Graphic illustration by Anke Dregnat
During the first week of May, the Rocky Mountian Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC), Shareable, and a growing list of partners launched the first session of the Social Cooperative Academy.
The Academy will consist of eight weekly sessions from May 1st to June 19 and will be live on Wednesdays at 1:00 PM MT/ 3:00 PM PT. Videos and transcriptions will be available after each session.
At the introductory session on May 1, Elias Crim, Social Cooperative Program Director at RMEOC, welcomed the group and explained that the Academy is not a series of finished lessons but an invitation to co-creation.
Social coops offer a wholly new model of social care. They are community-led, multi-stakeholder, democratically governed, and highly relational. Community benefit, not maximum profit, is prioritized to provide high-quality care.
At the conclusion of the Academy, RMEOC will begin a monthly Community of Practice so participants can deepen their knowledge and share best practices in their work, especially in the sectors of childcare, homecare, and disabled care.
If you missed the first session check out the transcript below. You can also register for the Academy here.
Transcript
Why Social Co-ops Offer Potential Transformation of Care and More
- Speakers: Doug O’Brien (NCBA/CLUSA), John Restakis (Synergia Institute), Minsun Ji (RMEOC), Matthew Epperson (Zolidar)
- Moderator: Elias Crim (Solidarity Hall)
- Topics: How the social co-op model is different; Successes in Italy, Quebec, and South Korea.
0:00:02.9 Elias Crim: Okay. That was great, Ellie. Thank you. All right. We’ll jump right in. Everybody good? Yes? Okay. Great. I’ll make a quick point about my background here. I look like I’m sitting outside. I’m not sitting outside. We call this an academy, so perhaps some of you are expecting I should be sitting in front of a wall of books, kind of like inside a school of some kind. But I want to say that I recently spoke to an organization in Quebec called The Chantier de l’économie sociale.
0:00:39.7 Jerome: Okay, put your seat belt on.
0:00:41.9 Elias Crim: And they are sort of the umbrella organization for the social economy.
0:00:51.1 Jerome: Odera is on the call.
0:00:51.7 Elias Crim: Okay, we need to mute Jerome. Everybody muted? Okay, good. So, I discovered that the group in Quebec, it’s called a chantier because that word in French means a building site. So, what I wanted to first communicate is that unlike schools that have ready answers to supply you with, we’re going to build this together. We have some good ideas, but I wouldn’t call them finished answers. So we’re inviting you here into a process of, I guess, what you would call co-creation. In fact, we want to create, ultimately, after the webinar series is over, a community of practice. So more on that coming a little bit later. One of the quick thing I wanted to say is that I think we would, all of us on the team would agree that this webinar series is a way of addressing a shared condition that we have, which is that of carelessness. We lack even a vocabulary of care. And so since social co-ops are mostly about social care, we want to reflect on that in this process. We need to build new social, legal, financial infrastructure using, among other things, the insights of feminist economics.
0:02:17.9 Elias Crim: And the point of that is to create and sustain, hopefully, thousands of caring enterprises, a kind of new social safety net. So that’s the larger vision, and I know that John is going to have more to say about that today. So I’m going to drop some links related to that in the chat, and what I want to do at the moment is introduce John. John Restakis is the former executive director of the… I’m sorry, I’m going to start with Minsun. I beg your pardon, before I get to John. Minsun is, after all… Minsun is the person who said to the team a few months ago, “Why don’t we create a social co-op academy?” She is a co-op developer, a labor organizer, a popular educator, a researcher, and an activist, and in her spare time she has a PhD. She is the director of global partnerships at the Drivers Co-op, in addition to being the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center. Minsun.
0:03:29.7 Minsun Ji: Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining this academy. It is super, super exciting. The whole thing happens with very simple questions that, there are some countries with social cooperatives, but why we don’t have a new cooperative category of social cooperatives? That’s how we are here today. I live in both the worlds, South Korea and United States. When I’m in South Korea, I talk about what’s happening in the United States, in terms of development of a social economy. And so I knew that South Korea and other European country had a social cooperatives. So with that questions, we start actually forming sort of the informal groups of peoples who agree that, yes, it’s a time for us to actually do something about social cooperatives. So that’s why we are doing our social cooperative academy for the first time. As you know, we don’t have answers, because again, each country has a different context and political situations and whatnot, so it’s wide open and I hope that by the end of these sessions, we have a little better ideas about what could be the next step for all of us in terms of creating a new policy. Having said that, I’d like to actually introduce Doug O’Brien, who is the president and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Associations, CLUSA International. So yeah, would you like to do some opening remarks?
0:05:03.8 Doug O’Brien: Oh, thank you, Minsun, and thank you, Elias, thanks everyone, I’ll be very brief. Just really appreciate the team who has organized this effort. It is a subject of great interest from my perspective at the National Cooperative Business Association that… The Apex Association here in Washington, DC, and I appreciate this work to co-create perhaps a path on how the US could enable and embrace social cooperatives in a much bigger way. There’s certainly a need and there’s an interest. And the path is not abundantly clear to me, I’ll be honest, but hopefully this work and I hope to do some work with you, we’ll see a clearer path ahead, so thank you.
