In late May, CoMinnesota hosted an event “Co-ops are Built for Resilience: Stories from the Past & Building for the Future.” This event featured speakers of current cooperatives and how the co-op model helped them be more resilient. We also explored principle 6, “Cooperation Among Cooperatives,” and how this principle can help us strengthen resilience across the broader cooperative ecosystem. Electra Skrzydlewski, Director of Shared Ownership at MCCD and CoMinnesota Steering Committee member, framed up this important ecosystem conversation with the powerful remarks on our collective journey below.
Many of us are in this room because, in one way or another, we already sense that the future cannot be built alone.
Maybe that belief brought you to the cooperative movement.
Maybe you arrived through necessity.
Maybe through frustration with systems that ask communities to compete for survival.
Maybe through witnessing what becomes possible when people share ownership, responsibility, risk, and concern for their neighbors and communities.
But I imagine many of us are here because we carry some quiet understanding that our lives are already deeply interconnected economically, socially, ecologically, politically whether our systems acknowledge that or not.
And perhaps cooperative spaces feel meaningful because they allow us to practice that interdependence intentionally. To build relationships, structures, and solutions that reflect what many people already know in their bones: that our well-being is tied together.
The future is collective.
Not because collectivism is trendy.
Not because cooperation is idealistic.
But because isolation is proving itself unsustainable.
Many of us are probably here today because, in one way or another, we already know this.
Maybe not always consciously.
Maybe not always in language we would use out loud every day.
But somewhere in our work, our values, our organizing, our businesses, our communities — we’ve come to understand that the future cannot be built alone.
That something essential is missing in systems organized around extraction, competition, and individual survival.
And that despite everything encouraging people to retreat into isolation, scarcity, and self-protection, we continue showing up in spaces like this because we believe another way of relating to one another is possible.
A more democratic way.
A more durable way.
A more human way.
A more principled way.
And I think that is exactly what Principle 6, Cooperation Among Cooperatives, calls us toward.
The challenges defining this moment — racism, sexism, and exclusion, burnout and crisis fatigue, rising costs and deepening inequality, precarious and extractive work, housing instability, climate disruption, food insecurity, fragile supply chains across sectors, and the loss of local ownership, community trust, and democratic control — are too interconnected to be solved by isolated institutions acting alone.
And cooperatives have always carried a different understanding of resilience:
that resilience is relational.
That communities are more capable of surviving and flourishing when resources, ownership, responsibility, and risk are shared.
Principle 6, Cooperation Among Cooperatives, reminds us that cooperatives were never meant to function as isolated islands of democratic ownership scattered across the economy. They were imagined as ecosystems. Networks of mutual support. Structures capable of circulating resources, examining the risk to the collective, and strengthening communities through interdependence.
Throughout cooperative history, the well-known and lesser-known moments alike reflect a recognition that resilience grows through interdependence.
Sometimes those ecosystems are informal — relationships rooted in care and reciprocity, peers engaging in shared learning and knowledge exchange, and like neighbors organizing mutual aid by pooling labor and resources during periods of hardship.
And sometimes they become formalized through things like shared purchasing cooperatives and financing institutions, local and regional federations, educational associations, national apex organizations, and international cooperative alliances that can coordinate resources and strengthen the movement across generations.
We see that ecosystem alive through organizations like CoMinnesota and Cooperative Network connecting cooperative sectors across the Upper Midwest; through the Minnesota Credit Union Network and CDFIs strengthening cooperative finance; through shared purchasing, distribution, and operational systems like National Co+op Grocers; through agricultural cooperatives like CHS Inc. and Land O’Lakes; through rural electric cooperative networks supported by organizations like Minnesota Rural Electric Association and Great River Energy; through housing and community ownership ecosystems supported by organizations like CoNorth and ROC USA; through employee ownership and worker cooperative ecosystem builders like Minnesota Center for Employee Ownership and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives; and through national and international movement infrastructure like NCBA CLUSA and the International Cooperative Alliance, which help connect cooperative work across sectors, regions, and the world.
These approaches matter because they help cooperatives do together what would be far more difficult to do alone.
And we already see Principle 6 alive in practice all around us.
Credit unions helping their members get ahead and accomplish their goals with education, products, services, and rates that allow them to build rather than suffer from extraction.
Co-op lenders financing housing cooperatives because they understand that housing can function as stewardship instead of speculation.
Food cooperatives and agricultural cooperatives strengthening local food systems through shared purchasing, distribution, and community ownership.
Worker cooperatives, unions, and employee ownership organizations collaborating to expand worker power and democratic participation in the economy.
Rural electric cooperatives coordinating energy infrastructure across communities that investor-owned systems often overlook.
Developers, lenders, educators, organizers, and technical assistance providers working together because the challenges communities face no longer fit neatly into silos.
This is cooperation as infrastructure.
And I think Principle 6 becomes even more important during periods of uncertainty.
Because we are living through a cultural moment that celebrates self-sufficiency while people and institutions quietly exhaust themselves trying to survive alone.
But nature itself teaches us something different…
Forests survive through interconnected root systems.
Prairies regenerate through biodiversity.
Rivers are formed through convergence.
Even our bodies survive through interdependent systems working together in relationship.
Life endures through cooperation.
And maybe that is why cooperative ecosystems feel so powerful when we experience them — because somewhere deep down, they reflect something fundamentally true about how human beings survive and flourish.
The future is collective.
The question is not whether we will depend on one another.
The question is whether we will build systems worthy of that dependence.
And I think there is wisdom in this room about what becomes possible next.
– Electra Skrzydlewski