Strengthening the Cooperative Community by E.G. Nadeau, Ph.D., draws on his 50 years of experience in researching, developing, teaching and writing about what makes cooperative businesses succeed or fail, and how to make co-ops an even more dynamic force for positive change that benefits people and the environment in the 21st century. The book first presents an historical review that derives lessons from a variety of cooperative sectors including insurance companies that emerged around 1700; grocery, financial and agricultural co-ops that originated in the 1800s; and electricity, employee-owned and social service co-ops that began in the 20th century. The book then focuses on examples of, and lessons from, Nadeau's 50 years of experience as a researcher and developer of dozens of cooperative projects in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.The third section of the book describes six "building blocks" of cooperative development that have proven to be key factors in creating successful co-ops and a thriving International co-op community with an estimated 1 billion members.The final section presents opportunities for cooperative development in the 21st century that have the potential to generate jobs and services for hundreds of millions of new co-op members and employees.The latter two sections of the book make 16 specific, practical recommendations for strengthening the cooperative community in the current decade.

In celebration of cooperatives’ contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come. This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

In this book, we present a hypothesis that humans may be on the threshold of a new historical stage, one characterized by cooperation, democracy, the equitable distribution of resources, and a sustainable relationship with nature. We can act strategically on a range of activities to become a more cooperative society.

This book brings together the work of experts in cooperative education--an educational strategy that combines classroom instruction with work--to show administrators and educators how to handle assessment, costs, growth, and legal issues of cooperative education.

This book discusses social innovations by cooperatives from the Asia and Pacific region. Social innovations emerge when the state and market in developing countries find it difficult to solve problems such as poverty, hunger, ill health, poor education systems, inadequate drinking water and poor sanitation. These countries also face barriers to economic growth such as climate change, poor governance, unequal opportunities and social exclusion. This volume therefore addresses the following questions. What are the distinctive features of social innovations by cooperatives? How social innovations bring in changes in the process and outcome of development? After presenting theories of social innovation and a critical review of cooperatives and social innovation, the book presents 15 chapters on social innovations by cooperatives in the Asia Pacific region. These social innovations are related to health insurance, community based tourism, disaster response, climate smart agriculture, use of social media for youth empowerment, training for the emergence of second-line leaders in cooperatives, social inclusion through innovative finance, profitable marketing of organic produce to strengthen economic status of small farmers, digital auction and value addition for income security of farmer members, collaboration between cooperative members and workers for the mutual benefit, worker cooperatives, women leadership and participation, building union-cooperative partnership in finance and rating of cooperatives to promote transparency and accountability. A chapter on innovative services of cooperatives during the time of Covid19 is also included. This volume will be quite significant for co-operators, researchers, teachers, practitioners and policy-makers at the global level. The theme is relevant for international development community and national cooperatives with concern for their communities, which is the seventh cooperative principle of International Cooperative Alliance and the Sustainable Development Goal of the UN.