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Resources Climate Co-ops Regenerative Culture What is a Co-operative?

Climate Co-ops

  1. What is a climate co-op?

We have named the specific model of co-op we would like to see thriving the “Climate Co-ops”.

In addition to the design guidelines already enshrined in the Co-operative model by the traditional ICA co-op ethics, values and principles, Climate Co-ops build 3 more core  elements:

  1. Needs based: They provide for our basic needs
  2. Towards a healthy Habitat: their operations produce positive results for climate and / or the other crises we face. Humanity needs a functional, healthy habitat too!
  3. A regenerative culture: The organisational design avoids the key institutional roots of these crises.
    1. These elements can be viewed as design principles:
  • 1 – Needs based: 
    • Their primary function will concentrate on provision of our core physical needs.
    • These must all be addressed before moving on to wants, considering the climate wrecked future which now awaits us.
    • Definition of a need: If a need is not met, that will cause your death.
  • 2 – Towards a healthy habitiat:
    • As a fundamental part of how Climate Co-ops achieve their primary function, their activity will either reduce carbon emissions or draw down carbon from the atmosphere – preferably both. They can also aim to address the parallel crises of peak oil, the extinction crisis, other forms of pollution, etc.
    • Climate Co-ops follow recurring natural patterns in their design and behaviour
  • 3 – Regenerative culture
    • Learning from and avoiding past mistakes
    • Create a living: Local employment with involvement of workers in management decisions (usually as one party in a multi stakeholder co-op environment
    • Universal Basic Assets:
    • Divestment opportunities
    • Re-commoning the enclosures
    • Organised using non-authoritarian, participatory, democratic models. 
    • A “not for profit” model
    • A “For community profit” model

We are currently building an interconnected system of these co-ops and communities to cover all of the basic human needs in any neighborhood. 

As our neighborhoods develop these systems, they can combine their strengths, and a co-operative commonwealth can be formed, from the bottom up.

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