0:06:00.6 Elias Crim: Great, thank you, Doug. All right, now I’m getting to John. And I’m eager to hear from you, John. Let me say that you were the former executive director of the BC Cooperative Association in British Columbia. A practitioner, an educator, and pioneering researcher in international cooperative economies. John is the author, most recently of ‘Civilizing the State,’ and it was in many ways from that book we took his vision of a social economy… It was kind of the spark which lit this whole project of creating the Social Co-op Academy. John, looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
0:06:43.9 John Restakis: All right. Okay. Thank you everybody. Thank you Elias and nice to meet you, Doug. I knew your predecessor many years ago and so I’m very happy that you’re here. Where to start? I think I have what, 15, 20 minutes or so to talk? Is that right? Okay. Let me take a step back and try to contextualize my own connection with this issue of social economy, social co-ops, because I think there’ll be echoes and a resonance with some of the people on this call. My professional background is in the field of social activism. I started my work very young as a community organizer. Then I worked my way through a whole range of organizations, almost all of them within the social economy. And then, and around the mid 1990s, 1995, 1996, I found myself working for the Ontario Cooperative Association, for the first time exposing myself to the whole sector of cooperatives, not only in Canada, but internationally. And up until that point, to be honest, my perception and my understanding of economics generally was pretty skeptical if not downright negative. I approached economics with a high degree of skepticism and considered the whole discipline as kind of a corrupted and compromised sector. And it was within that basic skepticism and really quite honestly ignorance that a good portion of my work as an activist and as an organizer had no real connection directly with economic theory, and certainly had no exposure to cooperative economics or Social Economy Theory.
0:09:08.2 John Restakis: It was only when I started engaging with cooperatives and co-op development through the Ontario Co-Op Association, and then later here in British Columbia as ED of the BC Cooperative Association, that I really started to get my head around the whole subject of economics. And the ways in which economic theory and economic practice intersected with my own focus and my own passion around system change and social transformation. And it was then I became aware of an entirely hidden and unknown history of economics as a discipline, both theoretically and practically. And it was my exposure to the teachings of people, theorists like Antonio Genovesi in Italy in the middle to late 1700s that introduced me to a whole hidden history of economic theory associated with what Antonio Genovesi called, Civil Economics, Civil Economy, as compared to Political Economy and the tradition of Adam Smith and the capitalist theorists that followed him.
0:10:26.1 John Restakis: It was in connection with the notion of civil economy, and the underlying principle that in fact economics is not separate from operating on its own autonomous rules and principles separate from society in general. That economic practice, economic theory, and economic models, and organizations are an extension of society, and a creation of society, and the models that we use to do economics have everything to do with our conception of human nature, of the connection between individuals and their communities, and how we understand the whole terrain of economics for the common good as opposed to economics circulating and surrounding the individual as the sort of rational economic agent, and the ways in which capitalism and in particular current models of neoliberalism are fixated on atomizing individuals in society and structuring the entirety of economic theory and practice around these isolated, profit-seeking, maximizing individuals as the foundation of neoliberal theory and practice.
0:12:10.0 John Restakis: In social economy, it is the community as a whole, and it is the social connections between people working together for their mutual benefit that is the foundation principle of social economy as a particular component of the broader political economic system that we all find ourselves in. So I started focusing on this question of cooperation, on this question of how these principles of mutual aid, reciprocity, of people working collectively for the common good as being the foundational principle of social economy and the foundational principle of social co-ops themselves.
0:12:56.5 John Restakis: This entire field of social economy and social cooperatives is relatively new in the United States, almost invisible, if not totally invisible within the academy. And certainly not offering a lot of opportunities or spaces or places where people, groups of people can come together to experiment and utilize these ideas of cooperative economics for the provision of social benefit. And so pretty much, sessions like this webinar, and a few courses and programs here and there are really all that’s available for people, activists in particular to think about alternative models for the subject of social care, for example.
0:13:49.8 John Restakis: So, I was wanting to share my screen and give you a couple of slides on both the history and the models of social cooperatives to give you a concrete sort of illustration of how these ideas of economics being an extension of social relations, and a form of economic theory and practice that is rooted in the idea of mutual aid, of reciprocity as being a fundamental economic principle, which is also a social principle, and which can form the basis for a new perspective or a new understanding of how to approach economics for the common benefit, for the common good, and in particular how to think about social co-ops and the social economy in connection to social care. So, I’m gonna open up and share my screen if that’s okay with everybody. Get rid of some of this stuff here. Okay. Can everybody… Hold on a sec. Can everybody see this, all right? I’m not sure if you can yet.
0:15:00.8 Matthew Epperson: Yes, we can, John.
