Co-op Member Education Needed in 21st Century
William J. Nelson
Executive Administrator
Association of Cooperative Educators
Is anyone surprised that we are seeing significant change
occurring in the economic and social systems in which cooperatives are involved
as the 20th century ends? And should we be surprised that cooperatives
themselves are undergoing significant change? We have known for some time that
change at the close of the 20th century would accelerate. We should not be
surprised that the accelerating rate of change is altering the very structure of
the cooperative system, and will continue to do so.
In an article in Rural Cooperatives (September/October 1998)
Randall Torgerson described several "drivers" behind the rapidly
changing cooperative system, including: the implications of the global economy;
the combined pressures of specialization and economies of scale; reduction of
the "safety net" provided by the federal government; the desire for
more control over quality and defined product characteristics leading to
vertical coordination of production and distribution; and the need and
opportunity for cooperatives to play a critical role in this new marketplace on
behalf of their members. This leads to the critical question of who will control
our destiny, and - in a producer or consumer-owned cooperative - will the
members, directors and staff be prepared to meet the challenge?
He closed the article by calling attention to a key issue:
among the many challenges these changes create, a very important one is
"keeping the member-owners informed, involved and empowered so that benefits
are clearly oriented and delivered to them."
While today's changes may seem great, even overwhelming, this
is not the first time this has happened in the cooperative system to either
producers or consumers. We might be able to learn a little about how to proceed
by looking back.
The modern cooperative business structure, and the system it
became, grew out of tumultuous and difficult social and economic stress created
by the revolutionary new technologies being created by the industrial
revolution. Of course not everyone agreed on the value of the new technologies
and, in retrospect, the "revolution" never really ended. We emerged
into a new era of civilization in which industrialized technology became a
driving force, rather than simply an extension of previous small, incremental
adaptations of tools and techniques to meet specific human needs.
The changes in technology and the structure of industry
created significant social, economic and political turmoil, which - like the
change in the structure of commerce and industry - never ended, either. As we
progressed into the 19th and 20th centuries, the pace of change began to
accelerate. Social, political, and economic change is a little more difficult to
see, describe or measure, but the impact is nonetheless significant.
As one very important solution to the problems created by
this change, ordinary people created a new type of business structure to meet
their needs: the cooperative. From the perspective of consumers, and later as
producers, they took calculated risks in a difficult environment, knowing very
little about what was ahead of them. They started co-op businesses designed to
reduce expenses, increase income or provide a needed service, using a new
strategy of combining entrepreneurship with collective action, in a formal
business structure. When they got it to work at the local level, they expanded
the idea into regional, national, and even global structures and systems.
The cooperative system has been able to function in a range
of economic, political and social systems for over 150 years. It promotes
desirable competition, creates value, adds value, meets needs and responds to
the needs and objectives of member-owners. Is there something unique about the system
that has made it so sustainable through so many changes? If so, what will it
take to continue?
A closer look at the formation of the Rochdale cooperatives,
the prototype of our modern system, reveals that along with all of the obvious
business challenges they faced, they realized they needed to know a lot more
than they did, and they devised their own elaborate learning system, including a
library, adult education programs and a commitment from the business to support
this education effort.
They devised a way to have the business pay for it, as an
investment in the future of their business and livelihood. When they created
their mission statement with a set of business principles to guide them, they
included education about their business as a key guiding principle for future
success.
As the system grew, and as basic general education became the
responsibility of the public school system, the tasks and responsibility for
education on the unique features of a co-op business gradually shifted to what
cooperative historian Brett Fairbairn of the University of Saskatchewan has
called "the agencies."
These are organizations such as state and national trade
associations, universities, and government agencies, and professional
associations. This worked reasonably well for a long time, even though the
commitment and capabilities of "the agencies" fluctuates over time,
depending on resources and a host of other
factors.
The leadership and commitment of "the agencies"
today are on an upswing. For example, we have a rejuvenated federal research and information service through the Rural
Business Cooperative Service of USDA Rural Development and rejuvenated and
expanded university centers for cooperatives and endowed chairs, with excellent
leadership and staff. We have very strong professional associations of
cooperative educators and communicators, including the Agricultural
Communicators in Education (ACE) and the Cooperative Communicators Association (CCA),
and we have new models of collaboration on cooperative education emerging
between state cooperative councils.
