#coops4dev (2021)
The Youth and Cooperatives: A Perfect Match? (Perfect Match) report outlines research conducted as part of a temporary working partnership between the European Union and the International Cooperative Alliance. Its content was developed using a global survey and complementary literature review, research methods similar to those used to create this toolkit. The Perfect Match project collected an impressive 420 completed surveys from individuals representing 20 countries. The scale of the response rate is partially due to their coordinated research efforts that leveraged staff within each of the four regional offices of the International Cooperative Alliance to solicit survey responses and to draft report chapters.
Using a framework of five “E’s:” Employment, Education, (In)equalities, Engagement, and Entrepreneurship to organize the findings, the report sought to:
- provide insight into challenges youth face,
- improve cooperatives’ support for youth, and
- generate general conclusions and recommendations.
The entirety of the report maps onto the Sustainable Development Goals and 2030 Agenda created by the United Nations and its respective agencies. Relatedly, the literature review within the report focuses exclusively on documents drafted within formal NGO and governmental institutions (e.g. United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank), which strongly influenced word choices and shaped the overall worldview from which the report is offered. While there are different political perspectives and worldviews present throughout the document, likely a function of its collaborative authorship process, its overall framing and tone are akin to those employed by the groups represented in the literature review. A succinct example of this worldview is found in a discussion of the difficulties for youth to access post-secondary education in Guatemala. The report states “this seriously complicates the country’s position in attracting investment from foreign companies which can potentially create an enabling environment for skilled jobs” (48). Statements such as this challenge the cooperativist worldview because of its inference that non-member ownership and investment are desirable, as well as its emphasis on education within a credential system rather than emphasizing the plurality of learning methods. This kind of inconsistency is understandable, as the Cooperative Movement struggles to remain distinct and both articulate and lives its values within the ever increasing "capitalist realism" (or, a world overwhelming defined by capitalism that embraces speculative investment and credentialism). You can read more about this phenomenon in the section called "Dirty Words?" in "Words Mean Things."
Of further and important note regarding worldview and language is the “employment” section, which is heavily emphasized because a large majority of survey respondents selected “unemployment” as their primary challenge from a predetermined list of options (similar to the impact survey structure and content had on the data for the Mapping Project). The ensuing discussion focuses heavily on conventional forms of employment, as well as how conventional education can be restructured with the end goal of making individuals more “employable.” However, the relationship between what characteristics and skills make someone employable and what characteristics and skills equip someone for cooperative membership is not made clear to the reader. Further, the focus on training youth to be more employable belies a number of potential realities - including those of youth working outside the formal economy but technically “unemployed,” or those of youth who may not desire to become conventionally employed (e.g. youth interested in worker-ownership). A different, more expansive framework that is utilized for this toolkit considers the issue of "unemployment" to, instead, be more authentically represented as two distinct elements - a lack of fulfilling work and/or a lack financial sustainability and autonomy - without further judgement or assessment. Financial instability, lack of fulfilling work, and related concepts address the root of the issue without being prescriptive, unlike “unemployment,” which implies the "answer" in the statement of the problem and excludes non-conventional solutions. The "and/or" is included because it is relatively common that a young person may have enough money through some means, but not be personally fulfilled in their life, as well as a young person may not have access to sufficient resources but has work they enjoy. Both the lack of personal fulfillment and lack of resources are addressed via cooperation. For a deeper discussion of how "work" is understood in the framework of this toolkit, refer to the "Definitions" section of "Words Mean Things."
The report provides a number of valuable data points and observations especially useful in advocating for policies or funding to support coopyouth initiatives, as well as several testimonials from coopyouth. Specifically, the survey and collected commentary offers critical feedback from youth for youth, as well as for elders and institutions within the Cooperative Movement. The predominant self-critiques in the testimonials are lamentations that the world is very capitalistic, which makes cooperatives a hard “sell” to young people who are aesthetically invested in “grind culture” and uphold a conception of entrepreneurship that prizes individualism and profit (88). In speaking to the broader Cooperative Movement, some comments identify there are many organizations that are capitalist enterprises that hypocritically call themselves cooperatives without loyalty to the Cooperative Identity. A coopyouth in Kenya said, “Cooperatives only suit the old and people who have money. There are no policies advocating for the youths to be given a place in their cooperatives'' (66).
Overall, many of the report’s recorded observations echo other coopyouth reports and statements, thereby contributing to an overall consensus on a few key issues for coopyouth. For example, 65% of youth surveyed reported that the values and the principles are the “most important” feature of cooperation. Many of their testimonials include comments that orient the cooperative model outside the sole context of “business”: either by referring to the power of its values to fuel social transformation at scale, or by recognizing how cooperatives can “be a solution to problems that ‘traditional’ providers of services (the nation-state, municipalities) are unable or unwilling to solve” (109). Feedback continues to point out that the state actively inhibits entrepreneurial activity with the exception of those with financial and educational privileges (111). Without privilege, there is generally little chance to participate in the presentation of solutions to problems that the government is no longer willing or able to solve; subsequently, only those individuals and private companies with sufficient resources typically succeed in entrepreneurial efforts better suited for cooperative development.
The report ultimately identifies seven strategies to engage more youth in cooperatives:
- improve knowledge of and boost the image of cooperatives with youth,
- develop more youth-oriented structures within cooperatives and support organizations,
- build real cooperative culture within existing cooperatives,
- strengthen partnerships between cooperatives and other organizations,
- promote decent work and employment, and
- advance an enabling environment for entrepreneurship (e.g. supportive policies).
Several actionable goal-oriented steps are proposed, and some of those steps would candidly require a philosophical seachange among the elders of the Cooperative Movement. For example, building real cooperative culture within existing cooperatives would require that cooperatives be self-critical and identify and correct their ideological failings - potentially to the loss of revenue. The report is incredibly comprehensive and has collected a great deal of narrative feedback and quantitative data that should serve the Coopyouth Movement for some time.