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By Charles Gould, Director-General, ICA
ICA is delighted with the success of our primary objective for the International Year of Co-operatives, which was to raise public awareness of the co-operative as a serious, values-based member-controlled model of enterprise. We wanted to take advantage of the channels of communication our members have with the public and their members, to push out a common image—the logo and slogan of the IYC—to surprise the public with our scope, our depth, our presence in every sector. The IYC logo appeared in newsletters and magazines and advertisements, and on shopping bags and products and merchandise, and even at the top of Mount Everest.
This was such a great success, in fact, that we are now in discussions with our Board about extending our use of a common image, creating an image reminiscent of the IYC logo, but for the Co-operative Decade.
This past year ICA also laid the foundation for a successful digital public awareness strategy, by acquiring the primary registrar and the registry operator for .coop. We anticipate enlarging .coop beyond its current role as the top level internet domain for co-operative enterprises, and to prepare it to become the digital brand for online and mobile technology for co-operatives and co-operators.
We had also set the objective for the International Year of raising our awareness with a very particular audience: policy makers. We saw great results in this area, too, most notably with the inclusion of co-operatives in the final agreed text from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20—last Summer. This is an important foundational document for our policy work, establishing co-operatives as central in sustainability discussions, one of the core strategies in our Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade.
We launched the World Co-operative Monitor during the IYC, a relaunch in fact of our Global 300 Report. The database has now been expanded to over 2,000 co-operatives, and we still report on the 300 largest, so that we have a focused attention-grabber with the mainstream business press. We’re not satisfied yet, however. In 2013, we want to grow the Monitor to a database of 5000.
When the Monitor is taken together with stories.coop, which was another important initiative of the International Year, it tells a rich story of the diversity and impact of the co-operative model of enterprise.
We’re not willing to let this great momentum that the IYC has generated simply come to an end. We anticipated success with the International Year early on, and so, as the Year was beginning, we set in motion a process to draft a Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade, which our membership unanimously approved at our close of the Year in Manchester UK.
With the Blueprint, we intend to use the base of this IYC, the exposure of the limits of other models of business, the global desire for sustainability, to raise co-operative awareness and impact, and to step up to take our full and rightful place in the global economy. With appreciation to ICA’s members for making 2012 such a watershed year, and looking forward to working together throughout 2013 to fulfil our shared vision.
Photo: Director-General Charles Gould at Co-operatives United with José Graziano Da Silva, Director General of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
