| Editor: Bruno Roelants is consultant on cooperatives and international development. He is the former Director General of the International Cooperative Alliance (April 2018 – February 2023). Previously, he was Secretary General of CICOPA as of 2002 and of its regional organisation CECOP CICOPA-Europe as of 2006. Until 2005, he worked on development projects in China, India and Eastern Europe, and coordinated the cooperative negotiating group for the ILO Promotion of Cooperatives Recommendation 2002 (n° 193). He has a Master in labour studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (Rotterdam University). He has lectured on cooperatives in Italy and is co-author of Cooperatives, Territories and Jobs (CECOP, 2011), as well as Capital and the Debt Trap – Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). He edited the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) report Cooperative Growth for the 21st Century (ICA, 2013) and Cooperatives and the World of Work (Routledge, 2020). Other contributors: Paloma Arroyo Sanchez is currently advisor in legislative topics, expert in worker cooperatives, and member of the Association of Cooperative Studies of Madrid and of the Cooperatives Commission of AECA (Spanish Association of Accounting and Business Administration). From 1988 to 2023 she was Director of COCETA, the Spanish Confederation of Worker Cooperatives, having represented the organisation on the Board of CECOP-CICOPA Europe. She is a graduate in Labour Relations from the Social School of Madrid and holds a degree in Law from the Complutense University of Madrid, a Master’s degree in European Communities from the Diplomatic School of Madrid and a Postgraduate degree in Gender Equality from the Complutense University of Madrid. She also holds a Master’s degree in Cooperative Accounting and Taxation from the University of Valencia. She has spoken at various congresses and conferences in Spain and Europe on the subjects of worker cooperatives, gender equality and public procurement. Kageki Asakura is the Director of Creators 440Hz cooperative and Tekisen Democratic University in Japan. He has worked in both the practice and study of democratic education. He taught at the oldest free Japanese democratic school and founded the first Japanese democratic university, Tekisen Democratic University. He is keen to network free democratic schools and universities internationally and has been an active member of the International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) for three decades. He studied democratic education, history of education and ethnography of the youth and is a pioneer scholar of “self-ology”, a study about the self. He supports worker cooperatives such as Creators 440Hz which he calls “democratic working organizations”. He has been invited as a speaker to many international conferences, such as the European Council’s World Forum for Democracy (France), BEYOND UNIVERSITY (Turkey), IDEC (Finland, Taiwan, India, Ukraine, USA, etc.), International Conference of Creative Education (Russia), Korean Democratic Education Conference (Korea). Lynda-May Azibi is Delegate for Public and Institutional Affairs at the Confédération générale des Scop et des Scic (worker and social cooperatives) in Paris. Her work involves lobbying public and political decision-makers at national and European level, with the aim of intervening favourably on the legal and regulatory framework applicable to worker cooperatives (Scop) and general interest cooperative societies (Scic) and developing the attractiveness of the cooperative model in France. Béatrice Barras, after graduating in speech therapy in Paris in 1970, joined forces with her partner Gérard Barras in in the restoration of the ruined hamlet of Viel Audon, through youth work. In 1975, she bought the Saint-Pierreville woolen mill while continuing her work as a speech therapist. She was hired by the cooperative Ardelaine in 1986 to work on communication, while also studies and fund-raising for development projects. She was very active in the cooperative life and in relations with the networks. Later, she structured the ‘human resources’ department. Memory keeper, she has always thought that she should write, and she has done so by three books published by REPAS. Today, she is classifying the Ardelaine’s archives for deposit with the Ardèche department, and coordinates the COOPROUTE network. Sven Bartilsson, senior advisor and innovation strategist at Coompanion Sverige, has been involved in cooperative development since 1990. His longest-held position was as CEO of Coompanion Göteborgsregionen, the cooperative development organisation in West Sweden. There, he and his colleagues first met the founders of Vägen ut, and he has continued to follow and support Vägen ut’s development ever since. Their joint work with Vägen ut led him to serve for a period as director of the European Social Franchise Network. Hazel Corcoran, B.A. (Hon.), M.A., J.D. is the Executive Director of the Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation (CWCF). She has been involved for over three decades in all aspects of worker cooperative support including advisory services, research, writing, capitalization and advocacy. Trained as a lawyer and fluently bilingual (English, French, plus some Spanish), Hazel has worked in the cooperative movement since 1992. She is passionate about serving as a change agent to promote a more prosperous, sustainable community through economic and social development and public policy. She has served on numerous boards, including Calgary Co-op, Connect First Credit Union, le Conseil canadien de la cooperation et de la mutualité (CCCM), Western Canada Labour-Worker Co-operative Council, the Big (Co-op) Idea Rainbow