Image: Alessandra Stråberg, Chief Economist at Länsförsäkringar
Innovation is gathering strength at the highest levels of the global cooperative movement, and it has the potential to reshape how every cooperative and mutual on earth does business. At the inaugural CM50 Leader’s Summit in Brussels in late June, 80 visionary CEOs and leaders from 28 countries across 5 continents converged with a single, audacious goal: to build a new global economy. Together, this group represents a combined, cautious US$500 billion in joint turnover, giving them the financial muscle and scale to push the boundaries of what cooperative business can achieve.
Facilitated by the International Cooperative Alliance, the Cooperative and Mutuals 50 (CM50) gathers together leaders from some of the world’s largest cooperative and mutual businesses. The initiative was launched in November 2025, during the 2025 World Social Summit in Doha, Qatar, and this first summit now marks the start of a long-term commitment of CEOs in the movement to position cooperatives at the centre of efforts to build a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable global economy. The group aims to nearly double the total global cooperative and mutual business turnover from US$2.7 trillion to US$5 trillion a year.
“This is a powerful new chapter for the global cooperative movement," said Jeroen Douglas, ICA Director and co-chair of the CM50 initiative. "The energy in the room proved that when cooperative leaders unite, we don’t just discuss the future we build it. We are the Architects of the New Global Economy.”
His fellow co-chair Shaun Tarbuck noted that “At the core of the CM50 is a powerful value proposition for cooperative and mutual leaders: by working closely together and scaling projects across markets, capital, digital spaces, and food systems, we do more than just strengthen our businesses. Through these deepening relationships, we ultimately uplift the families and communities we serve every day.”
Five Ambitious Commitments for the Movement
At the centre of the summit was a set of five concrete, scaled up commitments, aimed at creating a cooperative digital and social ecosystem:
- A Cooperative Digital Marketplace: Building a platform used daily by 150,000 enterprises.
- The 'Cloud Coop' Infrastructure: Creating a dedicated cooperative digital commons used daily by at least 100,000 enterprises.
- Planetary Health: Moving 500 million people toward a healthy, sustainable diet that protects both people and the planet.
- Future-Proofed Leadership: Training the next 4,000 cooperative leaders at the highest level by building a world-class, global academic infrastructure.
- Crisis Reconstruction: Deploying the movement's capacity to help communities and countries rebuild after crises in at least five major global contexts.
These commitments will bring together its members across every geography and sector towards practical action.
One of the most energising and critical elements of the CM50 Leaders' Summit was hearing directly from members about innovation and resilience underway across the movement. Over two days, leaders shared examples that demonstrated the leading force of cooperatives and provided concrete ideas for scaling, from Amul in India extending its model into new territory and Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia commanding premium prices through certified organic production, to a local energy cooperative in Germany financing a football club's stadium roof through solar panel returns and Coopercitrus in Brazil showing what cooperative trade infrastructure can do at scale when built around member ownership rather than investor extraction.
Central to the success of the CM50 is it being fit for purpose in the world we live in. This world, as our keynote speakers told the Summit, has shifted considerably.
Opening speaker Alessandra Stråberg, Chief Economist at Länsförsäkringar (a major Swedish group of 23 independent, customer-owned regional insurance and banking companies), outlined how the world has shifted from globalisation and cooperation to nationalism, protection, and conflict, and beneath this geopolitics, climate change, demographic transformation and AI are reshaping the world before us. Her call to action: stop being frozen by what cannot be controlled and focus on what can, and keep moving. Growth is the best crisis tool any cooperative has.
Kristof De Spiegeleer, the CEO of OurWorld and CTO of the CM50, closed the Summit by taking this argument into the digital age. We are living in the AI revolution, he said, and the question is not whether it will happen but rather whether cooperatives will be shaped by it or shape it themselves. Augmented Collective Intelligence, data sovereignty, and ownership are key. Together they made a single argument, what Alessandra called ‘resilience capitalism’: long-term ownership, democratic governance, and freedom from earnings-focused management.
In this fast-moving world, cooperatives and mutuals will need to innovate and collaborate: the CM50 is an engine designed to pull the entire cooperative movement into this high-tech, highly integrated future.
How your cooperative can take part
The innovations, digital marketplaces, and data tools built by CM50 will eventually flow down to benefit cooperatives of all sizes. To ensure your cooperative is at the table and directly aligned with these massive shifts, encourage your CEO to look into the CM50 initiative, champion these targets, and bring your cooperative’s unique strengths into this history-making global team. Together, we are building the $5 trillion cooperative future.
Find out more about the initiative at CM50.coop