0:15:02.2 John Restakis: All right. Okay. So, the context here then is a different framing for economics, basically and fundamentally, that I don’t think in fact that we can make a compelling and a comprehensive case for the social economy and for social co-ops, in particular, within the current framework of understanding that of market societies and of neo-liberal economics. In other words, what the current framework takes for granted is that the market is capable of providing solutions for the provision of every good and service, that the role of government should be absolutely eliminated if not extinguished from intervention in the economy, and for the production of social services for people. And so I think we need to embed the idea of social co-ops within a very different understanding and theory of what economics is and what in particular social care is and how those two interact with each other.
0:16:16.9 John Restakis: So to begin with, the nature of social care. The crisis of social care that the United States is contending with, not just United States, but Canada and all of the industrialized capitalist societies, the crisis is a consequence of the commodification of social relations. It’s about reducing all social connections, social relations into possible opportunities for profit-making. And so the commodification of things like social care does a couple of things. One, it ultimately destroys and disfigures the content of what social care is. And secondly, it produces a crisis in so far as it creates huge social care deficits while disfiguring existing social care programs into the exchange of commodities which are embedded in the for-profit enterprises that are providing things like elder care, home care, and so on. So, the nature of social care is at fundamental issue here. And what I want to say about this is that social care is actually a collection of relational goods, that is to say, goods that are actually based in the mutual and reciprocal relationship that people have between themselves in the care relationship. It is not a reduction into a commodity that can be bought and sold in the marketplace, which in fact destroys the very content of social care, which is ultimately a quality of interaction in human relations between individuals, between people, not between organizations and customers, or clients.
0:18:23.0 John Restakis: So the nature of social care itself requires a very different understanding of how these kinds of services can be provided, outside of purity, commodity, and market relations. That’s one point.
0:18:37.8 John Restakis: Social co-ops as a response to the crisis of social care. The ideas of neo-liberal economic theory have penetrated and contaminated public policy in governments all around the world. The ideology of neoliberalism has fashioned public policy in such a way as to separate the role of the state from the provision of social care, and also to isolate and atomize individuals within society from the kind of social relationships that they need to create if we’re gonna create anything like a humane and caring society. So social co-ops, in Italy in particular, were a response to the crisis of social care in that country, which resulted from a couple of things. One, from the failure of government-provided and bureaucratized systems for providing the kind and quality of care that families in particular were in desperate need of in Italy. And secondly, as a result of the increasingly huge and supportable deficits that the Italian state had incurred, and which resulted in a freeze of all hiring and delivery of new programs of social care in that country. What that created was a response from citizens, already active, and or utilizing social care services, to proposing another form of care where the organization, the design, and the delivery of the care was actually owned and controlled by the users of those care services themselves.
0:20:32.3 John Restakis: And so what you ended up having was a proliferation of these innovative models for providing social care through organizations that are organized and controlled by the users of these services themselves. This was also facilitated by a very active and a very vibrant and rich cooperative history and a cooperative community within those parts of Italy that adopted social co-ops of the model, which is primarily in Emilia-Romagna and in the north of the country.
0:21:06.2 John Restakis: So the history of social co-ops has to do with a reaction to the public service failures, on the one hand, of government, and of the inability or unwillingness of private sector, for-profit organization to provide these services. So the structure of social co-ops comes out of the previous history and the work of cooperatives more generally in Italy. In Quebec, the adoption of the social co-op model has been quite extensive. In Quebec, social co-ops are called solidarity co-ops, but they share the same fundamental characteristics. And I am going to close at the end of my little presentation here with a couple of remarks around the idea of social markets and their importance for actually proposing a system-wide re-calculation and a re-understanding of what is the relation between the state, between civil society generally, and of social co-ops in particular, for addressing the growing deficit in social care in industrialist countries all across the west.
0:22:34.0 John Restakis: I wanna say just a couple of words around defining the social economy, which is, what I started talking about. And in brief, and you’ll see the connection to social co-ops here. Social economy organizations are organizations whose members are animated by the principle of reciprocity, for the pursuit of mutual economic or social goals, often through the social control of capital. And I think this is, at its sort of foundational level, a defining characteristic of all those organizations that see themselves as being within the sector of our political economy system, which is the social economy. So this definition would include all cooperatives, all credit unions, trade unions, volunteer, recreational organizations, charities and foundations, all these kinds of autonomous, largely volunteer-driven organizations, but also for-profit cooperatives whose motivating, activating principle is the idea of mutual aid, reciprocity for the collective benefit of those people involved in the organizations. So it’s a huge terrain, when we talk about social economy.
0:23:55.7 John Restakis: And this is a figure which I use to try and sort of kind of illustrate how this fits within the larger schema. What you really have sort of at least in a kind of a theoretical setting is three points of this triangle, which comprehensively and together compose the three major elements or economic sectors within modern industrial societies. You have the capitalist market economy, which is a commercial economy, and its ultimate expression is the free market society, which is the neoliberal state, and the values that propel this sector of the economy are maximizing profits for either corporations or individuals. And that of course, we’ve reached the sort of near end point of that understanding of economics as a free market neoliberal form, which is the current status quo in the United States, most of Western Europe, Canada, and so on.
