Year of the Co-ops

Did you know the UN has made 2025 ‘International year of co-operatives’?

Co-ops are democratically owned businesses or organisations, with the co-op’s members in control to meet their shared needs. The members may be customers, employees, residents or suppliers.

All co-ops the world over shares the same 7 principles and 10 values.

Around 40% of the UK’s 7000 co-ops are consumer owned – think credit unions, high street Co-op supermarkets and Your Co-op, while over 350 are worker owned e.g. Essential (Food & Household specialists), Footprint Workers Co-op (Riso printers), Go Free Range (Software development revolutionaries: @freerange), Suma (Food, household, toiletries), Veggies (Catering company: @Veggies) and workers.coop (Federation of worker-led cooperatives: @workers_coop). Others can be multi-stakeholder owned such as Webarchitects (Cloud hosting services).

Examples of international co-ops are cosocial (Non profit social media platform: @coop – Canada), Limeleaf (Software developers: @limeleaf – USA), Nubo (Ethical mail & cloud services: @nubo_coop – Belgium), Ouvaton (Hosting & software services: @ouvaton – France) and Society (Digital technologies: @sociality – Greece).

The Labour government did say in its pre-election manifesto that it would double the size of the co-op sector and mutual economy in the UK, but as with many manifesto pledges I wouldn’t hold your breath.