10

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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Coop Owner-Members:
Top Decision-Makers

By Ed Aurelio C. Reyes

Executive Director, SanibLakas ng Taongbayan Foundation

This article was first published in LightShare Digest.

WHAT is the usual difference between the annual Stockholders’ Meeting of a stock corporation and the annual General Assembly of a primary cooperative?

In the corporate meeting, the stockholders feel and actively assert their power as co-owners, albeit with eagerness being somewhat proportional to the total value of their respective stocks.

In the annual general membership meeting of the typical Philippine cooperative, majority of the members, who are actually equal co-owners of the coop, do not even care to show up, much less prepare for active participation in the sessions. And they are allowed to have this imagined option.

The typical members seem to feel like mere customers and beneficiaries of the cooperative that they, collectively, actually own and are supposed to jointly run.

The principle of Democratic Member Control is one of the most enduring among the original cooperative principles formulated by the Rochedale Pioneers.  The International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) has consistently reaffirmed it in all three periodic reviews of the Cooperative Principles it has made since 1895.

This second principle describes the internal relationship of the cooperators among themselves and the power they should collectively exercise. As enshrined in the fundamental law of democratic states, so does Principle Two declare the locus of sovereignty in cooperatives as residing in all the members, with all organizational authority emanating from them.

Cooperatives are, by the operation of the ICA’s Seven Principles of Cooperative Identity, the most democratic among the various types of organizations. This puts leaders and members of healthy cooperatives in the best position to be no less than teachers of democracy for the broader citizenry.

For the cooperators to enjoy empowerment and fully perform in line with the principle of Democratic Member Control (Principle 2), two crucial requirements have to be met: (1) active stakeholdership through effective essential education and character formation of the members; and (2) empowering and fully facilitative leadership.

Active Stakeholdership

Active stakeholdership is a character trait that disdains being permanently dependent on the efforts of others for meeting one’s own real needs. Character formation should adequately cover this. As the logic goes, all persons who have a real stake in any cause should be active in pursuing efforts to promote that cause.

Even the physically challenged would strain their capabilities just to contribute whatever they possibly could to the successful assertion and pursuit of a common cause. To invoke all kinds of excuses to be exempt from participation in the effort while demanding to partake of the benefits of success would be exploitative of other people’s efforts. We can entertain ourselves with Superman characters in movies and comic books, but in real life, things get done by people who are willing to team up in great effort.

But members in a majority of Philippine cooperatives have developed two lines of dependency and allowed themselves to be transformed into a lot of cheering fans for Superman-type superstars:

One, they have become dependent on the knowledge and efforts of their elected leaders, almost absolutely relying on them to do everything from decision-making to actual implementation. Two, they have allowed their coops to be dependent on external sources. These lines of dependence have caused them to automatically abdicate their powers as co-equal owners of the cooperative itself.

A culture of active stakeholdership among the majority of coop members can be heightened if these members can be reminded that the cooperative exists as a social synergy of their very own personal enterprises, that they jointly own this consortium of personal businesses and should therefore jointly run it.

This does not mean they should be holding mass meetings to decide every issue in the day-to-day operations of the coop because direct democracy should operate in crafting only the most important policies, those that would guide work and transactions over a long period. The coop’s general assembly would focus on deciding the most important issues and hammering out policies comparable to a sovereign country’s constitution, and then it can relegate the matters of secondary importance to the standing body called the Board of Directors. Part of the agenda of the General Assembly would be to pass judgment on the decisions of the Board in the full year immediately preceding the session of the Assembly. This would ensure that the decisions made by the coop through representative democracy are kept faithful to the more important decisions made through direct democracy.

In fact, the members should have access to records on the performance and voting record of each director as part of their basis for choosing which ones of these deserve to be reelected. The Directors are answerable collectively and singly to the membership that elected them individually.

All these points are good to hear and look neat on paper. But for the system to work in the real life of a coop, the majority of the members should be breathing life into these processes through active stakeholdership. In many a coop, however, members abdicate on these prerogatives and content themselves in sighing grievances among themselves as if they were all completely helpless to do anything.

In a number of these coops, power-clinging officers frustrate all the members’ efforts to perform their duties as co-owners and highest policy-makers of the cooperative. As a result, they remain the officers while the coop remains internally very weak. Still, we’re happy to note that many cooperatives have started to emerge on the horizon with dynamic BODs, ready to lead their members in rescue and revitalization processes.

Servant-Leadership

Many elected officers of cooperatives have gradually grasped the essence of their leadership functions: that they are supposed to be servant-leaders facilitating and synergizing the wisdom, efforts and resources of the membership. Earlier, many of them behaved instead like rulers in undemocratic systems and relied only on their own wisdom, efforts and resources. Instead of achieving a synergy of minds and hearts of hundreds or even thousands of co-owners, they drew strength from a very narrow source – just themselves.

This is a great disservice to the essence of leadership, as contrasted to rulership. The gigantic potential of synergizing the varying capabilities of the members had remained just that—potential. That seems to be changing now, at least for these newly-revitalized leading bodies.

There is good news to be had from the experiences of some cooperatives who have developed real leaders. We can see the signs in the increasing number of coops that are growing and are pulling up their memberships with them. The leaders of these cooperatives have seen the essence of real cooperativism beyond the overly-technical and long-winded legal definitions of coops. In many of these cooperatives, the ethics of full disclosure of the problems and achievements to members is building up the spirit of trust and active involvement among their members.

In their Boards, veteran directors and new ones combine their respective strengths to continuously improve their discussions and policy-making output. You can tell which coops have healthy BODs by listening to their meetings, counting how many directors speak in them, and how clearly and collectively they arrive at decisions that would later get validated in effective implementation.

Viewing the essence of a cooperative at the core – as social synergies of personal enterprises jointly owned and jointly run – many coop leaders have been able to use such knowledge to develop themselves and their members to overcome earlier weaknesses.

The facilitation function of cooperative leaders fully appreciates and synthesizes the rich diversity of views aired by the members, instead of taking these views as a nuisance. Such ability encourages members to produce and express more and more ideas for the good of the coop.

This function also covers the responsibility of providing adequate information to all members about the principles of cooperativism and the conditions of their cooperative.

All the members of the coop must be informed that as equal co-owners of the cooperative they are, together, the coop’s top decision-makers. They must all be effectively educated to take that responsibility responsibly and productively.

To attain the full operation of Democratic Member Control, the leadership must foment a culture of active stakeholder-ship, and then shape up as servant-leaders in preparation for the desired situation where all members want to attend the G.A. and speak up on issues. That would be what we could call a “happy problem,” challenging the leaders’ conference facilitation capabilities.

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