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Critique of elitist, individualist and extreme-collective economic systems, philosophies and practices

Synergism and sharing paradigm in collective productivity and prosperity.

Promotion of successful enterprises that are broad and popular in ownership, management and operation in the mold of genuine cooperatives

Promotion of bigger roles for cooperatives in major industries and the economy

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Cooperative's Essential Definition
and Clustering of Seven Principles

By Advocates of Cooperative Education on Synergism

ACES is a founding member-organization of Pamayanang SanibLakas ng Pilipinas. It was initially formed by the SanibLakas Foundation's program committee for Cooperative Education on Synergism (CES) from among the 100 or so signatories to the 2002 declaration for such advocacy.

This item was first published by the LightShare Digest in the form of a mini-poster one-page ad.

EVERY REAL COOPERATIVE is a social synergy of a definite set of personal enterprises jointly owned and jointly run. It is as sustainably strong as it sustainably lives this definition and it is as perennially weak as it perennially violates this definition.”

This has been the essential definition of cooperatives as promoted by the Advocates of Cooperative Education on Synergism (ACES), since 2002, when it made it the centerpiece of the Coop Code Month mini-poster circulated by the National Capital Region Union of Cooperatives (NCRUC), which later came to be called Union of Metro Manila Cooperatives (UMMC).

ACES has also been promoting the study of the Seven Principles of Cooperativism as clustered in close relationship to the above essential definition.

ACES promotes the serious study of all seven principles of cooperativism not in their numerical order, but within their essential clusters, numbering three in all. As explained on the basis of the above essential definition, this approach will hopefully help our fellow cooperators avoid the mechanical memorization of the seven items and understand, instead, the interrelations that spring from our definition of the cooperative.

Cluster A: ESSENCE PRINCIPLES:

Principle 1-- Voluntary & Open Membership. Voluntary because it has to be a real synergy of personal enterprises, with each member having real basis to be an active stakeholder. Open because this synergy is a social one, a community resource, not a private social club.

Principle 7-- Rootedness in the Community-- it serves the community members individually and collectively in economic, political and overall human development, and the community, in turn, makes the cooperative’s business(es) socially viable.

Principle 5-- Effective Education and Information for everyone, so all the members and the community will know well the essence, operations and benefits of the coop. Informed decision-making, along with freedom of choice, is the pillar of voluntariness.

Cluster B: INTERNAL PRINCIPLES:

Principle 2-- Democratic Member control, not just “participatory democracy,” requires that the cooperative is jointly run by at least the simple majority of members.

Principle 3-- Members’ Economic Participation in many forms is the actualization of the cooperative’s being jointly owned and capitalized, and therefore also jointly patronized.

Cluster 3: EXTERNAL PRINCIPLES:

Principle 4-- Autonomy and Independence principle guarantees that the coop is jointly run by its members, and controlled only by its members, free from any strong influence from government, from benefactors and even from larger cooperatives.

Principle 6-- Cooperation Among Cooperatives is a practice that each coop owes to the community, considering the magnification effect of the principle of synergism. There are many forms of such cooperation among cooperatives, and one such form is voluntarily forming and joining unions and federations among themselves and, as member-coops, jointly owning and controlling these unions and federations fully and never being controlled by these larger formations.

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