Q: What do Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Nature’s Bakery in Madison, Wisconsin, Tierra Nueva Coffee Co-operative in Boaco, Nicaragua, Cabot Creamery in Vermont, and Equal Exchange, a worker-owned Fair Trade co-operative in West Bridgewater, MA all have in common?
If you answered that each of these co-operatives is engaged in the business of providing healthy, high quality, organic food to consumers, you would certainly be on the right track. If you responded that each of these co-operative businesses is also committed to its own membership through education, democratic governance, and profit-sharing, you’d be even warmer. But, if you were to take one step even further, and noticed that all of these businesses, and many thousands more across the country, are now formally linked together in a new Co-operative Trade Movement, called Principle Six, your answer would be spot on.
Principle Six: Co-operative Trade Movement. What on earth is that?
Principle Six is the sixth international principle of co-operatives: co-operation amongst co-operatives. Simply put, it says that co-ops should support each other. They should trade with each other. They should lead with their values. We believe in this principle: so strongly in fact that we’ve decided to start living this principle to the fullest extent possible. Equal Exchange already buys all of our products from small farmer co-operatives. And food co-operatives already sell our products, and many more from their own local networks of ethical producers. But why not take this principle further, as far out there as we possibly can?
Imagine the power behind an entire network of co-ops explicitly leading with their values and unequivocally encouraging their members to do the same: supporting small farmers and producers, local farmers and producers, and co-operative and non-profit businesses!
That’s interesting… Tell us more!
During the month of October, Equal Exchange and six visionary, consumer co-operatives across the country (Bloomingfoods Co-op (Bloomington, Indiana), Brattleboro Food Co-op (Brattleboro, Vermont), The Merc (Lawrence, Kansas), Davis Food Co-op (Davis, California), Equal Exchange (West Bridgewater, Massachusetts), Seward Community Co-op (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Willy Street Grocery Co-op (Madison, Wisconsin), are launching an exciting, new pilot initiative to rebuild the food system and our local economies in stronger alignment with our co-operative values. We’ve done it before: the organic and natural foods movements were brought to you through the labors of the food co-op movement. Fair Trade was built through the dedication and commitment of farmer co-ops in the Global South and food co-operative members in the North. More recently, food co-ops have championed the Buy Local movement, once again putting concerns for the environment and local economies at the forefront. In fact, throughout the past 40-odd years, care for high quality food, the environment, local community control and democratic participation has run deep in the co-op movement. Yet, for all our hard work and well-placed values, we haven’t had the impact on the food system and the economy that we believe is necessary to provide sustainable livelihoods for small farmers, protect our environment, sustain healthy, vibrant communities, and put consumers in the drivers’ seat where they belong.
Okay, but how are we going to do this?
Seward Co-op General Manager Sean Doyle with Equal Exchange's Scott Patterson at Seward Co-op's P6 launch (photo courtesy of Seward Co-op)
Today, October 1st, marks the beginning of National Co-op Month. We will begin highlighting and promoting those products which we believe meet our highest values. We’ll also be educating and engaging consumers to think about these products, the companies that make them, and the kind of food system we want and deserve. Through community events, in-store activities, and on our website, www.p6.coop, we’ll inform, promote, debate, challenge ourselves and each other, all the while learning, sharing, having fun (and of course eating and drinking well). Ultimately, we hope to strengthen existing, and build new, co-operative relationships between producers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers thereby creating a web of new economic structures and patterns, that add value at every step in the supply chain.
Several months ago, David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy, spoke at the Association of Cooperative Educators conference in Cleveland, Ohio. He was criticizing the bankruptcy of our old economic models that have propelled us into the current economic recession. He concluded his talk saying, “it is the relationship between organizations that will create the new economy. Individual co-ops offer society a new model with values and principles but,” he continued, “the real power is when they begin to interlink. When co-ops come together, to support their mutual goals, that’s when we can begin talking about ‘rebuilding the food system’.”
His words actually gave me goose bumps. This is exactly what we’re trying to do and the time couldn’t be any more right. The recent economic, banking, housing, and food crises – to name just a few – point repeatedly to the need for an alternative economic system. What better time than now to rebuild our local economies and food networks and what better way than through a co-operative trade movement?
But don’t take it from us: this vision isn’t ours, alone. Tell us what you think. Go to www.p6.coop and share your opinions. It’s your movement after all.
Small Farmers. Big Change. 