0:25:07.6 John Restakis: And then you have the opposing theory of a centralized economy, the socialist model, which values equality, but the economic principle driving that is the idea of redistribution, the idea of making the goods and services of the economy available to as many people as possible on an equal basis. And typically what has happened is the pendulum swinging between the top point of the triangle, the capitalist market economy, or the socialized centralized economy on the bottom left, and that is the access within which public policy around social care, and around economic policy generally has traveled from neoliberal to socialists, those are the two sort of endpoints. What I am pointing to is a third component, which is the social economy.
0:25:58.5 John Restakis: And on the bottom right, you have a huge component of the broader body politics, so to speak, which is only now getting the recognition it deserves, and this is a social economy, its values are social solidarity, community building, solidarity, and the economic principles that drive this portion of our political economy, are reciprocity and mutual benefit. And the point I want to make, stress in this presentation, is that what we need to be thinking about, both in terms of theory and in terms of practice, is not the conventional, traditional travel between market state on the one hand or socialist state on the other, as we’ve been doing the last 100 years or so, but rather to develop the theories, the models, and the infrastructure that empowers and mobilizes the inherent principles and resources of the social economy. And therefore, understanding how the principles of reciprocity, mutual aid, and cooperation can define an entirely new set of economic and social relations that include the provision of social care through organizations that embody these principles of reciprocity, mutual help, and in fact, democratic ownership of those institutions.
0:27:35.3 John Restakis: And so the use of reciprocity then as an economic principle distinguishes what is essential and constant about the social economy from what is secondary and transitory. And the second principle is social control over capital. What social co-ops do, and of course what cooperatives do, is provide a mechanism, a structure that allows the social control of capital. The owners and the members of a cooperative or a social cooperative actually control or rent the capital to drive the delivery of their services. Okay, so reciprocity then is a social relationship that also has economic ramifications and that the reciprocal exchange may have either social or economic motivation and often embodies both. So it’s not a question of separating the social from the economic, in the case of social economy and social co-ops, the two are conjoined through the principle of reciprocity.
0:28:40.2 John Restakis: Okay. So the primary purpose then of social economy organizations is the promotion of mutual collective benefit. And the aim of reciprocity then is the promotion of solidarity and community, and unlike the capitalist principle of capital control over labor, reciprocity is how labor, citizens, or consumers can exercise control over capital for the common benefit.
0:29:08.4 John Restakis: Okay, so and I will close on just an example or two of social co-ops and the legislation that guides them, at least in Italy. This is the city of Bologna. It is one of the epicenters of this innovative adaptation of cooperative models for social care. And it has to do with understanding this key term, which is relational goods. So from a social and economics perspective, social care revolves around the notion of relational goods and the types of organizations that are best suited to provide these kinds of goods. Relational goods are those goods such as caregiving, which are services to persons, and which are characterized by the exchange of human relations. So not commodities. In relational goods, the quality of the personal relationship is at the core of what is exchanged between the provider and the recipient, and can be optimally produced only by the provider and the recipient working together. And that is precisely what social co-ops make possible through their democratic structure of user control and user member ownership. Cooperatives therefore embody a natural advantage in the delivery of what are termed relational goods. Cooperatives will outperform capital-owned for-profit corporations when the essential service being delivered entails a specialization and a focus on human relations, not on the production and sale of commodities.
0:30:54.0 John Restakis: In other words, reducing and diminishing the care relationship and the individuals in that relationship into simply a provider, a professional provider of a service and a customer or a client. So social co-ops then are uniquely suited to the provision of social care because they can transform people from being merely the passive recipients of care to being protagonists in the design and delivery of the care that they depend on. Okay? So as I was saying, the history of social co-ops is part of a huge growth in Italy’s social economy in the last 30 years. It began with the de-institutionalization of mental patients in Italy, and then with the failure of the existing system to actually provide the kind of care that these and other individuals actually require. Okay, so, nearly half of the early social co-ops that arose in Italy came out of the voluntary organizations and advocacy groups often associated with the Catholic Church, which had at that time still a big responsibility for providing social services in their parishes, and throughout the ’80s, these groups struggled to receive recognition. They finally were able to convince and lobby the government to include special provisions for the legislation of social co-ops in particular.
0:32:28.2 John Restakis: Today, there are over 14,000 social co-ops in Italy, and account for almost 400,000 employees, of which 30,000 are disadvantaged workers. The social co-ops account for something like 13% of Italy’s expenditure in social services, and over 85% of the city’s services in Bologna are actually provided by social co-ops under contract to the municipality. Okay?
0:32:56.9 John Restakis: So the legislation. It’s a legislation called Law 381, which identifies that the purpose of social co-ops is to pursue the general interest of the community in the human promotion and social integration of citizens. So a lot of it has to do with reintegrating marginalized populations into civil society. The legislation also stipulates that the social co-ops have a special mandate to provide for the integration of disadvantaged persons, such as at-risk youth, the elderly, people with disabilities, people with drug or alcohol dependencies, ex-prisoners, and the homeless. There are two types of social co-ops, Type A, which is a cooperative, which delivers health, social, and educational services mainly for local authorities like municipalities and public health bodies. And public sector bodies are enabled under the law to preferentially contract for Type A services with social co-ops. And then Type B social co-ops focus on integrating disadvantaged people into the labor market, and they are specifically designed to recruit, and train, and integrate people from these marginalized populations, and must have at least 30% of the workforce to come from one or more of these demographics, and that then allows the social co-op to benefit from certain public policies that give them support in the marketplace. So they receive certain tax benefits, because of their particular service to marginalized populations.
