Young Perspectives on the International Cooperative Movement
Ian MacPherson, Robin Purga, Julia Smith (2005)
This English-language book was was compiled and edited by a team of three Canadian non-youth cooperators, using contributions from dozens of youth from around the world. The style and content of each submission vary greatly. The perspectives included in the book are very geographically representative, more so than any other reviewed coopyouth research or report. While many organizations helped collect and curate the youth submissions, the initiative was led by the British Columbia Institute for Cooperative Studies. The book was published in 2005, just as the global Coopyouth Movement was beginning to gain momentum and identity.
In the book’s introduction, four perspectives on youth in the Cooperative Movement are outlined:
- stories of youth organizing their own cooperatives,
- cooperatives fostering youth engagement in the movement,
- relationship between youth and the Cooperative Movement relative to current social and economic issues (e.g. poverty, climate change), and
- the determination of youth to leverage cooperative solutions to respond to global issues.
Youth Reinventing Cooperatives (YRC) focuses, primarily, on the first two lenses for understanding the Coopyouth Movement. The reader’s editors share that the perspectives of youth on the latter two points involve real critique of the greater Cooperative Movement: “Their messages are not always comforting and they can be harshly critical, but that does not mean they are wrong or should be ignored” (16). While this toolkit endeavors to explore what it is to be a coopyouth from all of the four perspectives listed above, but focuses on the first two, it is notable that the oral interviews included in the document often organically focused on the third and fourth perspectives: specifically, how coopyouth are perceiving current societal issues, and how they are leveraging cooperative solutions in the face of broad-scale social, economic, and political issues. This focus is reflected throughout many coopyouth reports when youth are surveyed about their motivations for pursuing cooperative opportunities - broadscale societal critiques and desires for transformation.
The first section of YRC is composed of stories and essays from coopyouth on their general experiences within cooperatives and cooperative programs. A loose case study format is then employed for the subsequent two sections, which share examples of how youth have developed cooperatives and how existing cooperatives have encouraged youth involvement, respectively. Given the nature of how the qualitative data was acquired by independent submissions, there is minimal uniformity throughout these sections. The basic items included in most of the case studies are: vision and purpose statement, organizational structure, origin story, links to community, future plans, and lessons learned. This generous case study framework was used as a reference in the development of the interview and survey questions used to gather content for this toolkit. Overall, the book contains such a broad cross-section of stories from the Coopyouth Movement that it is better approached as a narrative reader than a reference book. Like Youth Reinventing Cooperatives, this toolkit also employs storytelling formats, but it endeavors - via its structure - to serve as more of an “as needed” reference able to be read in parts.
The closing section of YRC contains conclusions and highlights, including the assertion that the Coopyouth Movement is relatively nascent, dating back only to just after the turn of the 21st century. This is an incredibly powerful insight, which can help account for why youth engagement in the Cooperative Movement has been relatively disempowered and unorganized until recently. Respondents report being drawn to the movement by its professed values which imply that broad-scale social, economic, environmental, and political transformation is possible. More conclusions that align with other research outlined herein include: no one approach to cooperative development works for all youth in every context (Once You've Seen One Cooperative...); cooperatives are a path to both income and self actualization; youth tend to learn about cooperatives only if they’re in the “right place at the right time”; more research into coopyouth is needed; and money is the top issue for youth trying to create and serve cooperatively.
The recommendations call for:
- increased financial support of youth programs within the Cooperative Movement - specifically research and programming,
- more research into how different program models succeed or fail,
- assurance that any conducted research be widely accessible, and
- the Cooperative Movement to work harder to integrate cooperative education into schools and other institutional education systems.
Youth Reinventing Cooperatives is an incredibly important and powerful documentation of the Coopyouth Movement in its early years. It is perhaps the most comprehensive coopyouth report to date; it employs firsthand narratives without being filtered through culturally specific interview and survey frameworks. The wealth of insight provided by coopyouth about their own realities is immense and indispensable for all readers.