Foundation, Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada, and she is currently on the boards of The Co-operators Group Ltd., CICOPA, and Prairie Sky Cohousing Co-operative. Maurício da Costa is the President and one of the founding members as lawyer of Cooperflor, one of the cooperatives of the Uniforja cooperative group, one of the largest worker buyouts in the world. He is also the President of the Brazilian cooperative organisation Unisol for the São Paulo state. He studied law and is trained as a lawyer. Nicolás Dimarco is one of the founding members of Farox, a software development cooperative based in Argentina, and a founding member of two networks of technology cooperatives: the Federación Argentina de Cooperativas de Tecnología, Innovación y Conocimiento (FACTTIC) and the global community of technology cooperatives around the world called Patio. He began his career as a developer in a software consultancy at the age of 18. After working on various projects, at the age of 25 he identified the need for a change in his career path. So, after a year as a freelancer, he joined colleagues and friends from university to found a worker cooperative. Currently, he focuses on the commercial and business development area of his cooperative, actively participating in the collaborative networks he helped build together with colleagues from other cooperatives. Passionate about cooperative entrepreneurship, he dedicates his daily work to contributing to the development and promotion of Farox, FACTTIC and Patio. Lucila Dominguez is an editor at the University of Buenos Aires and, since 2019, a member of the worker cooperative Nayra, where she works in management, liaison, business development and administration. Since the founding of the cooperative, Nayra has been a member of the Federación Argentina de Cooperativas de Trabajo de Tecnología, Innovación y Conocimiento (FACTTIC). She is also a member of Patio, the global network of technology-based cooperatives, where she actively participates in different network building and decision-making spaces. She currently represents her cooperative in both networks, which, day by day, show her that another way of connecting with work, people and the world is possible. Suzanne Doucet, Architect MOAQ, aims to contribute to the advancement of inclusive and social architecture. She has been working in the field of the built environment for over twenty years, developing her practice in a context of awareness-raising, ideation and action-research. As a co-founding member of Pivot, architecture cooperative, she works with various community players, developing a participatory design approach. This approach is part of a design methodology that recognises the cooperative movement’s values of mutual aid and democracy. In recent years, she has worked on renovation and new construction projects for homes, community centres, artists’ studios and shelters for the homeless in Montreal. She has also worked for over ten years as a project manager and assistant professor in universities, and regularly participates in courses and conferences as a lecturer. Ander Etxeberria Otadui was born and lives in the municipality of Mondragón, which gives its name to the Corporation. He joined the Group more than twenty-five years ago as a trainee at Otalora, MONDRAGON’s cooperative and management training centre. Subsequently he worked for eleven years as head of personnel at the technological research cooperative IKERLAN. For the last nine years he has been the Director of Cooperative Dissemination at MONDRAGON, based in Otalora. Every year he receives around two thousand people from all over the world who want to find out about MONDRAGON’s Cooperative Experience. He also takes part in conferences at universities and other forums all over the world sharing the Experience. He studied Technical Engineering at the University of Mondragon and Sociology at the University of Deusto (Bilbao). Hyungsik Eum has been actively engaged in the cooperative movement and in the social and solidarity economy (SSE). After working as Data Analyst at CICOPA from 2015 to 2024, he served as Strategy and Statistics Coordinator, then Director of Research at the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). Since April 2025, he has been serving as Technical Officer in the Cooperative, Social and Solidarity Economy Unit of the International Labour Organization (ILO). His areas of expertise include the development of statistics on cooperatives and the SSE, research on work and employment within cooperatives and SSE entities, the institutionalization of the SSE and emerging organizational forms. He is the author or co-author of several key publications on cooperatives and employment, including Cooperatives and Employment: A Global Report (CICOPA, 1st edition 2014; 2nd edition 2017) and Cooperatives in Industrial and Service Sectors in the Asia-Pacific Region: Models, Work and Employment, Ecosystem and Public Policies (ICA AP & CICOPA, 2019). He is also co-editor of Cooperatives and the World of Work (Routledge, 2019). Isabel Faubert Mailloux is the Executive Director of Réseau COOP and has been working with worker cooperatives for 20 years. She is particularly passionate about the democratisation of workplaces and the processes of participation in collective decision-making in companies. She is co-author of five research papers produced by the Chaire de coopération Guy-Bernier (Italian social cooperatives, cooperatives in aboriginal environments, fair trade and social economy financing instruments). She has a Master of Business Administration (Executive MBA) specialising in collective enterprises, a graduate certificate in cooperative management, a certificate in entrepreneurship and a Bachelor of Political Science specialising in International Relations. Mauro