The Cooperative Movement is on the Rise

FINDING “SUPPORT”

Although it sounds like an easy concept – to support a movement which clearly empowers and provides a better life for the middle class – there are certain barriers to the movement.

Firstly, investment from the private sector is hard to come by when high returns cannot be promised.
“It’s a difficulty in some ways,” Earle said, “particularly when you take seasoned investors with a particular idea of what an investment has to look like. To a certain degree,” he continued, “we’re trying to change the mentality of what we really need to be investing in: that is, looking outside of individual returns and thinking genuinely in investing in society at large.”

The Working World loans money ranging from $1000 to $40000 to new and established cooperatives which would normally be turned away by traditional creditors as they have little or no collateral. It does this on very friendly terms, never asking for the money to be re-paid yet nevertheless boasting a 97% repayment rate.

The organization began with funds from Martin’s own pockets and “two angel donors who have given [them] long-term support.” At this point, Earle said, it is “sort of a smorgasbord of funding,” since they’ve received as recently as 2009, a bit of financing from the Argentinian government through the Ministry of Social Development under Leftist president Nestor Kirchner.

“More recently,” he explained, “in a shining moment for the organization, two different federations of cooperatives actually had extra money that they had a mandate to use to support the growth of other worker cooperatives in the area, [but] they cast that money over to us, which was a real affirmation of the quality of the work that we’d been doing and…the extent to which we were seen as a group genuinely responsive to the needs of the movement.”

“I’d be lying to say that people are beating down our door to give us their investments,” he clarified with a chuckle. “But at the same time I can say that we do have a moderately-sized group of regular investors.” As a matter of fact, he thinks that this year they will be going “over the one million-dollar [mark] in loans.”

TREC and its two affiliated projects – WindShare and SolarShare – have also had difficulty “getting people to put investment up front,” Lipp told me, largely because they are trying to provide renewable energy sources in an industry that has been “dominated for the last hundred years by large centralized entities.”

“We’re transitioning to a decentralized electricity system, but there are lots of people who don’t understand what we are doing,” she said. “On the whole,” she began explaining, “it is [a group of] – environmentally-conscious, middle-class individuals interested in finding ways to address climate change and other issues, but also looking for investment opportunities that align with their values.” Unfortunately, that is precisely the reason why it is difficult coming by private investment.

People “turn the lights on but they don’t really want to engage with how it is that we keep those lights on and the impact that keeping those lights on has on the environment as well as on other social aspects,” Lipp explained. “So the challenge is navigating the system that is geared towards large players and being able to make that system work for essentially small players who are doing smaller projects.”

Luckily, there are programs in Ontario such as the Green-Energy Act, a Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program, and the Community Energy Partnership Program, all of which “essentially provide the framework…to apply and become a generator and feed into the grid as long as you’re given a contract,” Lipp reassured me.