0:34:49.4 John Restakis: And they can also include volunteers to help subsidize the cost of operating these services up to 50% of the workforce can be made up of volunteers and social co-ops. So there are four principles that guide how social co-ops approach the structuring of solidarity and cooperation to the provision of these services. Clients and family members participate in the design and content and delivery of these services. Membership is limited, usually to about 100 members, to facilitate the building and maintaining of strong social ties within the organizations. Of course, as a cooperative, managers are accountable to the members which elect them, and services are defined with the defined… Or delivered, sorry, within a defined geographic area. The municipality has a key role to play in the provision of contracts for these kinds of social co-op services, and municipalities are also enabled to become members of social co-ops as a key stakeholder in the quality and a purpose of the services that are being provided. The legislation also recognizes the mutuality of purpose between a municipality and a social co-op and in providing goods and services for the community at large. And there are a number of…
0:36:23.5 Elias Crim: John.
0:36:23.8 John Restakis: Yeah.
0:36:23.9 Elias Crim: Let’s make sure we leave time for Minsun. I just wanna see if we could hand off in a sec.
0:36:29.9 John Restakis: Yeah. I have sent these slides to Elias, so all these other details…
0:36:38.9 Elias Crim: Yes.
0:36:39.2 John Restakis: Regarding co-ops can be gleaned from the slides. But I’ll just close on the notion that social co-ops offer more than simply a new format for the provision of social care that’s more humane and more responsive because it is actually designed and delivered by the people that are using that care. It also has to do, and I think this is an immensely important question, with the general collapse and decline of social relations and social connections within society, the polarization, the distrust of government, and the social aggression that we’re witnessing increasing in the United States is a direct consequence, I believe, of the decline and destruction of social capital. And so the other thing I want to leave with you is that adopting social co-ops as a way of rebuilding and reimagining what social care can be like also has to do with repairing the destroyed and deteriorated social relations between people, the alienation of individuals from their communities and from each other, and for doing something concretely by democratizing and cooperative-izing public services and social care to rebuild connections between people in community around a specific and needed delivery of services that all kinds of individuals need, whether they’re Democrats, whether they’re Republicans, whether they’re completely…
0:38:24.5 John Restakis: Whether they’re Christians or whether they’re atheists, social co-ops and cooperation around the delivery of social care, which everybody requires at some point in their lifetime, is a way of reengaging and reconnecting people in a positive and constructive way through the use of cooperation.
0:38:39.0 John Restakis: And I think this is a public policy initiative that has to do not just with social care, but with rebuilding social capital and social trust within community as a whole. So, I will leave it at that, and I just sort of skimmed on the top of the surface of this issue, but I’m very, very happy to respond to comments and questions. Thank you.
0:39:02.3 Elias Crim: Thank you, John. We’re gonna be sharing a couple of your articles in the group as well, so these points you’ve made will be live, kept alive. Minsun, we wanna hear from you. Please go ahead.
0:39:16.3 Minsun Ji: Actually, you need to share the screen, please. You need to… Yep.
0:39:28.3 Matthew Epperson: If, John, if you could stop sharing your screen.
0:39:29.0 John Restakis: Oh, I’m sorry, you’re talking to me? Sorry.
0:39:32.1 Minsun Ji: Yes.
0:39:33.5 John Restakis: Hold on a second here. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me get my act together here.
0:39:52.5 Matthew Epperson: John, it’s just on the Zoom rather than on your presentation.
0:39:56.6 John Restakis: Yeah, hold on, it… Yeah, sorry, sorry.
0:40:00.1 Elias Crim: Up at the top, right.
0:40:01.2 John Restakis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here we are. Stop share. Got it.
0:40:02.4 Elias Crim: There you go. Got it.
[pause]
0:40:18.0 Minsun Ji: Okay. Can you see the PowerPoint? Okay. Okay. Thank you, John. So I’m going to talk about the situation of the United States in particular. So basically, my organizations promote employee ownership as a way to create a very just and sustainable economy. And we do have a EU conversion co-op incubations that actually provide a one-stop center program from beginning to completions, and we are in the process of drivers co-op incubations and co-op education and research and policy. So use of co-op is one of those policy issues that we want to work on, and all of a sudden my idea came from while I was working at RMEOC. So as actually John said, I’m sorry, my dog is barking and I have no control over when my dog is barking. Sorry.