Frangi is CFI’schief executive officer. He has been a cooperative entrepreneur based in Como (Northern Italy) since 1981. Since 1998, he has been President and CEO of numerous consortium structures providing service, technical assistance, management and financial advice to support the development of cooperatives, both at territorial and national level. He has been President of Confcooperative Como since 2004 and since 2014 of Confcooperative Insubria, which associates cooperative enterprises operating in the provinces of Como and Varese. Since 2010 he has flanked these activities with roles of responsibility in the main national financial structures dedicated to cooperatives and in particular, since 2015, he has been President of ‘Cooperfidi Italia’, a financial intermediary supervised by the Bank of Italy, specialised in supporting cooperatives’ access to credit. In CFI, he was President from 2016 to December 2024 and currently holds the position of CEO. Saji Gopinath is Professor at the Indian Institute of Management at Kozhikode, in the Indian State of Kerala. He previously was Vice Chancellor of Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation and Technology and of APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University, as well as Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala. He also held several positions as Director, Dean or Professor in academic institutions. He has a PhD in Management Studies and Finance from the Indian Institute of Science. He won several awards including the Kerala Management Association Technology Leadership Award and the Calicut Management Association Management Leadership Award, as well as the Top Performer Award issued by the Department of Industrial Promotion and Internal Trade, Startup India, Government of India. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard is Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City University of New York. Author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (2014), she is a widely published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political Economy, popular economic literacy, and community-based approaches to justice. She is a member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA; the International Cooperative Alliance Committee on Cooperative Research; a Faculty Fellow and Mentor with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University School of Management and Labour Relations; an affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives (University of Saskatchewan, Canada); and adjunct with the International Centre for Cooperative Management, Sobey School of Business, St. Mary’s University (Halifax, Canada). She is also a past board member of the Association of Cooperative Educators; a past fellow with the Centre on Race and Wealth at Howard University; and a member and past president of the National Economic Association. Giuseppe Guerini is President of Cooperatives Europe and Vice President of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) for Europe. He is the former President of CECOP-CICOPA Europe, the European Confederation of Industrial and Social Cooperatives and of Vice President of CICOPA. He is Vice President on Social Economy Europe, which represents 4.3 million social economy enterprises and organisations in Europe. He is member of the Board of Confcooperative, in charge of relations with European institutions and international representative organisations in partnership with Alleanza Cooperative Italiane, the permanent coordination of the three largest Italian cooperative associations, namely Agci, Confcooperative and Legacoop, representing around 90% of the Italian cooperative movement with a turnover of around €150 billion (USD 156 billion), approximately 1.150.000 workers and more of 12 million members. He is the Spokesperson for the Social Economy category of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), being a member of EESC since 2010, dealing in particular with the social economy and cooperatives, employment, finance for SMEs and social enterprises. He is Vice President of the Fondazione Comunità Bergamasca, a philanthropic foundation that provides funding for the social and cultural sectors in Bergamo (Italy). Ashley Holst is a cooperative development and economic development technical specialist based in Washington, DC. She recently held the role of Chief of Party of the Cooperative Leadership Advocacy and Engagement project at Global Communities, which supported Worker Cooperatives in the US, Kenya and Guatemala. She has a special interest in Research, Learning and Collaboration. Prior to joining the Cooperative Development Programme, she worked on development topics including sexual and reproductive health, youth, and economic capacity building. She started her career working in the Dominican Republic before returning to Washington, DC. She earned a Master’s Degree in International Development, specializing in Monitoring & Evaluation from American University in Washington, DC and an Undergraduate Degree in Sociology and International Political Science from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. Gabriel Isola is the new Director General of Rural Development of the Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries of Uruguay. He is an Agronomist Engineer graduated from the University of the Republic in Uruguay (UDELAR) and graduated with honours from the Master of Cooperative Administration at the University of Costa Rica (UCR). He has been a teacher, researcher and university extensionist. He was technical referent of the Federation of Production Cooperatives of Uruguay (FCPU) and General Coordinator of the Uruguayan Confederation of Cooperative Entities (CUDECOOP). He has also been responsible for Territorial