Upwards of 800 million people around the world have a direct ownership stake in the secret success story of the global economy - and, fortunately, greater metropolitan Brattleboro has more than its share of them.
That success story is, of course, the cooperative movement.
The latest tangible evidence of that success in Windham County is the new headquarters of the Brattleboro Food Co-op. It is no coincidence that this beautiful and life-affirming addition to downtown Brattleboro comes as the United Nations General Assembly celebrates 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives.
What's all the fuss about?
Well, co-ops have been the very embodiment of “corporate social responsibility” since at least a century before the phrase was invented.
According to the International Co-operative Alliance, cooperatives provide more than 100 million jobs around the world.
If you count credit unions (which are banks organized as cooperatives), then more people in the U.S. are member-owners of cooperatives than own shares in traditional profit-maximizing corporate entities. In Vermont, food co-ops are collectively the state's 25th biggest employer.
But if you're like me - an entity geek - then surely you will agree that what's really cool about co-ops are the fundamental elements that distinguish them from other forms of business enterprise.
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What makes a co-op a co-op is the lack of outside investors who own their slice of the business purely to receive a return on their investment.
A cooperative is owned, and democratically run on a one-person-one-vote basis, by the people who use and rely on the business.
At a consumer co-op like the grocery stores in Brattleboro and Putney, that's shoppers. At a worker co-op like the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, it's the employees.
At a credit union like the River Valley Credit Union, the depositors and the borrowers own the place. At a housing co-op, it's the residents. At an agricultural co-op, it's the farmers.
In other words, at a cooperative the people who depend on the business are the people who own it - all of it.
To look at it from a different angle, a cooperative takes what's best about the for-profit and the nonprofit sectors and leaves behind the disadvantages of each.
Co-ops are businesses and, as such, can be as entrepreneurial and creative as any investor-owned enterprise, but without the constraining obligation to maximize profits for investors.
Co-ops can be as virtuous as nonprofits but, unlike them, have actual owners (and thus accountability) and are freed from the “charitable purpose” limitation that applies to nonprofits with tax exemptions under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Both our state and our nation have a cooperator-in-chief. President Obama and his family were members of the regrettably-now-defunct Hyde Park Food Co-op in Chicago, while Governor Shumlin and his family are longstanding members of the Putney Food Co-op here in Vermont.
But co-ops have appeal across the political spectrum. They combine Democratic notions of communitarianism with the very Republican concepts of autonomy, self-help, and an “ownership society.”
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Those celebrating the new Brattleboro Food Co-op building will not just be paying tribute to the excellent design work of the award-winning Vermont architectural firm of Gossens Bachman in Montpelier.
They will also be honoring both a social and economic movement with ancient roots - after all, people were cooperating with each other, to their economic advantage, long before capitalism, and every other “ism,” was dreamed up - and also a movement that in its modern form began 168 years ago in Rochdale, England.
A mill town, Rochdale in 1844 was a Dickensian horror story in which textile artisans were displaced and consigned to miserable factory work at poverty wages as the Industrial Revolution swept through England.
A group of those disenfranchised weavers began meeting at a local pub and, inspired by the writings of utopian thinkers like Robert Owen, decided to pool their meager resources and start the first modern consumer cooperative.
They succeeded where others failed because of what they decided to do with the surplus generated by the co-op. They called it a “patronage refund” and divided it according to how much each member spent on purchases. This system struck people as fundamentally fair and vastly different from paying out profits according to how much people had invested.
The co-op started by those British weavers, Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, survives to this day as The Cooperative Group – a mighty co-op conglomerate with more than 6 million member-owners and 106,000 employees. It is the fifth biggest grocery retailer in the U.K.
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Just as traceable to the good work of the Rochdale Pioneers are lots of great things happening here in our area.
The Brattleboro Food Co-op has its new building, the Putney Food Co-op is thriving at age 71, and new food co-ops are emerging in the nearby New Hampshire towns of Keene and Walpole.
In April, Governor Shumlin signed Act 84 into law, strengthening the state's cooperative sector by making sure that only real co-ops may advertise themselves as such in Vermont.
But there is more work to be done.
Late last month, NorAm International Partners, an up-and-coming company that economic development officials in New Hampshire lured north from Massachusetts three years ago, announced that it was decamping for Kentucky and taking all 200 of its New Hampshire jobs with it.
Such is the way of things with investor-owned enterprises. But that is not the way a cooperative works.
Someday, you will see the governors of Vermont and New Hampshire place cooperatives front and center in their economic development strategies, and that's when we will know that co-ops are no longer the economy's secret success story.
Until then, be sure to join your local food co-op – and enjoy the fact that you're one in 800 million around the globe.