0:41:15.7 Minsun Ji: So as John said, there are two piece of social cooperatives. We already have a lot of cooperatives in the United States too, but the social cooperatives really serve the public interests. That is going kind of beyond just benefiting the members of the co-op only. So I think that’s really important to know that. And the other big piece about a social cooperative is that actually it comes with a sort of social missions, and especially job creation for marginalized community become very, very important. As you heard, Italy has over 14,000 social cooperatives, and South Korea has over 5,000 social cooperatives as of today. And this is a very powerful way to job creations. In South Korea, because of the social cooperative, over 67,000 jobs were created, and also providing service up to 6.2 million people. So this is a huge change that we are making. Think about that job creations for the people who otherwise don’t have. So this is a big. But when we think about sort of the social cooperative, I think there are two kind of questions. One is, actually, who are the members of social cooperatives? And they are actually the marginalized community members. You mentioned that in Italy, actually, 30% of the, actually, member have to come from disadvantaged communities. In the case of South Korea, 65% of the members have to come from marginalized community members.
0:42:56.8 Minsun Ji: Then there is another question about who do social cooperatives provide benefit to? We have two categories. One is also, we actually provide service to marginalized community, such as low wage workers and the disabled populations and previously incarcerated peoples or the elderly, whatever we want to categorize, those people have to get the benefit. But at the same time, a lot of social cooperatives are allowed to provide a benefit to just the general public. That’s how actually social cooperatives create incomes, generations for the marginalized community members. In the case of South Korea, actually they can provide service up to 60%. So that’s pretty high number. So these two categories, obviously there are just distinctions and difference between how actually social cooperatives will distribute surplus, this is something that we should think about moving forward. Some countries don’t allow it at all. Like South Korea and France and Spain, they categorize social cooperative as non-profit. Therefore, although those social cooperatives get tax exemptions, but Italy actually allows surplus distributions to members. And some of the countries like Greece, any kind of supplies has to go to sort of a social cooperative fund. So that’s very unique, that each country has a very different way of looking at surplus distributions.
0:44:30.4 Minsun Ji: So I guess my question was sort of the United States. How about now here in the United States? I mean, are we really ready for creating a different kind of social cooperative? If you look at actually the co-op development history before the crisis in 2008, a lot of co-op was kind of like agriculture, housing co-op. It was led by a lot of university-led co-op development centers, like a Kent University or University of Wisconsin. But after the crisis, that’s actually the whole thing changed. There are more worker co-ops, over 612 and 100s are on the way right now. And there is also rise of the worker center, meaning these are the worker centers organizing very vulnerable day labor population, domestic workers, and gig workers. And those worker centers start organizing collective as alternatives. And another really important thing is actually more cooperative development organizations emerged after 2008. My organization, Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center was founded in 2012. Back then, nobody knew what we are doing. Nobody actually knew why we need to have these kind of organizations. But if you really look at it right now, it’s everywhere. Why? Because we see co-op development as very important economic development strategies for the marginalized. That’s why I think we are doing a lot of great work with organizations, are even going much further. And these are actually integrating cooperatives.
0:46:08.2 Minsun Ji: For example, the ICA groups, they actually create the home care cooperatives. Now, they are creating a platform of Elevate Nationals to really support many different states with the co-op creations. How about Center for Family Life? So sorry. And they are since 2006, they organized 21 co-ops over 400 members. RMEOC, my organisation is in the process of launching the Drivers Co-op, Colorado, which actually costs a lot of money. And same thing in the Co-op Cincy. Those are the organisations that actually utilize organized union co-ops and also 16 co-ops for very marginalized communities. So why actually we will do incubate co-ops, because these are the good practice that we are working with, have such a hard time getting access to capitals. This is a really big problem. That’s why a lot of nonprofit co-op development organizations are stepping up to support. And the other one is a scale up… One moment. I’m so sorry. I think I need to go and hold my dog.
[pause]
0:47:37.1 Minsun Ji: Sorry about that. My dog needs a hug. Okay. And then the other thing is, and that’s why actually we are here to help cooperatives get more grant support. So however, we have a lot of obstacles. There are some questions about how much a non-profit can support cooperative incubations. We are actually dealing with that issue right now. We are actually incubating the Mushroom Cooperative in Alamosa, for the workers and the loan is coming to my organisations, but that’s the only way that they could get a loan. But this is a kind of a very sensitive issue. What can actually a nonprofit do or cannot do? And how about the governance conflict. What kind of power can we actually access over incubated cooperatives? So there are a lot of things that we have to look considers.
0:48:30.9 Minsun Ji: So for me, I think we should create a social cooperatives in the United States. I do believe that US has very robust movements happening right now. So then there is a question of equity. If you want to really support the cooperatives that are organized by the marginalized communities and that have members, and that serves those marginalized communities, why can we actually provide more supports to those cooperatives? I do believe that not all co-ops are created equals. What that means is that we have to actually pour our energy and support to those cooperatives that are coming from the marginalized community. Only then actually we could actually create a more robust social equity for society. So that’s how I see the importance of social cooperatives. And I want to end by saying that we are ready. I think the US is such interesting country to have so many groups coming together to develop co-op. And it’s a time for us to create a social cooperative. Then if you are actually categorized as social cooperatives, then you will actually have more tax benefit on government subsidies. Let’s create those. If I am working with a drivers co-op, they should be a part of the social cooperatives, that gets actually more government contract and procurement than Uber and Lyft are getting all those from government. Same thing. So I think social cooperative is a very concrete way to create more social equity and it’s good for all of us. Thank you so much.
