A Co-operative Exchange!

This is an invitation to all Co-op members, fans, and supporters, to follow the blog I'll be writing while serving as a delegate from the Olympia Food Co-op to Cecosesola, (Central de Cooperativas de Servicios Sociales de Lara) a worker-owned, consensus-run cooperative with around fifty linked cooperatives in Barquisimeto, Venezuela this January & February!

Starting on the 20th of this month, my co-worker Alejandra and I will be traveling on behalf of OFC to Venezuela for 5 weeks, the first of which will be spent in Caracas and on the coast, along with students from an Evergreen program, gaining an orientation to Venezuelan government and culture, and visiting a successful cacao cooperative. The following four weeks Ale and I will spend at Cecosesola, participating in meetings, working in their food markets, and visiting affiliated cooperatives in the area. We will be reporting back to our co-workers and members at OFC through meetings, and presentations, and will be involved in planning a conference and helping to host 2-4 members of Cecosesola, when they visit Olympia in May 2012 to complete this exchange. Ale and I are both honored and elated to be have been chosen to represent OFC, and we hope that our organization will benefit concretely from the ideas and new understanding we bring back as a result of our experiences.


What is Cecosesola?
Though Cecosesola first began as a cooperative aiming to offer more affordable funeral services to members of its community (a function it continues to serve to this day) its largest project is a retail food cooperative, which includes the operation of 3 ferias––large markets for food and other goods––which supply 1/4 to 1/3 of the families in Barquisimeto with affordable, sustainably-grown food. Other services provided through Cecosesola to its community include: health care, discounts on appliances and other services, savings and loan services, farming, food-processing, transportation, and more.

As OFC continues to grow as one of the very few consensus-based, collectively run food cooperatives in the United States, we are very fortunate to have this opportunity to create a partnership, and share valuable skills and learning with a cooperative like Cecosesola. This trip is a way to put into practice our goal of solidarity with the cooperative movement worldwide. Cecosesola and OFC have many qualities in common, including:

* consensus-based decision-making
* collective, non-hierarchical management
* longevity: Cecocesola was founded in 1967, OFC in 1977
* mission goals to support the cooperative movement
* responsibility for multiple locations
* goals of linking sustainability to economic and social justice

At the same time, Cecosesola, a much larger and vertically-integrated organization, has a great deal to teach us here at OFC. Following our commitment to consensus-based decision-making, as OFC's staff has grown to nearly 80 members, we have been in a continual process of evaluating, shifting, and creating new staff structures to accomodate the scale at which these decisions need to be made. As you may imagine, it can at times be challenging for 80 people to find shared ground on issues as varied as staff wages, expansion, accountability policies, and building improvements, especially as we seek to keep the many desires of our members central. Some decisions can take a very long time to develop and be implemented, and experiences such as the ongoing conversation and lawsuit around the Co-op's boycott of Israeli products show that there can be disagreement about which bodies should have decision-making power in which circumstances.

At Cecosesola, building consensus among a large and diverse group of workers is also an important part of ongoing work, but at a scale it is hard for us at OFC to even imagine. For example, there are over 400 workers involved in the running of their three ferias alone! Though Cecosesola is functioning in a cultural, societal, and political climate that is very different from what we experience in Olympia, there is likely much that we can learn from a process that brings such a number of workers together in decision-making. And this is just one of the many areas we hope to study while at Cecosesola. Others include the integration of producer and community-based cooperatives (such as OFC's relationship with Tulip Low-Income Credit Union), the focus on local and international cooperative education, and notions of expansion, among others.

Follow this blog to get regular updates on mine and Alejandra's travels, and to gain an in-depth look at one staff person's experience of learning and working in solidarity with one of our international partners in the cooperative movement.


For More Information
* An in-depth look at Cecosesola's history and current projects as of 2006. (This source also has a more recent interview with a founding member of Cecosesola).
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1793

* A very recent article commissioned by an NGO we will be working with while in Caracas.
http://priven.org/262/

* For Spanish speakers, Cecosesola's excellent and in-depth website.
http://cecosesola.blogspot.com/