By Thomas Beckett

Economic cooperation, whether informally or through organized cooperatives, has always been a human response to scarcity. We look to the example of the Rochdale Pioneers in industrial England, poor millworkers combining their resources to open a small cooperative grocery, to show that co-ops are a response to economic deprivation. However, Rochdale was one of many co-ops to arise in westernized nations in the face of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanized impoverishment of the new working classes.

Closer to home, North Carolina has a rich but little-known history of African American cooperatives. As revealed by the scholarship of Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, many African American farm families enduring the Great Depression in rural North Carolina through formal cooperation. They converged upon the Bricks Rural Life School, in Edgecombe County and the Tyrell County Training School to organize credit unions, general stores, mutually owned farm machinery, and agricultural education. Later, The Workers’ Owned Sewing Company grew from the business failure of a textile mill in Windsor, North Carolina. In the fading days of Jim Crow, a group of African American employees bought out the mill and operated it successfully for twenty years.

Cooperatives are for benefit, not for profit. When we have to squeeze every drop of value out of a dollar, we get more out by putting our dollars together. With prospect of another serious depression looming, we must now more than ever organize to ensure that none of our neighbors goes hungry.

Remember: Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. When we exercise these values, we release abundance.