Youth Realities & Responses

COOPERATIVES REFERENCED

ENTRANCE 

Coopyouth interviewed provided input on new member recruitment priorities, methods to streamline recruitment processes, and - most thoroughly - various practices and guidelines for how best to orient and onboard new members so they are fully empowered, informed, and equipped to participate in all aspects of the cooperative’s function.

Recruitment Priorities

Given the risk and potential impact of bringing a new person or persons into a cooperative, it is valuable to target recruitment outreach in some way that serves the priorities of your cooperative, as well as fairly and clearly articulates what your cooperative is about to potential members. Some characteristics to highlight include, if relevant, geography (e.g. neighborhood-specific carsharing cooperative), culture (e.g. cooperative gallery showcasing indigenous artists), or other forms of identity - specifically, youth cooperatives that aim to serve youth should indicate this as part of their outreach. While both the Cooperative Identity and, often, legal statutes prohibit the preclusion of certain peoples (e.g. elders) from membership in your cooperative, you are allowed to recruit and accept people based on their capacity to support the cooperative’s purpose. In the example of a cooperative created to serve youth, a young person arguably is more equipped to interpret and meet the needs of other youth than an elder. For Red Root (Worker, Philippines), they noted that - while they are open to older members and have some elder contractors, youth are typically the only applicants that have a command of the tools and style in which the cooperative communicates.

Prioritize Personality, Deprioritize Teachable Skills: More generally, a universal task for all cooperatives is to recruit people with cooperative, rather than uncooperative, dispositions. While some social and cooperative skills can and often need to be taught, a cooperative has to assess its true capacity to transform uncooperative personalities and make membership decisions accordingly. Red Root (Worker, Philippines) explicitly indicated in their interview that it is much easier to educate someone in skills specific to their industry than it is to train someone in how to have a cooperative personality. One step that helps them to ensure those who self-select to apply to Red Root have a cooperative orientation to the world is to very explicitly and often share their unique organizational values (including and beyond the Cooperative Identity) with all potential new members. One of their co-founders joked that after they comprehensively share their values and visions with an applicant, it ensures that only “the crazy ones stay” and continue to pursue membership." Conducting recruitment in a strategic way is an effective way to minimize difficulty in assessing, selecting, and training new members.

Social Movement Participation: One of the required qualifications for hiring in the Vio.me cooperative (Worker, Greece) is for an applicant to have demonstrated engagement with social movement activities in the region. For Vio.me, this provides some evidence that an individual truly “lives their values,” rather than just has a command of political rhetoric. Following, they then feel it is relatively safe to assume that someone with a drive for broad-scale social transformation will be both equipped for and committed to enacting transformative values on a more intimate scale in their daily work and relationships within the cooperative.

Recruitment Relationships

The Green Campus Cooperative (MSC, Canada), housed within a university system, maintains a semester-long course on the cooperative model and movement. Students are often directed towards the course by faculty members in hopes of instilling genuine interest in cooperative participation, which then translates into them pursuing cooperative membership with the GCC. Other students may sign up independently for the course with or without knowledge of GCC and may ultimately end up joining the cooperative following their completion of the course. The class is essentially an institutionalized recruitment net for the cooperative, which collects potential new membeea once a year just before the cooperative loses members who graduate, thereby helping to sustain a critical mass of members in a majority student cooperative with an inherently and incredibly transient membership. Relationships with a variety of other organizations, individuals, or insttitutions can be established to serve in this same fashion - any group or entity that has an overlapping membership base works!

Orientation & Onboarding

Once applicants have been selected to join a cooperative, they must be trained and oriented to how the cooperative functions and their role within it. In many ways, these initial onboarding processes are an extension of the recruitment and selection process, as it is a time at which new members become more intimately acquainted with the cooperative’s culture and may decide membership is not for them, or a cooperative may become better aware of an individual’s disposition and skillsets, in turn, discovering the new member is not a good fit.

Institutional Connections: The semester course maintained by GCC (MSC, Canada), mentioned above, serves not only as an easily sustainable recruitment method, but also as an unusually extensive orientation training for potential new members. Such thorough training is incredibly unique, in part because it allows members to just learn about cooperative philosophy and practice without having to begin working or participating within the cooperative, and last for months thereby allowing sufficient time for participants to fully integrate cooperativism into their worldview. Most cooperatives do not have the capacity to educate their new members to this degree, as this kind of intensive training requires funding, time, and labor that a cooperative cannot spare. In reality, given that students are funding their own education at the university through money, loans, or awards, they are essentially subsidizing the cooperative’s operation by funding their own orientation training. Any student cooperative with a relationship to a specific educational institution may be able to leverage student and institutional resources to their advantage; however, institutional relationships come with as many or more strings attached as benefits. For more discussion on how to manage and what to consider in pursuing such relationships, review the key issue sections “Relationships of Solidarity” and “Relationships of Coercion.”

