Part Three: Co-operatives Encouraging Youth Involvement
Historically, the co-operative movement has always demonstrated an interest in communicating its messages and providing its benefits to young people. The Rochdale Pioneers, shortly after their store was opened, recognized what they could do on behalf of young people and formed a youth study club for them. In 1853, as their Society prospered, they proposed that 10% of their surpluses (or profits) should be allocated for educational activities, many of them for the young. For better or worse, the UK Registrar opposed such generosity but agreed to a lesser commitment to 2½ per cent of their surpluses, still a significant percentage that few co-ops today can match.
Education of young people, in fact, became one of the key aspects of the co-operative movement as it emerged in industrializing Europe in the nineteenth century, a carry-over from the influences of the Enlightenment and the thoughts of Robert Owen; the result of the impact of such thinkers as St. Simon, Charles Fourier, Bishop Nikolai Grundtvig, Freidrich Raiffeisen, Luigi Luzzatti, Alphonse Desjardins, and Charles Gide.
The commitment to education, broadly conceived – a commitment that went far beyond “competency training” – was a hallmark of the consumer movement as it emerged in the United Kingdom and most other countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sparking the formation of co-operative colleges, training institutes, and adult education programmes. As some cases in this book demonstrate, that tradition still flourishes.
The community-based co-operative banks, such as credit unions, have often had special programmes to encourage youth to save and to understand the value of thrift. That, too, as other cases demonstrate, is still evident. Many rural co-operatives around the world have developed youth clubs and sponsored a wide range of youth activities aimed at teaching good agricultural practices and at encouraging young people to stay on the farms. Many housing co-operatives have special educational programmes for the children in their midst. The worker co-operative movement, as the forgoing section has shown, has been arguably the most open to youth involvement and empowerment…and young people have been easily attracted to the idea of worker co-operative, perhaps signalling the beginnings of a “golden age” in that movement’s development. Less evident in the following, but ubiquitous within the movement, all kinds of co-operatives have developed scholarship and bursary programmes to help young people with their academic and technical studies.
The case studies that follow give examples of youth activities sponsored by various co-operative organisations, though one can also see ways in which government involvement is also significant. As among other age groups, co-operatives among youth are a reflection of many trends, pressures and circumstances in a society at a given time. Little in the co-operative world, young or old, happens in isolation.