En la reunion Concilio metodista, realizada en Panamá, tome un broshur de Equal exchange. Trabajamos con Alfalit, enseñando a leer y escribir a jovenes y adultos, principalmente en el area indígena (Ngobe Buble), ellos habitan en grandes areas de tierras montañosas, y cada año se trasladan a cafetales en otras regiones a cosechar el café.
Dejan todo, casa, los niños la escuela, se van por unos 3 a 5 meses y vuelven a su area indigena, tan pobres y marginales como se fueron.
Hay una gran cantidad de analfabeta. de 168,400 de Panamá, 48,000 son Ngobe Buble.
Me gustaria saber más de esta organización, creemos que en las áreas indígenas, pudiesese sembrar café, para su consumo y para vender y elevar su condición de vida.
This article is very exciting! My coop specializes in developing customized software applications, and we have a vision to develop open source software to strengthen the cooperative economy.
We have recently started the development of CAPA, an app for worker coops to manage member equity, patronage, and dividends.
With the help of Erbin and the NFCA (The Neighboring Food Coop Association) we are in the planning stages of an app for food coops that will track product characteristics like local, coop, fair-trade, organic, etc and report back to the members!
Go Coop!!!!
COMMENTARY BY JIM MILLER
We need the tools and resources to reshape the economic underpinnings of our democratic society. The Corporatists have their goal of a Corporatist State which follows dictatorial examples of Chile, Argentine, Brazil, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Uraguay, and other “third world countries”. They have been gathering-in the wealth of nations (ala Adam Smith) for a couple of hundred years. They have “hollowed out” the U. S. military and are well on their way to hollowing out the Federal government and some state governments.
The Corporatist no longer need individual consumers since they co-opted the Federal government as its customer with unlimited funds, with little or no oversight, and no remorse for causing repeated depressions and recessions. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld gang practiced “Capone Capitalism” for eight years and moved billions from the government to the corporate players.
We must turn the tide by refusing to purchase any goods or services from the Corporatists and their front organizations. We must become self-sufficient as local communities and trade only with local vendors and only with cooperative worker companies which are more distant. To do this we need to build a vast number of small entrepreneurial business enterprises, each of which as four bottom lines: People, Planet, Profit and Principles. We will need to raise among ourselves, a vast amount of capital without dealing with the banks or the Wall Street money moguls. How?
The only solution I’ve found is to raise small amounts from millions of investors, much along lines of KIVA, but with about half being equity and half being loans to the start-up and grow-up worker cooperatives. To that end, I have begun researching ways of raising money – not the casino exchanges – but more the to the point, the “Mondragon” method. Eventually, we will need a virtual, ethical, highly transparent way of evaluating both the investor as well as the investee – the small business entrepreneurial enterprise (SBEE). To that end, I’ve begun organizing the proposed Small Business Investment Exchange (SBIE), using mind-mapping software from TheBrain.com. Take a look at some basic information using a more traditional wikiwebsite: http://sbic.wetpaint.com. Let me hear from you.
Jim Miller
jimmiller5417@yahoo.com
Mondragon, the oft quoted example of successful co-operative. Yet, what happened to this 6th Principle when one part voted another part into bankruptcy by refusing assistance even when the Spanish state offered to help out.
Co-ops are a fine way as a coping mechanism but on the long term become integrated within the prevailing capitalist system or they go bust.
Hi Alan – you certainly raise a good point. I do believe that Mondragon, as a whole, was supporting FAGOR for many years before deciding it was no longer capable of doing so (aka – Principle 6 until it broke), but I can’t find any periodicals to back me up on that belief. I will say Gar Alperovitz wrote a very good article addressing the challenges you are pointing to: http://www.garalperovitz.com/2013/11/mondragon-and-the-system-problem/. It could be worth looking into the Italian network of cooperatives in the Emilia Romagna region: http://dept.kent.edu/oeoc/oeoclibrary/emiliaromagnalong.htm. I know co-ops from that region have been involved in a number of inter-cooperative activities including one worker co-op from that region being one of the large initial backers of Color’s Worker Owned Restaurant in New York City, which was a worker owned cooperative made up of staff from the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, which formed as a worker co-op after 9/11.
Again, your point is valid, operating as an alternative in a prevailing capitalist model does put pressure to play by “their” rules. However, early capitalist were operating under Feudal rules before transforming the world into what it is today, so there is an evidence that one model can grow from and ultimately transform another.