Self Selection: While interest and allegiance should be made explicit by each party, if membership is to always be truly open and voluntary, power and agency need to be sustained by both parties, which can amount to either party saying their interest or allegiance has changed at any point during the onboarding process. The application process for cooperatives is a shared assessment of compatibility, rather than a unilateral judgement. This is in stark contrast to conventional job interviews, where an interviewer has particular power to grant or not grant a job, with the supporting assumption that any applicant wants and would feel “lucky” to get the job. In order to be able to adequately assess compatibility in an equitable way, the cooperative must provide the applicant sufficient information about the cooperative to allow the potential member to “self-select” whether or not they are a good fit and would enjoy membership. Given that predominant employment culture disempowers applicants, it is also imperative that such information is shared alongside the reminder that the cooperative needs the potential member to assess the cooperative and whether or not they truly want to be a member. This practice and ethic was expressed by three worker cooperatives from very different cultures – Red Root (Worker, Philippines), Knowledge Worker (Worker, Denmark), and Genç Işi (Worker, Turkey). Of those, Knowledge Worker (Worker, Denmark) takes the most explicit approach to empowering potential members to self-select by baking self -reflection and -selection into their onboarding process. As the final step before becoming a full member, potential members are asked to write an essay outlining their vision and plans for their work within the cooperative. After this exercise, the cooperative has found that potential members undoubtedly have a solid idea of whether they think they will be a good fit and enjoy cooperative membership. Applicants without a true commitment to the cooperative experience will struggle with the task and sometimes will not even opt to complete it, thereby choosing for themselves that the cooperative is not for them.

“On The Job'' Onboarding: Many of the cooperatives interviewed report that they invite potential members to participate in the cooperative as part of their onboarding process by attending meetings or events. This supports effective self-selection, outlined above, if paired with explicit communication that it is important the potential member treat the onboarding process as equitable, rather than as one of unilateral judgement. To actualize the potential member’s experience observing the cooperative’s function, Red Root (Worker, Philippines), Gencisi (Worker, Turkey), and Knowledge Worker (Worker, Denmark) all ask the potential members to offer input and feedback on what they saw happen in the cooperative. This step both empowers a potential member, by demonstrating that their perspective is valuable no matter their tenure in the cooperative, as well as showcasing whether the potential member fully understands the cooperative's values, culture, and purpose.  

Similiarly,  Sheffield Student Housing Cooperative (User, UK), a student housing cooperative with only four members at a time, maintains a very simple and brief training process that they have found fully empowers their members. The house maintains a single document that gets updated annually (end of the school term) by exiting and continuing members. The document is again read and reviewed during an annual education/orientation event at the start of the subsequent school term when new members join. They call the document and meeting at which the document is reviewed the “Handover,” and it has successfully perpetuated the cooperative, its culture, and practices for the past several years. Given that the members live together on a daily basis for months and years at a time, one of the most intimate forms of cooperative practice, they are also able to reserve some aspects of onboarding for informal interactions in the course of living together day-to-day.

Peer-Mentorship: Genç Işi (Worker, Turkey) offers mentor relationships during the course of on the job training and observation. In their model, an applicant is paired with a current member with whom they can discuss their experiences or ask questions in a more intimate and private fashion. This can allow a potential applicant to ask questions they might feel insecure about asking in a larger group or sharing something about themselves and their abilities that they don’t want to broadcast publicly. The goal is to foster and facilitate frank questioning and increased information sharing. At the end of the onboarding process, both the applicant and the mentor are asked what they think about the applicant becoming a member - which may sound intense, but this is always something they have already discussed one-on-one. This ensures that all decisions are well-considered, thoughtful, and unsurprising for all involved.

EXIT 

Cooperatives of majority or entirely youth have to effectively manage members leaving more than cooperatives with older members, accordingly their observations and solutions should be considered especially powerful. The majority of youth cooperatives interviewed for this toolkit had not experienced a great number of member exists, which suggests a need for specific research into the topic with "older" youth cooperatives.

Pay Outs

While youth cooperatives often experience higher turnover than elder cooperatives, they typically have to manage much less complicated departures given that exiting members have not frequently acquired much tenure and, accordingly, equity in a cooperative.