Impact and Cooperative Development of Cooperatives of the Americas – International Cooperative Alliance Region; promoter of the Network of Cooperative Incubators of the Americas; planning and economic development advisor to local governments in Uruguay, as well as consultant to IICA, FAO, and RECM, among others. Seungkwon Jang is a professor of organization theory at the Division of Business Administration, and currently Dean of the Graduate School of Impact Management and Chair of Cooperative Management at the Graduate School, Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He earned his PhD in organization theory from Lancaster University Management School, UK. He was President of the Korean Society for Cooperative Studies and the editor-in-chief of the Korean Journal of Cooperative Studies. He has published papers and edited books of organization theory and cooperative management including the Management of Consumer Co-operatives in Korea (Routledge, 2020), Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential (Academic Press, 2020), The Consumer Co-operative Sector (Routledge, 2023), East Asian Ethical Life and Socio-Economic Transformation in the Twenties-First Century (Routledge, 2024). His research interests include organization theory, cooperative management, organizational innovation, Fair Trade, and social economy. Pamela Kaburu is a Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) professional with over 13 years of experience, primarily with donor-funded programs. For the past decade, she has led the design and implementation of MERL frameworks, systems, and plans, acting as a key liaison with USAID MEL teams and ensuring successful reporting, evaluations, and data quality assessments. Her experience spans across multiple sectors such as agriculture, peace building, cooperatives, food security, youth, gender and livelihoods. She has experience in monitoring, evaluation, learning and research strategies and overseeing their implementation for a holistic approach to programming. She is result-oriented and passionate about telling impact stories. Her goal is to help maintain programme relevance through data and the story beyond numbers. She is deeply passionate about youth and women inclusion in development as vital drivers of sustainable development, having actively contributed to international discussions and publications on the subject. Her career in youth programming includes impactful work on the USAID Yes Youth Can! Project, the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation’s Youth Empowered for Success (YES!) program and USAID Cooperative Development Program, creating employment opportunities for Youth and Women through the Worker Cooperative Business Model. She graduated from Moi University with a First-Class Honors in Social Sciences. Slimane Lhaji isHead of Studies and Assistance to Cooperatives Division (2023) of the Moroccan Office of Cooperation Development (ODCO). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Mohamed V University, Rabat (1992). His passion for cooperatives led him to be a member of the editorial board of the Arabic-language magazine ATTAAWON (Cooperation) in 1994. He further enhanced his expertise by earning a Certificate in Cooperative Management from the Cooperative College of Malaysia in 1998. He began his career at ODCO in Rabat in 1994, rising to Deputy Administrator in 2002 and Regional Delegate in the city of Tangier by 2007. He became the Cooperative Accreditation Office Manager in 2010 and, later, Head of Legal Service (2014). He has contributed to the Moroccan Journal of Cooperatives (REMACOOP) and other publications, reflecting his dedication to supporting cooperatives across Morocco. Joe Marraffino is the New York State loan officer for the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, a 50 year-old nonprofit loan fund for cooperatives. Previously he supported a national coalition of worker cooperative professionals at the Democracy at Work Institute, and before that was the finance manager at the 12,000-member GreenStar Cooperative Market. From 2004 to 2010 he was a worker-owner at the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives – first as a baker, and then on the development and support team. He lives in Ithaca, New York. Adriana Menghi, H.B.A, M.Arch, is a candidate for the profession of architect. Her architectural interests lie at the intersection of biobased architecture and co-creation with communities. Her bilingual and multidisciplinary background has led her to study and research fields as varied as art history, holography, urban planning and landscape architecture, as well as participating in design-build projects using biosourced vernacular techniques. Today she brings this wealth of experience and her critical sense to the team at Pivot architecture cooperative. During her last two years at Pivot, she has led work teams to successfully complete architectural and community-based participatory ideation projects, as well as taking an active part in managing the cooperative’s affairs and getting it involved in the social economy ecosystem. Arildo Mota Lopes has a degree in geography. He began his professional career in 1979 as a bank clerk in São Paulo. In 1986 he worked as a vertical turner at Conforja, and became a militant member of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union as a grassroots director. In 1996 he was part of the workers’ association at the former Conforja in Diadema and in 1997 he helped set up the Uniforja cooperatives in the same city. In 2004, he helped set up UNISOL (Central de Cooperativas e Empreendimentos Solidários). He was a Uniforja cooperative member for over 25 years, his last position being Administrative Assistant at UNIFORJA. In 2007 he was invited by the