests as a lack of counter-argument or discourse within their meetings, as members choose to defer to titular leadership on decisions. To combat this drift towards deference, the ICYC established a standard of participation for meetings in which each person in attendance is expected to do at least one thing during the course of the meeting - be it take on a task or express an opinion. Repaired Nations (MSC, USA), in the process of “demoting” its founders from central leadership roles but keeping them still working within the organization. In the start-up process, it is incredibly common for individuals able and/or willing to commit more time and labor to the development work to become viewed as leaders, to which other and newer members defer authority. This phenomenon happened within Repaired Nations, which stressed the importance of including in policy and written documentation the style of leadership in the cooperative. 

Project-Based Collaboration

Participatory democracy is not just a phenomenon of governance; it is imperative in all other aspects of organizational function in a cooperative. Red Root (Worker, Philippines) leverages a project-based work model that engenders a culture of shared leadership throughout their cooperative. Specifically, work is taken on or initiated as a “project” with a team of those able to and interested in participating. That group convenes to discuss the project, and during that meeting the project’s leader is selected by virtue of whose idea is selected, who has the most energy to commit, or who feels passionate. In other words, they apply the "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," an adage from Karl Marx to how they design and distribute their shared work.

LEADERSHIP SUCCESSION AND SHARED REPRESENTATION 

Ensuring that leadership is exercised by and encompasses the skills and perspectives of all people in the cooperative, and that a cooperative has the capacity to bring in and empower new people with different identities and experiences, are both two of the most important and most difficult tasks of any cooperative. For an enterprise to be fully owned and controlled by its members, they must all be leaders in some capacity or another. This issue, more generally in the Cooperative Movement, most often speaks to gender, race, and class representation. Within the youth cooperatives interviewed, the most common challenges faced in the context of shared and representative leadership have to do with generational succession of leadership - specifically, the recruitment of new members, as well as the transition of leadership from a founding group of members to fully shared and distributed model of leadership.

Empowered by Elders/Institutions

Due to the lack of knowledge about cooperation among the general public, recruitment to a youth cooperative can be difficult. Given that youth – and students, in particular – are so transient, steady recruitment is absolutely necessary to ensure not only that the cooperative persists, but also that there is sufficient participation to have a culture of shared and diverse leadership rather than power becoming concentrated among a few people and, thereby, harder to redistribute to a larger group of people with a culture of shared leadership. Green Campus Cooperative (MSC, Canada) depends on elder faculty at the university in which the cooperative is housed to encourage and nominate students to be members to address this issue, as students often otherwise do not find out about the cooperative until later in their tenure, with only enough time for they themselves to fully learn about the cooperative - not enough time to then be motivated and informed enough to recruit new members before they graduate. Additionally, having an elder faculty member, someone who is typically respected by a student, refer an individual for participation can be incredibly empowering and support the individual in pursuing leadership in the cooperative. Empowerment via interpersonal relationship is effective for people of all ages, though the validation received by a young person from a respected elder can be especially effective. Further still, GCC leverages their institution relationship to fuel recruitment and empower leaders. The cooperative runs an annual cooperative education course within the university’s formal credit granting course catalogue. Through the coursework, students become educated in cooperative philosophy and practice, as well as informed about the specific work done by the GCC. Such a comprehensive educational experience orients students into the cooperative, creating a unique situation in which new members may already feel equipped and enthused to act as leaderships within the cooperative; the culture created by such informed and accessible leadership is essentially cooperative.

Peer Empowerment

While there are many wonderful examples of elders and institutions promoting and empowering young people, there are also many less wonderful examples of the same stifling youth voices, visions, and leadership. The frequent balm to that painful reality is a focus on how youth can empower one another into leadership and active participation. The Youth Committee (Network, Global; formerly Global Youth Network) shared a story of an incredibly capable and enthusiastic coopyouth in Asia-Pacific that repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to connect and work with their national and regional intergenerational cooperative associations. Their national and regional movement infrastructure did not support them and simply ignored them; when the young person applied to join the regional youth committee, the regional Board failed to consider their application or even communicate with them about the committee and application. Their leadership aspirations and interest in broader-scale movement activities were totally dashed. However, another young person encouraged them to attend the Global Youth Forum, a global education and relationship building event of the Youth Committee, despite the past disappointment. During this event, their talents and enthusiasm were given space to be expressed within a movement context and were well received by many. They have since become an active and invaluable movement leader regionally and internationally, were interviewed for this toolkit, and their application for the regional youth committee has still yet to be approved by the regional Board and staff. This situation is not unique to the Asia-Pacific, and underscores how absolutely imperative it is that coopyouth organizations be autonomous in all aspects, especially their membership eligibility and engagement practices. Further, it is worth noting that the Youth Committee and its regional youth committees and networks, as well as the events and programs they offer, did not even exist prior to the 2010s; begging the question as to how many youth have been shut out of or unable to access greater participation in the Cooperative Movement.

Peer Training

Due to a series of coincidences during the past two transitions of the role of President within the Youth Committee (Network, Global; formerly Global Youth Network), there has been months of “on the job” overlap between the outgoing and incoming presidents. While this was initially a coincidence, it was found to be so successful in orienting and empowering a new president that the Network is seeking to institutionalize the practice in the future. This kind of peer-to-peer support can provide confidence a new President otherwise might take months or years to develop, which thereby empowers them to more quickly voice their ideas - even if controversial - and take action around their ideas. The Woodcraft Folk (MSC, UK) have a long maintained “buddy system” practice they use to train young people into new positions, much like the term overlap organically evolved by the GYN. What the buddy system provides, moreso other forms of education and empowerment, is emotional validation by a more knowledgeable or experienced peer, which can amount to a form of implicit “permission” for an individual to behave in a leadership capacity. Most mainstream cultures throughout the world promote a deference to authority and, when that authority isn’t present to “approve” of someone taking on greater leadership, it can take a long time for an individual to give themselves permission to act in their full capacity in a given position or role. By allowing a “buddy” to provide tacit approval, it can nullify any unconscious or conscious hesitancy to take on leadership.