0:50:28.4 Elias Crim: Thank you, Minsun. That was great. There’s questions, I’m sure for both John and Minsun. I want to note Tom Llewellyn’s comment about the Canvas that we created, our learning space, where you will find, if you sign up, many articles and a good deal of research on the topics both today and going forward. So I encourage everybody to do that. I’m going to ask Matthew to help field some questions here that we’ve spotted through the… From the chat. Matthew.
0:51:00.8 Matthew Epperson: Yep, absolutely, I know we’re quite short on time, so unfortunately we won’t be able to get to all these questions, and we’ll figure out some kind of a followup mechanism, and we might be able to stay a couple minutes afterward, I’m not sure what our restrictions are there, but we might be able to squeeze a little bit in for folks. So one of the ones that I think we could probably knock out fairly quickly, Miles asks, and this is probably to either, “Are social co-ops typically multi-stakeholder with workers and patients as members, and what is the typical structure, or does it vary a lot?” Oh, John, you’re on mute.
0:51:34.3 John Restakis: Sorry. Okay, I’ll take a shot at that. Conventionally, social co-ops are regarded as multi-stakeholder organisations, in other words, they have more than one group of identified stakeholders that can have a membership in the co-op, so that, for example, in a healthcare co-op, it could be the doctors and nurses, as one professional group, it could be the employees of the center as the second group, and it could be the families or citizens using the services of the health co-op as a distinct member group. So it’s a multi-stakeholder structure. But I’ve also seen a good number of social co-ops in Italy, which are primarily worker co-ops. In other words, it’s the service providers, the educators, the physiotherapists, and so on that are providing the professional services to the membership, and they’re structured as a worker cooperative. So it can have both a multi-stakeholder structure or a more traditional single stakeholder organisation. But all of them seem to have… Or most of ’em seem to have a reliance on a cadre of volunteers that also have a structural connection to the organisation as well.
0:52:58.8 Matthew Epperson: Minsun, did you want to add anything to that?
0:53:00.7 Minsun Ji: No, I think that he answered very well.
0:53:00.7 Matthew Epperson: Awesome. Just since we have you John with us. So Ken was specifically curious about social cooperative impact on those the most vulnerable, such as the homeless. Could you comment a bit on that?
0:53:11.4 John Restakis: Yeah, I mean social co-ops have specifically been designed to be able to identify and provide care for these marginalized populations, including homeless. And there are examples of homeless people that have organized themselves into a nonprofit structure here in Vancouver, for example, and they are engaged in the recycling. They are binners, people that recycle products from garbage bins and so on in the city. And so there’s any number of examples of people that are homeless that are receiving part-time or occasional employment through social co-ops that basically provide them with a mechanism to earn a living even marginally through recycling or providing other kinds of services, and also organizations that provide accommodation, food services, health services, organizations that provide treatment for people that are homeless that also have drug use issues. So there’s a whole, whole range of social co-ops that are doing concrete service delivery and employment for homeless people in, and certainly in Italy that I know, but I’m sure in other places as well. I don’t know about South Korea, Minsun.
0:54:43.1 Minsun Ji: Yes. Yes. A lot of sort of the social cooperatives for the homeless peoples in South Korea as well. We have actually relatively smaller population of homeless, but yeah, this is how we can provide them with a job.
0:54:56.9 John Restakis: Yeah. Can I just jump in here? I noticed a question, which is a key question in one of the chats, I forget who wrote it down, but he noted that in Italy that social co-ops are actually really challenged at the moment because the state, which is a huge support system for social co-ops, both in the legislation and in its public policy and tax provisions is actually withdrawing, reducing the amount of money available for contracting these services from social co-ops. I wanna highlight that for a moment, because the social economy itself, plus social co-ops in particular both share a common weakness, which is their reliance on capital, which was already mentioned, the reliance on either public capital through tax dollars, or private capital through charity. This is inherently an unstable foundation for the social economy and social co-ops. In other words, they’re always contingent upon powers, capital powers and, that are beyond their control.
0:56:16.0 John Restakis: What I wanna inject in this conversation, which I think is crucial, is establishing institutional supports for the creation, or at least the emergence of social markets for social care and other kinds of collective enterprises. And social markets are based on principles other than exchange of goods and services for profit. And there are examples of non-commodity or non-market evaluation of goods and services, like what provides through social co-ops, through things like time banking, through things like the creation of cooperative capital, which is independent of the state on the one hand, and charity or private markets, private capital markets on the other. There’s a huge amount of work to be done on creating social value markets that are based on the principle of the creation and exchange of goods and services for collective benefit through reciprocity, and to create institutions that allow the emergence and the valuation of socially valuable activities that are not commodities. This is a huge area. But I need… There needs to be theoretical work done on this, public policy work done on this in order to place both the social economy and social co-ops on an economic footing that is autonomous and independent of private capital.
