Truly, the future is cooperative

This is the last week of National Co-op Month. This year’s theme is “The Future is Cooperative.” Of course, the future for all of us is cooperative. Either we get along together and join hands in brotherhood and sisterhood or we will die. We can choose to make our future cooperative, or not. Without a doubt, the future is relentlessly pressing itself on us all.

While many of the 1,650 agricultural co-ops with almost $300 billion in annual revenue are some of the largest of the over 30,000 co-ops nationally, even they offer the opportunity “to promote economic growth in an equitable, inclusive, local and democratic manner,” as the annual U.S. Department of Agriculture proclamation reads.

The flowery language champions co-ops as a solution to “the nation’s housing crisis by providing affordable housing through resident-owned communities.”

Co-ops “can be central to building local food systems that enables small and mid-sized farmers, business owners and rural communities to flourish.”

At 51 years old, the Skagit Valley Food Co-op is the poster child for the results vision, persistence, hard work and commitment can bring to people’s hopes.

But the co-op model is a hard dream to realize in our hyper-individualistic society. All cooperatives are built on seven principles that require people to recognize shared needs. These include membership open to all, equal ownership, democratic membership control and constant education, training and providing information on the products or services the co-op provides. These principles can become boring, mundane, in the weeds and lost sight of, which is why education is a key principle.

A North Carolina electrical cooperative has these words on its website:

“Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.”

These are hard to fulfill.

Here in La Conner, it is gratifying to see area residents come together in collaboration for a cause important to themselves as individuals and what they recognize as critical to the fabric of the community. The effort to transition the La Conner Weekly News to a community resource run by a nonprofit organization is in the spirit of cooperation.

This shows a fundamentally democratic impulse and centers concern for community, the seventh cooperative principle.

Our neighbors are cooperating without forming a co-op. Their efforts are mutually beneficial to bring a better future to all of us. It is profoundly democratic.

And, like every co-op, it is economic, a business endeavor requiring financing to get off the ground and to succeed.

As publisher of the La Conner Weekly News, there is a self-interest in highlighting this, for a community takeover of the newspaper is also an economic transition that provides fair compensation for the business that is the Weekly News.

That exchange saves a valuable community asset. By having it managed by a nonprofit, its ongoing value – economic and social – stays with the organization. Like a cooperative, it will be built on shared values and the principles of community, self-help and mutual benefit.

The worth of that effort will be realized by its readers and the people and institutions it will continue to cover.

Now, that’s community cooperation.