“Demoting” Founders

Sometimes, when particularly charismatic and capable people found an organization, they will typically accumulate social and administrative power in that process. In order to establish a more collective balance of power and work within the organization, they will need to intentionally defer power and “demote” themselves. While this issue is common across cooperatives founded by people of all age groups, the majority of youth cooperatives have been recently founded, making this an especially important challenge for coopyouth. Repaired Nations (MSC, USA), a cooperative education and development organization, is currently tackling this challenge. While they are taking steps to name what needs to happen and opening up discussion about how it can be accomplished, there are material realities hindering their efforts. The founders have amassed administrative and social power for multiple reasons, primarily: they were willing and able to work for free or by using funding they acquired that is unique to them as an individual (e.g. fellowships). This amounts to both a considerable amount of consolidated power in the form of institutional knowledge and emotional attachment, as well as means that leadership and power may not necessarily be able to be transitioned unless they are able to access sufficient money to pay someone else or other individuals are able to leverage their labor or personal funds, as the founders did. While Repaired Nations does not yet have a solution, the guiding principle they shared for this work is to approach it explicitly and intentionally. By openly voicing both that the founders need to be “demoted” alongside a clear articulation of what kind of culture of leadership the cooperative seeks to maintain, they have taken the first step of orienting themselves to where they are and where they want to go.

AUTONOMOUS YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS 

The most effective and authentic way to foster cooperative leadership among youth is to allow coopyouth to be wholly self-determinate in their work, in line with the spirit of the cooperative values self-help and self-responsibility. This is in large part because leadership training is rooted in practice; reading or telling someone about leadership does very little to actually empower a person to be a leader. By giving sufficient space and resources to someone so that they can determine and meet their own needs, a person can develop the confidence necessary to be comfortable in cooperative leading others as they had learned to lead themselves. Fostering movement leadership about young people follows a similar path; allow youth to self administer their youth-specific initiatives, and they will gain the expertise necessary to step into broader cooperative leadership roles in intergenerational cooperatives or associations. Coopyouth Movement organizations - such as the ICA Global Youth Network, its four regional affiliates, and the countless national youth organizations, are prime examples of those youth-specific spaces in which autonomy and self-determination is key if they are to be effective in generating truly cooperative leadership. However, quite commonly, these youth organizations are not granted the autonomy that is absolutely essential - and in accordance with the Cooperative Identity - for them to have if they are to truly succeed. Typically, these organizations have some sort of financial or governance relationship with an elder institution that considers that relationship as justification for exercising control over the youth enterprise - primarily by dictating its membership eligibility standards or by conditioning the use of any provided funds. “We cannot speak of community where relationships and coexistence are based on the use of force” (Arizmendiarrieta, 1999, 24). These relationships are also discussed in greater detail, and with a specific focus on the absolutely central issues of membership eligibility and financial control, in both “Relationships of Solidarity” and “Relationships of Coercion.”

Protected Environment

Most Coopyouth Movement organizations are relatively “finite” endeavors, insofar as there is typically a small budget, not a huge amount of administrative responsibilities, and most labor going towards executing events and educational programs. In other words, it would be very difficult to generate harm or cause irreparable damage - which is often an implicit concern elders and institutions employ to justify their control of youth endeavors; it is somewhat of a “protected environment” in which young people can practice cooperative skills. While Green Campus Cooperative (MSC, Canada) is not a movement organization, rather an individual cooperative enterprise, the elders and the institution with which the cooperative is relationship uphold this same tenet and take it a step further - the primary goal of their youth-led cooperative is education, even to the point they are willing to risk their financial viability in the name of education. It certainly helps that the cooperative is highly unlikely to financially fail due to member error or mismanagement, but that reality is always possible, acknowledged, and their priorities to serve members with cooperative education remains primary. Elders and institutions that feel the need to violate the autonomy of youth endeavors out of what is, at worst, a patronizing distrust of youth capacities, and, at best, unwarranted worry can be aided by being reminded of the purpose of coopyouth organizations. After all, a coopyouth organization that does not effectively educate and empower youth but financially sustains itself perpetually creates less benefit than a temporary organization that effectively educates and empowers. In fact, a non-autonomous coopyouth organization may even harm the Cooperative Movement, by discouraging and disempowering youth away from continued participation in cooperation - let alone from taking steps to take on leadership responsibilities.

Wealth Redistribution

Quite logically, in order for an individual or group to feel able to assess and address their own needs and support the same in others, they must have access to the resources necessary to meet their needs. Many youth find themselves able to self-identify what they need and desire, but are unable to take according actions because they are lacking the material resources - not information or insight. “Giving advice is not the same as giving wheat;” no amount of mentorship or wisdom can cure not having enough money (Arizmendiarrieta, 1999, 87). In practice, respecting the autonomy of a coopyouth enterprise in a way that guarantees its success in generating cooperative leaders is to ensure the organization has sufficient financial resources to do its work. Following, the provision of sufficient financial resources must be done in a way that is not conditioned or corrupted, that does not violate the organization’s or any individual’s autonomy. Candidly, none of the coopyouth interviewed had experienced this, despite it being called for in various coopyouth statements, hence the lack of specific examples.