Foundation support of cooperative education has increased,
new electronic technologies are being used for information delivery and
increased coordination in the development of new or updated curriculum materials
is improving communication efficiency and effectiveness. We have some very
strong co-op educational programs in place, including the Graduate Institute for
Cooperative Leadership (GICL) and the Legal, Tax and Accounting (LTA) conference
of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Consumer cooperatives have
similar educational programs.
One key area of cooperative education, leadership
development, is being improved on several fronts, including programs such as
GICL, and a new program for defined membership cooperatives created through a
partnership between the Quentin Burdick Center and several other agencies,
foundations and -most importantly - the cooperatives themselves. Other
leadership development and support programs include the Future Co-op Leaders
Program of the National Cooperative Business Association and the New Cooperative
Leaders Scholarship program of The Cooperative Foundation, which supports
professional development in cooperative education.
The Cenex Harvest States Foundation has made a commitment to
co-op education, including support for professional development of co-op
educators. Two new director training series are available, and young farmer
programs emphasize leadership development.
But this is only a part of the story. While it is important,
necessary and reassuring that "the agencies" are alive and well in
actively looking after the principle of cooperative education, it can't fully substitute for a full commitment by the cooperative
businesses themselves. We need to take another look back, to see what we might
need to do now.
When the early cooperatives made a commitment to their own
ongoing education, they ensured that they would continue to be risk-takers,
innovators, successful competitors in their cooperative marketplace. This
approach, which they supported as a necessary business expense and investment,
is what we today call "a learning organization."
A learning organization is an organization which is
continually expanding its capacity to create its future, through learning as
well as earning. Cooperatives used to do this - it was how they got started and
what they had to do to create a new niche market in a very difficult business
environment. They started at the most basic level and grew into a system that is
locally, regionally, nationally and globally competitive, ensuring a place and
future for member-owned and controlled business. But we have gradually lost much
of our inherent advantage.
Today, we tend to follow the rest of the business world
through one management "innovation" after another: total quality
management (TQM), re-engineering, reinvention, systems models, networking vs.
hierarchical models of leadership and management, niche marketing, customer
orientation, shared profits, incentives, give-backs, adding value and even
trying new technologies to sell things. We lament that our democratic system
sometimes slows us up, because it takes too long to get the buy-in of members
who don't understand where we need to go on their behalf. We try to
"communicate" more, we provide (what sometimes amounts to remedial)
education to attract and train directors, we increase our legal and lobbying
budgets and we try to find new ways of explaining our unusual capitalization and
financial structures to new types of investors. Sometimes we even consider
giving up the cooperative business model because we aren't sure if it is up to
the challenge of today's business environment.
Isn't "adding value" what we were doing when we
started? Weren't cooperatives learning organizations, innovators, risk-takers,
networkers, partnership-builders, profit-sharers, customer service providers,
niche marketers, investor-controlled business innovations? Wasn't the system able to
transcend local, regional and national boundaries when it was the appropriate
and necessary business thing to do (still done in service to members)? How did
we do this? What was the key ingredient? Could it have been ongoing cooperative
education? Was this the reason it was included as a principle?
Where, then, do we go from here? Not backwards, except to
learn what we can from the past. Just as the originators of any cooperative -
whether in Rochdale, England in the 1840s, the Upper Midwest states, the West
and East Coasts in the early 1900s or in the Midwest again in the 1990s - we in
the cooperative system need to rethink the commitment to cooperative education.
We need to capitalize on the investments made in "the
agencies": the university centers, endowed chairs, state and national
councils and USDA. We need to continually re-invest in them to keep them strong
and future-focused, emphasizing the "learning organization" aspect of
a member-formed, owned, and controlled business. But we also need to make a
stronger commitment within our cooperative businesses themselves to make sure we
have a membership which fully understands the power and potential of a
member-owned and controlled business in today's global competitive economic
environment.
We may need to set priorities: can we, or do we, need to
educate the pubic about cooperatives, which some co-op education advocates
believe should be the top priority? If we want to build strong, informed,
dedicated members, at what age do we start? What is the best access point, the
optimal curriculum, the most efficient and effective delivery system? What does
the content for cooperative education in the 21st century need to be?
Some of these questions are being addressed by the agencies,
but that is not enough. We need the cooperatives themselves to re-claim their
roots as authentic learning organizations. A key step in this direction would be
a renewed commitment to member education, as part of a business investment in
cooperative education. This may be necessary to, as Torgerson suggested,
"keeping the member-owners informed, involved and empowered so that
benefits are clearly oriented and delivered to them." 
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