President of the Brazilian Republic to join CNDES (Brazil’s National Council for Economic and Social Development), where he remained until 2016. In November 2011, he was elected president of CICOPA Americas for two terms. In 2017, he was elected president of UNICOPAS. In 2023, he was once again elected president of UNISOL. Osamu Nakano holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in comparative literature. After conducting historical research at the graduate school of New York University, he joined the Japan Workers’ Cooperative Union (JWCU) in 2014. He has been a board member and director of the international relations department at the JWCU since 2017. He has also served as a researcher of Japan Cooperative Alliance (2018-present), an apex organisation of all cooperative sectors in Japan, and visiting researcher of Tokyo University (2019-2021). He has served as a chairperson of CICOPA Asia and Pacific, the egional organisation of industrial and service cooperatives in the Asia-Pacific region that was established in November 2021, and a vice president of CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives. He has been secretary general of the JWCU since July 2024. He has a rich experience of giving lectures at various universities and international conferences. Angelica Peraza Martinez, B.Sc, M.Arch, candidate to the profession of architect. With a degree in architecture from the University of Montreal, she has chosen to focus her career on community and ecological projects. She believes that architecture comes to life through its users. She brings her analytical skills to bear on projects that strengthen the social fabric. Over the past two years, she has acquired expertise in the various stages of a project, from pre-conceptual studies to the administration of the construction contract. By focusing on the quality of the spaces she designs, both new construction and the renovation and conversion of buildings address issues of sustainable and inclusive design. Sanjay Pinto is a researcher focusing on racial, gender, and economic inequalities within the world of work and strategies for building grassroots worker power. His recent work includes survey research on conditions in Amazon warehouses and a mixed methods study of a peer education model for confronting gender-based violence in the janitorial industry. He is part of the Real Utopias Collective and a board member of Co-op Rhody, which is supporting the creation of BIPOC-led worker co-op cannabis dispensaries in the state of Rhode Island. For several years, he directed the programme on unions and worker ownership at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, and he is currently a fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago Center for Urban Economic Development and the Worker Institute at Cornell ILR. He has an M.Sc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. Alessandro Viola isCFI’s cooperatives business assessment Director. Graduate in economics, he was auditor and controller in two international companies, one of which a market leader. He has successively had 22 years of experience in CFI, institutional investor whose main objective has been to provide financial and management support to cooperatives established through business transfers to employees. He spent years on the field, in close contact with worker and social cooperatives. Since 2010, he has been in charge for CFI development and cooperatives business assessment, with 127 million euros invested to support 264 cooperatives, out of which 97 worker buyouts with 58 million euros. His main activities are business plan elaboration, action plan, management control, financial assessment and advising, monthly informative reports submitted to the board of directors, supervising a team of resource persons, training courses on budget analysis and cooperative model. Vangelis Vragoteris is a former VIOME worker (2015–2019). As a “KAPA Network” collaborator he participated in the CoopStarter 2.0 Project (2019) and the 1st Global Youth Forum on Cooperative Entrepreneurship (GYF20). Since 2020, he has been an ICA Youth Network voting member. He attended the ICA Research Conference in Athens (2022), where he participated in the roundtable discussion in the context of the proposed Model Law for Cooperatives in Greece: «Legislative deviations regarding the dual nature of cooperatives». Since 2023, he has been an instructor in the program “Contemporary Trends in Cooperative Management” at the Hellenic Open University’s Lifelong Learning Centre. He is pursuing a PhD at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, examining the potential application of the cooperative model in municipal solid waste management within the framework of the Circular Economy. Concurrently, he has worked as a researcher on the Erasmus+ project Social Economy Forces (SE4Ces). Siôn Whellens started work in cooperatives as a printing machine operator in 1982. He then worked in sales and marketing for Calverts in London, UK. Today, he is a worker cooperative organiser and advisor with the Principle Six partnership. He served on the UK’s Worker Cooperative Council from 2003 to 2022, the Board of Cooperatives UK from 2006 to 2011, and he was a board member of CECOP and CICOPA from 2016 to 2024, acting as CECOP’s Vice President for the North Western Islands of Europe. He is a founder member of workers.coop, a new UK-based worker cooperative federation, launched in 2023. His main focus is advising worker cooperatives on their practical governance, business and legal challenges. He believes the future of global worker cooperation lies in building stronger local and transnational political and intertrading links, and deepening our solidarity with working class economic and social justice movements. |