Cooperative Musings

                                                   Photo Credit: Alejandra Abreu

When is a cooperative not--well--cooperative? As a family farmer and community organizer, Javier Marcos, of Hacienda La Ceiba, has not always had the best experience with cooperatives. At a certain point, he says, some of the cooperatives he's worked with are no more democratic or community-minded than your average private business.

How so? Javier describes how decision-making and funds-allocations work for the organized cacao farmers in the high production states of Miranda and Sucre, in Venezuela. Each community has access to a communal council (consejo communal) through which government loans and other funds are allocated, and development projects are identified and prioritzed. Anybody from the community can attend these councils, and many decisions are made together in assembly. Other decisions are made by committees elected by the assembly and are responsible for particular community projects, for loans and money disbursement, for accountability of the overall process, etc. When several community councils have interests in common, they can form a larger organization, called a comun. In addition, state-owned processing plants have worker councils, which are connected in many ways to the communal councils of the areas where they are located. And so on. As I followed Javier's talk, I found I needed to draw what I was hearing in order to understand the relationships. Interestingly, the resulting page of circles and squares and the manic spiderweb of connecting lines between them turned out to look much like what happens when we try to map out the various committees, departments, action teams, and other bodies that make up the Olympia Food Co-op.

The difficulty that Javier has run into with some of the co-ops in his community is that they can feel like closed structures in which the members are only accountable to each other, and not to the good of the greater whole. For example, he says, if he has an opinion about something happening in his community or in another nearby, he can go to a meeting of the local community council, speak his piece, and have an effect on decision-making. However, if he has something to say about the actions of a co-operative in his community, he may not have any way to communicate it, unless he is already a member. And, Javier says, as a part of Venezuela's Afro-Venezuelan community, his ancestors' struggle to liberate themselves from slavery, to find their voice, has meant that he is not willing to allow his own voice to be quieted. Once your voice is found, he says, it cannot be taken away.

All of which left me and Alejandra abuzz with thoughts about our own dear Co-op, of course. Certainly ours is a Co-op that has a long history of involvement with and advocacy for our community through our mission statement, our donations, our classes, and other avenues. And our membership structure assures that there are no financial barriers to membership, though cultural and other barriers may remain for some. Members can make their voices heard in the policies of the co-op through Board of Directors elections, attendance at the annual meeting and other Board meetings, through ballot decisions, including those that can be initiated by any group of 300 who sign a petition to place a particular issue on an election ballot, and by writing suggestions in the stores. As a relatively new staff member, I am likely to be missing something here, perhaps other longer-term co-op folk could chime in in the comments section (which I haven't figured out how to respond to yet...please bear with me in my blogger-newbiness).

As for other decision-making at OFC, Staff make decisions by consensus, as does the Board. In general the two have different spheres of decision-making. Of course, throughout our history as an organization, we have not always found it easy to draw these lines.Hopefully both Board and Staff decisions take into account both the needs of our members and of the wider community. I'm sure there are times when both bodies do a better job of this than others, but the question of the day for me is: how fully do members and the wider community have the chance to participate in decision-making at the Co-op? How are we accountable to the communities that surround our stores? To what extent is what we do now sufficient? To what extend might we want to increase access to direct participation in decision making for those who are members of neither the Board nor the Staff?

Good questions to mull as we arrive in Barquisimeto, and spend our first night here at Cecosesola, where we are welcomed by a group of about 20 compener@s, and where we are looking forward to a good nights' sleep in their lovely office/ dormitories before heading out to stay with host families tomorrow. Already we have created and tried to address confusion about who makes which decisions at OFC in the course of trying to present our organization's structure (the workers at Cecosesola seem to be just as interested in this issue as all other collective workers I've ever met). Already we have found we have a lot in common, and also much to learn from each other. It is going to be a wonderful four weeks.