Understanding the Nature of Cooperatives
added 10/23/09
by Terry Appleby,
General Manager
Cooperatives have been much in the news recently, with suggestions that one approach to health care reform could involve the creation of cooperatives similar to Group Health in Seattle. Having lived in Seattle for many years and been a member of Group Health almost from the beginning of that time, I am very familiar with that excellent model of health care. My three children were all born at Group Health facilities, and our family enjoyed the benefits of high-quality care there.
I knew from my association with Group Health that it was a cooperative governed by a board comprised of consumer users of its services and chosen by its members. I also learned more about the cooperative nature of Group Health from time I spent on the Board of Puget Consumer’s Co-op, where one of the members was Hilde Birnbaum, a Group Health member who, in 1955, became the first woman president of the board of trustees. So it was surprising to me that the national news media-types who were reporting on Group Health as an example of a health care cooperative had very little knowledge of the nature of the organization.
The lack of knowledge about cooperatives is also somewhat disconcerting. I say disconcerting because one of the seven principles of cooperation concerns education of the public about the nature and benefits of cooperation. In fact, the principle specifically mentions informing young people and opinion leaders about these benefits. So the lack of public understanding of how a co-op is governed and how it functions indicates that we cooperators have failed to educate the public adequately about cooperatives.
This topic has additional meaning for me due to an internal conversation our Co-op’s Board is having about our cooperative identity, the meaning of membership, the value of membership, and the need to ensure members and the public have an understanding of what being a cooperative means. There is a sense from these conversations that the general public, including our members, are uninformed about the nature of cooperatives and how they operate. This feeling is reinforced by a news media generally uninformed about cooperatives.
As I thought about my obligation under the cooperative principle to inform the public I decided to look again at Hand In Hand, a video history of the Hanover Co-op which contains interviews with early members. It is a wonderful documentary containing many uplifting stories of the Co-op and of how and why it grew. In it, members talk of how the standards of consumer education provided by the Co-op became the standard for all of the stores in the Upper Valley. They speak of the level of engagement members had in the Co-op and how their social relationships changed because they worked together with their neighbors.
The most uplifting part of the video for me is a piece by Freya von Moltke, who joined the Co-op in the 1960s. In that interview Mrs. Von Moltke, who lived through the Nazi dictatorship in Germany in the 1930s, talks of the democratic nature of cooperatives as the most perfect form of democracy. In a co-op, she says, it is possible to cooperatively achieve desired objectives together through the democratic process of involvement and engagement with ideas.
I very much aspire to foster that ideal in the work of our Co-op in the future, so as to shed more light on the nature and possibilities of cooperation and to better inform the public about those topics.
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