Dividends Not Huge Factor: None of the cooperatives interviewed reported having experience paying out dividends to departing members, given that they either had not made enough money to accrue distributable equity, or they are a nascent cooperative and simply had yet to experience member turnover (i.e. all founders are still members). While only time will tell, many of the interviewed cooperatives do not generate much surplus and may share the fate with many cooperatives throughout the world of being unable to scale to the point that they require complex payout schemes of equity, and may rather just aspire to and sustain a simple living wage or comparable for their members. However, if a cooperative both chooses to legally incorporate and foresees generating a surplus, they must necessarily incorporate under a statute that subjects them to income taxation. Which begs the question of why a cooperative would choose to pay income taxes and potentially submit themselves to higher levels of regulatory scrutiny if they will never achieve the financial scale at which this is required? Whether or not a cooperative is oriented towards a financial scale that accumulates significant equity or maintains itself as a source of living wage or specific services has a huge impact on the cooperative’s culture. Essentially, the former concerns itself to some degree with accumulating individual wealth, while the latter seeks to maintain a part of the commons. Most youth cooperatives tend to fit into the latter category - intentionally or by circumstance.

• Common Equity: If a cooperative is likely never to generate a surplus but would like to legally incorporate, there are other incorporation options that involve lower rates of income taxation, if they tax income at all. Student housing cooperatives, which have inherently transient and often majority youth memberships, but often also possess a great deal of wealth in the form of physical property that could arguably be distributed but typically is not. Over time, the value of their property or properties increases via inflation, as well as generations of members collectively pay off the mortgage over time, and, sometimes, when the housing market in a given area becomes more expensive due to development or increases in population. The Sheffield Student Housing Cooperative (User, UK) has chosen a model that will never distribute any of the equity accrued through property ownership to members. The reasons for this are many, including: members turnover quite quickly and the calculation and distribution of dividends would be quite burdensome, the increase in equity is not tightly linked with the participation of individual members as a significant portion of its value is determined by external forces, and not paying out dividends maintains a financial cushion that grows over time and can be used to cover organizational costs without having to raise membership dues to cover them. This cushion is called an “indivisible reserve,” because it is a financial reserve that cannot be divided up and distributed. By maintaining an indivisible reserve, the cooperative does not depend on extra dues from members to cover big costs (e.g emergency repairs, property renovations) - the value of the property itself is used to sustain the property in perpetuity, and dues are charged at a rate that supports the day-to-day lifestyle of the people living in the property. This cooperative model is called “common equity” and is applicable beyond the housing sector.

Founders

By and large, most of the cooperatives interviewed had not seen the exit of their founders. In fact, many of those interviewed were founders and interested in advice on how to manage their own departure from the cooperative. Only one interviewed cooperative, Alchemy (Worker, USA) a coffee roaster and cafe, reported having an explicit founder departure process in place, which they only evolved after the cooperative experienced the first - and more or less unplanned - departure of some of the founders. Another cooperative, Repaired Nations (MSC, USA), shared they were endeavoring to not facilitate the departure of founders from the cooperative, but rather to shift them away from central leadership roles, a related topic which is covered in greater detail in the key issue section on “Leadership.”

Advanced Notice & Intention: The departure of two of three founders from Alchemy (Worker, USA) happened informally, largely because one of the founders chose to remain and was more or less able to provide the same historical perspective and institutional memory the departing founders took with them. When the remaining founder chose to leave the cooperative, they signaled their intention a year ahead of time and engaged the continuing members in a gradual process. He slowly reviewed nearly every aspect of the organization’s functions with the entire remaining membership, and methodically handed off specific tasks, bits of acquired knowledge, and relationships. The cooperative conducted an exit interview with the founder that they documented, which is likely to have caught any lingering issues or responsibilities not yet accounted for, allowed for the sharing of general institutional memory that did not neatly associate with a specific task or function (i.e. oral history), additionally provided an opportunity for the founder to share their wisdom and reflections they’d gained through their experience in the cooperative, and both created a sense of closure and ritualistically marked the an important event in the cooperative’s life.

Legacy: In the exit interview conducted by Alchemy (Worker, USA) and outlined above, the departing founder shared an idea they had for a service innovation in the cooperative. Given their experience and perspective, they suggested the initiation of a coffee bean subscription service, which the departing founder and the cooperative began to set-up just before the founder’s last day at the cooperative. Shortly after the subscription service was established and the founder left, the COVID pandemic hit the United States and forced Alchemy to cease the operations of their cafe - their main source of income. At the same time, Alchemy’s coffee bean subscription service took off as people began ordering coffee to their homes. The cooperative reported that the subscription service is what kept the cooperative solvent and viable throughout the pandemic, allowing them to eventually reopen the doors of their cafe. Giving departing founders an opportunity to distill/share what they’ve learned and allowing them to dedicate some of their departure time to thinking about the cooperative’s future can be a great gift to the remaining members.