0:58:03.0 John Restakis: Huge issue. And the fact that social co-ops are having to struggle now, not only in Italy, but in Quebec as well, you have a change in government, let’s say you have a free market government, or a neoliberal government, like you have in Greece at the moment, that thinks, “No, we’ll just let everything to the market and we’ll withdraw our contract money for the provisioning of social care through social co-ops.” And then those structures too come into crisis. So we can’t think about social economy and a long-term strategic plan for system change through social co-ops without thinking about what is the economic foundation, the capital foundation of these organizations and their dependence on the state on the one hand or private capital on the other is simply insufficient.
0:58:58.4 Matthew Epperson: So, speaking of juicy questions, I think Abe asked one that I would really love to ask the both of you, if we have time. “So beyond social impact alone, what role do social co-ops have in systemic change, transforming or abolishing dominant oppressive institutions?” And maybe Minsun you’d like to lead us with that.
0:59:15.7 Minsun Ji: Yeah, so for me, I think the one of the reasons that I’m very excited about social cooperative is that basically we are finding a way and giving more empowerment to those cooperatives that are coming from the disadvantaged groups. I think that is very important part of sort of the building more power, and but at the same time more justice and a kind of fairness for those peoples. And so that’s kind of how I see it. As a social cooperative, we can utilize social cooperatives to give them more support, whether that is a financial, whether that is any other sources. With those support, these cooperatives can actually find a better foundation and more impact in the long run. So, I see it as a more kind of a part of organizing strategies, again. That’s my point.
1:00:11.0 Matthew Epperson: Would you like to add anything there, John?
1:00:18.4 John Restakis: No, I agree. Social co-ops are sort of a microcosm of how you can change the power dynamics in the care relationship. Because both, typically in social care organizations, or certainly in government departments and bureaucracies, absolutely in profit companies, the power imbalance and the information imbalance between the customers or clients or users of these services and the professionals who provide that service or from the organizations that provide that service, is a huge imbalance. And what social co-ops do is equalize that power relationship. Because both are equally members with same control rights in the organization. And in some forms, it’s actually the users that have control rights that can actually provide direction to the providers of the service in social co-op. So it completely rebalances the power relationship in the care framework. But beyond this, the co-op form itself generally democratizes power relationships and equalizes the distribution of power within the organization. And so it always has that kind of an equalizing impact both on the particular members of the co-op, but I think more broadly within the community as well, because of the democratization of power relationships.
1:01:48.9 Elias Crim: Great. All right. Maybe we should wind down. I hope you noticed the note again about the Canvas. Please save the chat. You’re able to do that, I think. Save the chat to your desktop if you’d like. We will be huddling again one week from today, same time, 3:00 PM ET. And I want to thank everybody for an amazing kickoff event here. This was great. Final thoughts?
1:02:16.8 Doug O’Brien: Yeah, just a final thing, Elias. As we’re considering the role and the work that an academy might do, I just want to stress again, if I may, the importance of research and articulation of the theoretical aspects of what we’re talking about here. In other words, you can’t just go out, I think, and beat a model forward without providing a solid social and economic rationale for that system change. And that work, especially around social value markets, still needs to be done, so this is something that an academy might be able to contribute to. The neoliberal policies don’t come around by accident, they’re a product of 50 years…
1:03:07.4 Elias Crim: True, true. True.
1:03:09.0 Doug O’Brien: Of think tanks that promoted those ideas. Okay? So we have to do something similar to propose an alternative understanding of economics and system change.
1:03:18.0 Elias Crim: Okay. Final word to Tom Llewellyn of Shareable.
1:03:24.7 Tom Llewellyn: Yeah, hey, thanks for this. So Shareable, just really quick, we’re coming in to partner on this academy to support with some of the convening work. So as I put in the chat, we have the Canvas, which is the learning management system, which also Elias mentioned, which is where we will be collecting all the recordings from these sessions, where there will be opportunities to be in dialog in between sessions, and where there are all the resources that have been mentioned during these sessions, and many, many more already, if you jump in there. There is a discussion space open for reflections upon this session. And if you happen to have any trouble navigating Canvas at all, you can reach out to [email protected]. That link is in the chat, I can post that back there again in a moment. And yeah, we’re just happy to be here on the journey to help us kind of co-facilitate this learning space.
1:04:21.9 Elias Crim: Great. Okay. All good/ Anybody else? Great. All right. In one week, I’ll see you back at the building site and we’ll keep building. All right. Peace, everybody.
1:04:38.0 John Restakis: Thank you, Elias. Thank you, everybody.
1:04:38.7 Minsun Ji: Thank you.
1:04:39.7 Matthew Epperson: Thank you so much.
1:04:40.7 John Restakis: Bye-bye.
1:04:40.9 Elias Crim: Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye, everybody.
This article originally appeared on Shareable.net.
