By Hannah Breckbill, board member
Hello from the board of the Oneota Food Co-op! 2025 is a United Nations Year of the Cooperative, and we’re celebrating by inviting you to “Principles in Practice: A Conversation Series on Cooperatives & Community.” A series of panels will be held Tuesday evenings on November 11, December 2, January 6, and February 3 from 7-8 p.m. at Pulpit Rock Brewery’s event room in Decorah. Each event will focus on the seven cooperative principles and highlight cooperative enterprises in our community. We’re excited to hear from a diversity of voices representing all kinds of co-ops in our area.
Before I dig into the cooperative principles and the panelists who will be speaking about them, let me back up and share some of the “why” behind cooperatives. In the United States, the first recognized business using a cooperative model was a mutual fire insurance company founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. Mutual aid societies, followed by consumer agriculture cooperatives, with eligibility limited to Whites-only, grew in the 19th century. These organizations were rooted in the hardship experienced by immigrants during Europe’s Industrial Revolution.
The first documented Black mutual aid society was the Free African Society, founded in 1787. Later, in the Jim Crow South, as Black people continued to be systematically denied economic opportunity, they found ways to survive outside of mainstream economics. They were able, through cooperatives, to band together as communities and form enterprises together that they didn’t have the power to do individually. The groundwork established led to what is today a strong Black cooperative movement in our country.
Decorah in 2025 is by no means the Jim Crow South, but people here might also be feeling economic squeezes, lack of power and agency, and a longing for community and shared purpose. Cooperatives can address all of these issues, on tangible, local levels. This is why we’re hosting this mini-series, so that you can get to know the cooperatives that are operating locally and how you can get involved. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to be part of starting your own co-op!
There are seven cooperative principles that have been standing since the first modern cooperative in England in 1844. They are:
- Voluntary and open membership
- Democratic member control
- Members’ economic participation
- Autonomy and Independence
- Education, Training, and Information
- Cooperation among Cooperatives
- Concern for Community
There’s so much more to all these than can fit in a blog post, which is why we’re glad to be hosting this mini-series to explore them all together!
Our first panel, “Membership & Voice in the co-op model,” will feature the first two cooperative principles, “Voluntary and Open Membership” and “Democratic Member Control.” We’ll have panelists representing the Oneota Food Co-op, DuTrac (our local credit union), Humble Hands Harvest (a worker-owned co-op), and the Farmers Land Investment Co-op, or FLIC. Join us to learn from these examples of membership and democracy on a local level.