Institutional Memory

Perhaps the most important resource that needs to be stewarded during member exits is what is commonly referred to as “institutional memory,” which is an abstraction that endeavors to account for knowledge of the organization's past, how it functions at the time of departure, general stories that are representative of the people and relationships within the group, and the group’s culture. For cooperative enterprises, a key and unique element of institutional memory is cooperativism - both its theory and its expression. 

Relationship with Institutions & Elders: As discussed in more depth within the key issues sections “Relationships of Solidarity” and “Relationships of Coercion,” relationships with institutions and elders can bring both myriad challenges and benefits. The Green Campus Cooperative (MSC, Canada) was specifically designed to be in a special relationship to an educational institution, and essentially exists within the institution’s superstructure. This connection to an institution that endures much longer than any one member’s tenure in the cooperative has allowed the cooperative greater ease in maintaining its institutional memory even in the face of high membership turnover. The institution provides a physical place and system in which information can be recorded and preserved, and its inclusion of individual faculty members in the cooperative helps to both recruit new student members to participate as well as provide a source of accessible historical knowledge and insight. If such an arrangement can be managed without paternalism, it is an ideal cooperative training ground for young people to practice cooperative skills in a “low risk” environment in which their livelihood or savings are not at stake.

Torch-passing Mentality: For many youth cooperatives experiencing membership transition, there can be a rapid succession of leadership styles, organizational priorities, and cultural practices when there is no overlap between leaders or generations of members. If there is no tradition of carrying on the work that was initiated by previous members, the most common consequence is a cooperative that repeatedly starts new initiatives and fails to finish them. The ICYC (Network, Asia-Pacific) had experienced this precise phenomenon for much of its lifetime until relatively recently, when the Chairperson explicitly committed to figuring out what had happened in the past, determining what could be continued, what had been successfully completed, and what initiatives were beyond the Committee’s capacity. To support this process into the future, documentation practices, including an online presence and blog, were developed. The Chairperson refers to this as a “torch-passing” leadership practice, which is a concept stemming from ancient relay races in which a torch was passed between runners, and feels that - when made explicit - can help youth cooperatives survive over time and leadership changes.

Lingering Members: Two worker cooperatives, Red Root (Philippines) and Knowledge Worker (Denmark), both have founding or more senior members who only participate occasionally in their cooperatives, in essence having partially exited the cooperative. For Knowledge Worker, this is manageable because they do not pay salaries; rather, they pay out per project that a member works on, which enables workers to come and go from the cooperative. Red Root also structures their work on a per project basis, allowing some members to work part-time or only when needed. Both cooperatives have found benefit in having longer term members still affiliated with the cooperative and accessible to provide historical information or insight. However, managing the influence of these members on the cooperative can be tricky. Red Root reports having a strong culture that limits the influence lingering members have on the organization, and they maintain their strong culture by having a rigorous entrance process for new members. Within Knowledge Worker, this balance is not as tightly managed as in Red Root. There are times when resentment exists between older and younger members at Knowledge Worker - specifically when older members express strong opinions without working as much in the day to day of the cooperatives as newer members. The solution seems to be better communication about the role/responsibilities of lingering members, as it is difficult to hold individuals accountable to an organizational culture if they do not participate in maintaining that culture daily and/or key elements of the culture are not consistent over time. All this said, these staggered member and founder exits can be a gentle and strategic way to preserve cooperative culture and institutional memory.

Leadership Overlap: For those youth cooperatives with specific age limits for participation (e.g. movement governance entities such as committees and networks), it is very common that a young person will get elected into a titular leadership role (e.g President, Chairperson) during the final years of their tenure within the organization. In such instances, overlap between old and new leadership typically does not take place or extends for a very limited portion of time, as the leader often leaves the organization altogether when they age out at the end of their term. Within the Youth Committee (Network, Global; formerly Global Youth Network), they have coincidentally experienced overlap during the course of two leadership transitions. The Youth Committee Chair both leads the youth network, and serves on the larger ICA Board of Directors as the youth representative. As a result of this latter responsibility, the first leadership overlap occurred because the outgoing Chair transitioned into working for the ICA Board President, which allowed them to be present at Board meetings and support the new Youth Committee Chair by answering any questions, explaining politics, and providing moral support. This was especially important given the network was within its first few years of existence at the time of the transition. During the COVID pandemic, the Chair that previously benefited from leadership overlap is now getting to provide that to the incoming chair due to the meetings at which the Youth Committee Chair is approved by the larger ICA Board being postponed. The coincidental leadership overlaps have proved so beneficial to date, that the outgoing Chair intends to seek to institutionalize leadership overlap as part of their leadership legacy within the network, that they feel will help to ensure strong cultural continuity and help to sustain multi-year initiatives.