Why “Economic Cooperative”?
Cooperative Economics is the idea of people working together to provide for the essentials of everyday living. In this case, cooperative refers to businesses collaborating to further business education and community engagement. This is accomplished by taking a mixture of organizations, both large and small, and pooling their knowledge and resources for the purpose of personal, professional and regional growth.
Definition of Cooperative
-adjective
1. working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit.
2. demonstrating a willingness to cooperate
3. pertaining to economic cooperation: a cooperative business.
4. involving or denoting an educational program comprising both classroom study and on-the-job or technical training.
-noun
5. a jointly owned enterprise engaging in the production or distribution of goods or the
supplying of services, operated by its members for their mutual benefit.
Article on Cooperative Economics
Written By: Ron Watkins
Published In: New Coalition News & Views
Publication Date: April 1, 2006
Publisher: The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change
"In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." -- Booker T. Washington
Historically, when faced with limited access to institutional financing, most oppressed ethnic groups, including African-Americans, have devised ways to finance their projects from within their own groups. Often, small groups organize and pool their money.
In China these groups are called "Hui," the Koreans call them "kye," the Japanese "Tanomoshi," and in parts of West Africa and the Caribbean they are called "Susu." In the United States, black immigrants from the Caribbean have enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates using a form of the susu and leveraging this practice to establish successful credit unions.
As early as the mid-1700s, African-Americans began to form self-help or "mutual aid" societies. In his book Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), John Sibley Butler notes that in 1778, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, who later founded the A.M.E. Church, organized one of the first mutual aid societies, The Free African Society, in Philadelphia. Over the next 30 years, it became the prototype for hundreds of self-help and benevolent organizations.
Several secret self-help societies also came into being during this period, the largest and most prestigious being the Prince Hall Masons. Other prominent secret societies were the Grand United Order of Old Fellows, The Knights of Pythias, and the Grand United Order of True Reformers. Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association was an outgrowth of this self-help movement. The mutual aid and secret societies gave birth to a wide range of business enterprises, including churches, banks, insurance companies, and most independent black colleges and universities.
No group can truly prosper without a strong economic base that creates jobs for its members. Some black churches still maintain some of the principles of the early self-help societies through "building funds" and social service organizations. But the emphasis that once was placed on entrepreneurial development and economic empowerment has been sidelined.
The fourth principle of Kwanzaa, "Ujamaa" (cooperative economics), has as its goal "to build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together." If the African-American community today made the same commitment and focused the same energies on economic development that it did yesterday in the fight for civil rights, our economic empowerment could be fully realized.