Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change

Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change

Author: Marcela Vásquez-Léon

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0816536295

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition. The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities. The stories in Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment. Contributors: Luis Barros Brian J. Burke Charles Cox Luis Alberto Cuéllar Gómez Miguel Ricardo Dávila Ladrón de Guevara Elisa Echagüe Timothy J. Finan Andrés González Aguilera Sonia Carolina López Cerón Joana Laura Marinho Nogueira João Nicédio Alves Nogueira Jessica Piekielek María Isabel Ramírez Anaya Rodrigo F. Rentería-Valencia Lilliana Andrea Ruiz Marín Marcela Vásquez-León


Grassroots Development in Latin America & the Caribbean

Grassroots Development in Latin America & the Caribbean

Author: Robert Wasserstrom

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Case studies of social change and popular participation through self help associations and cooperatives in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Jamaica, Mexico and Paraguay - based on interviews, covers the running of a consumers cooperative, a savings and credit club organized by woman workers, and a rural development-oriented credit cooperative; looks at an urban area textile production cooperative, small farm-based agricultural cooperatives, workers self management in a furniture industry, and a women's theatre. Bibliography, photographs.


Getting Ahead Collectively

Getting Ahead Collectively

Author: Albert O. Hirschman

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1483158225

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America is a seven-chapter book that first discusses certain types of developmental sequences in Latin America. The emergence of cooperative action and the intangible benefits and costs of cooperatives are then explained. The book also explores the ""intermediate"" organizations that have grown all over Latin America to help low-income people better their condition. The last chapter details the social and political effects of a dense network of grassroots development efforts.


Cooperatives and Community Development

Cooperatives and Community Development

Author: Vanna Gonzales

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317850572

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In celebration of cooperatives’ contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come. This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.


Grassroots Engagement and Social Justice through Cooperative Extension

Grassroots Engagement and Social Justice through Cooperative Extension

Author: Nia Imani Fields

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2022-08-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1628954647

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Grassroots Engagement and Social Justice through Cooperative Extension grows out of a commitment to the belief that Cooperative Extension professionals can and should be deeply engaged with the communities they work in to improve life—individually and collectively. Rooted in an understanding of the history and development of Extension, the authors focus on contemporary efforts to address systemic inequities. They offer an alternative to the “expert” model that would have Extension educators provide information detached from the difficult and sometimes contentious issues that shape community work. These essays highlight Extension’s role in and responsibility for culturally relevant community education that is rooted in democratic practices and social justice. The ultimate aim of this book is to offer a vision for the future of Extension as its practitioners continue to reach for cultural competence necessary to address issues of systemic injustice in the communities they serve and of which they are a part.


Collective Courage

Collective Courage

Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-13

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0271064269

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.


Cooperatives and Social Innovation

Cooperatives and Social Innovation

Author: D. Rajasekhar

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9811588805

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book discusses social innovations by cooperatives from the Asia and Pacific region. Social innovations emerge when the state and market in developing countries find it difficult to solve problems such as poverty, hunger, ill health, poor education systems, inadequate drinking water and poor sanitation. These countries also face barriers to economic growth such as climate change, poor governance, unequal opportunities and social exclusion. This volume therefore addresses the following questions. What are the distinctive features of social innovations by cooperatives? How social innovations bring in changes in the process and outcome of development? After presenting theories of social innovation and a critical review of cooperatives and social innovation, the book presents 15 chapters on social innovations by cooperatives in the Asia Pacific region. These social innovations are related to health insurance, community based tourism, disaster response, climate smart agriculture, use of social media for youth empowerment, training for the emergence of second-line leaders in cooperatives, social inclusion through innovative finance, profitable marketing of organic produce to strengthen economic status of small farmers, digital auction and value addition for income security of farmer members, collaboration between cooperative members and workers for the mutual benefit, worker cooperatives, women leadership and participation, building union-cooperative partnership in finance and rating of cooperatives to promote transparency and accountability. A chapter on innovative services of cooperatives during the time of Covid19 is also included. This volume will be quite significant for co-operators, researchers, teachers, practitioners and policy-makers at the global level. The theme is relevant for international development community and national cooperatives with concern for their communities, which is the seventh cooperative principle of International Cooperative Alliance and the Sustainable Development Goal of the UN.