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Co-operate to Transform Society.
We, young co-operative leaders and members, believe in the co-operative principles and cooperative values. We believe that the co-operative movement must be at the center of creating a more sustainable and equal economy. This economy should be built around principles of democracy, social justice and solidarity.
Our vision and expectation of the global cooperative movement is for it to transform an economy based on the individual accumulation of wealth and power into a system that serves the collective wellbeing of people and our planet through redistribution of resources and common ownership. We believe that there is an alternative to the capitalist economy. The cooperative movement needs to be at the forefront of creating this. This means not emulating its institutions, looking to its leadership and theory for guidance, or staffing the management teams of our co-operatives with subscribers to neoliberal philosophy.
We suggest that we will only be successful in creating a more just and sustainable economy by bringing the perspective and leadership of people most impacted by economic recession, climate change, and political instability to the heart of our decision-making structures. This necessitates a movement that works from the bottom up not the top down, where a diversity of voices are valued and heard, a movement that it is fully participatory and democratic. It is important our conferences and events / bring cooperative values into practice.
Our experience at the Summit has demonstrated to us the strength of the cooperative movement, the scalability and resiliency of the cooperative model, and has provided us the opportunity to work with cooperativists from around the world to collaborate and increase the integrity and impact of our collective work. However, our visions and expectations for the cooperative movement, economy, and community should be further represented in this event.
As we believe that this perspective is not only that of cooperative youth, but is shared more broadly with others present here and within the larger cooperative movement, we suggest the following:
More broadly, large cooperative institutions and businesses should strengthen their inter- and intra- generational solidarity and cooperation by committing funding, knowledge and resources to youth and other marginalized people. This could occur in a number of ways:
We thank you for listening to our voice and hope you will join us in making this vision a reality. We know that similar sentiments were shared by youth during the 2012 Summit, as well as in other national and regional spaces. We aim for these recommendations continue on this dialogue to strengthen our movement. For our part, we commit to continuing our organizing work as international cooperative youth through the ICA cooperative youth network, and we will continue to communicate with you, the broader cooperative movement, about our evolving visions and work. In cooperation!