Social Co-op Notebook: Issue #1

Welcome to a new series here at the RMEOC. In these weekly or biweekly blog posts, we’ll be offering an introduction to what will probably be a new “flavor” of co-ops to many readers: social co-ops.

While well-known in other parts of the world for the many benefits it can deliver, this model of co-op is mostly unknown in the U.S. We think the moment for social co-ops has come. Hopefully, these blog posts will help inform everyone about the amazing potential of this model.

The Social Co-op Notebook will also offer preview insights into the RMEOC’s new Social Co-op Academy, launching on May 1 and continuing weekly thereafter for a total of 8 virtual sessions.

Check the RMEOC newsletter for more about this exciting new offering with a signup link coming soon!

Before we say more about social co-ops, let’s talk about why the RMEOC is hosting this discussion and the Social Co-op Academy.

We support and promote cooperativism because we know a few things about the power of worker co-ops. For example, they are a business model which provides the means to:

• Reclaim control over our labor;
• Democratize our workplaces; and
• Humanize our work.

There are by some measures over 3 million cooperatives providing livelihoods to 10% of the employed population of the world today, if we’re counting credit unions, agricultural co-ops, and consumer co-ops. And new forms—like platform co-ops—are growing.

At the same time, we know that a combination of labor market deregulation, the assault on unions, and advances in AI and other technologies pose unprecedented risks to everyone dependent upon a wage. Not only are working people increasingly considered disposable but we are losing any understanding of work beyond its utility as a source of profit.

A few years ago, some people expressed hopes in a new “sharing economy” until it became clear that in that model nothing is shared except the declining conditions of work. The result of all these factors is a widely shared sense of precarity, the anxiety of knowing we are one illness or one traffic accident away

from financial collapse.

In the world of social care—i.e., the huge sector of the economy devoted to childcare, elder care, or disabled care, both paid and unpaid—conditions are bad and getting worse. These are businesses which are highly relational but have become highly transactional, a shift which has had a huge impact on the quality of the care they attempt to deliver.

What solutions do we cooperators have to offer? A great one—social co-ops!

In the early 1970s, the Italian government was cutting care to families with disabled members, to the point where caregivers and families teamed up to create social care services owned and operated by front-line workers AND the people they served. They were so good at this work that in 1981 the Italian

government passed legislation recognizing the central role of social co-ops in serving and empowering marginalized communities.

The result? Among Italy’s 70,000 co-ops of all kinds, employing 1.6 million workers serving 13 million members, there are now some 14,000 social co-ops serving almost 400,000 people in Emilia Romagna alone. They handle 85% of all social care in the city of Bologna, for example.

Why are they so popular in regions like Emilia Romagna, Quebec, South Korea and elsewhere?

The key to their success is in the way social co-ops can offer some advantages not found in the conventional worker co-op model:

• A multistakeholder model which makes several additional categories of membership available—i.e., care recipients, family members, community members, local funders, volunteers;
• Social co-ops draw on these diverse members in order to co-create together the care services provided rather than depending upon top-down models;
• Social co-ops offer meaningful employment and the satisfaction of membership to several kinds of disadvantaged and marginalized populations.
• According to the data, they also deliver some of the highest quality care we can measure, with high satisfaction from both providers and recipients.

So that’s some background on social co-ops and why we—and quite a few more

folks nationally—think the hour of social co-ops has finally arrived.

More about them to come in the next issue of the Social Co-op Notebook!