Instructions: Read the following information about co-ops.
When you walk through the doors of a food co-op, you experience the hospitality of owners and staff, the smells of fresh and wholesome foods, and a sense of community that you just don’t get from conventional grocery stores.
About co-ops:
A cooperative is an enterprise that is owned and democratically controlled by its owners.
Cooperatives use the one owner/one vote system (not the one-vote-per-share system used by most businesses). This ensures that people, not capital, control the organization.
Co-ops empower individuals and encourage healthier and stronger communities by enabling people to pool their resources and share risks.
Co-ops are the fastest growing socio-economic movement in the world. They exist in virtually every sector of the economy including agriculture, financial services, and housing.
There are approximately 10 000 cooperatives and credit unions in Canada alone providing products and services to 18 million owners!
Hamilton has a car sharing cooperative, a developing renewable energy co-op, and the Canadian Co-operative Association, among many others.
While each co-op is unique, they are all ownership-based, driven by social as well as economic concerns, and guided by principles, including equality and solidarity.
- Cooperative grocers play an important role in communities across the country as purveyors of local, organic and sustainable foods.
- Food co-ops spend 3 times more on locally-sourced products, give 3 times more to charity, sell far more organics, and pay significantly better local wages & benefits.
- On average, they support over 150 local farms and other producers. For every dollar spent at a food co-op, 1.6 times more money is generated in the local economy!
Yet our experience of food co-ops is that they are still affordable and beautiful places to shop – because owner benefits come before shareholder profits.
Source: https://mustardseed.coop/about/about-co-ops/
Anglais pré-collégial © 2023 by Rebecca Peters, Cégep Édouard-Montpetit/Entente Canada-Québec is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
