Charles Gould: Our goal is to ensure that we use 2012 to launch a co-operative decade

Coinciding with the start of the International Year of Co-operatives, Co-operatives UK interview Charles Gould, Director General of the ICA. These are his hopes and wishes for the New Year.

Isabel Benitez, Co-operatives UK

Each new year begins full of promises and ambitious goals. Sometimes, we easily succeed in achieving them; quite often, more effort is needed. However, everything is more straightforward if we get some help or we gather good team work for common aims.

This new year, the co-operative movement has set a very singular global goal: turning 2012 into the starting signal of a long-distance race —a decade of co-operative growth.

Declared International Year of Co-operatives by UN, 2012 seems to offer a unique opportunity to enhance the competitive advantage of this alternative way of doing business. But what do the next 365 days look like?

For Charles Gould, Director-General of the International Co-operative Allaince (ICA) it is the right time for co-operatives to work together to build a better world. These are his hopes and wishes for the new year.

The theme of this International Year of Co-operatives is "Co-operative enterprises build a better world". But how do co-operatives fit this statement?

I think those events of the last few months have shown that people are really hungry for a better world. This whole "Occupy Movement", falling upon the Arab spring issues that we saw, the student unrest this summer… they all show there is a sense that things are not working for people, that people are really disconnected from the political, economic and social models that dominate their lives. And the co-operative is a concept that came out of a similar time: at the Industrial Revolution, when people woke up and found that the world was such a different place. Co-operatives have proven over time to be a great self-care model when there is a kind of disruption like we see these days. The International Year of Co-operatives cannot come in a better time.

How do co-operatives specifically deal with the main problems of conventional businesses: lack of opportunities for youth, threats to workers’ rights...?

I think co-operatives do that every day. They do that, because they are controlled by their members, so to the extent that their members are concerned about these kinds of problems, the members can dictate the practise and the policy of the co-operative. And you see this happening again and again.

For example, we have youth active in co-operatives. In every business, we are worried about how you bring in next generations, how you keep this relevant, how you make certain they understand how this works, and being focused on principles established in the past that can be flexible and meet emerging needs in the future. But yes I think that co-operatives are able to address these issues; I think they are up to the task.

What about the relationship between women and business; between under representation and Boards of Directors?

There are many co-operatives that are focused on women and in a number of development countries. But I would say that we need to do a better job of ensuring that women are represented in the highest ranks of co-operatives. And in the ICA we are seeing that. We have now our first women president, Dame Pauline Green, who is just outstanding a very powerful voice for co-operatives, she has been in or around the movement for most of her life, also in politics, but supporting the co-operative movement. There are some very strong and powerful women leaders in the co-operative movement, but we need to make sure that there are not lonely voices, ensuring that we have the environment that invites women in and allows them to grow in the positions, to move in the positions that are at the top of these organisations.

Could we say, then, that co-operatives are ready to tackle 21^st century’s global challenges?

Yes I think co-operatives are ready to face those global challenges. I think we have been facing huge challenges, the biggest problems, over time.

Co-operatives by their nature are concerned about this kind of issues; it is on our DNS, and it is how we do businesses important to us.

But, in addition to that, co-operatives are not just small community based organisations. Sometimes, they can also be huge. ICA publishes the global 300 report every year and in the last one we show that the largest three hundred co-operatives in the world have a combined turnover of USD 1.6trillion, the size of the ninth largest economy in the world. So it is a huge impact and there are not just 300, there are hundreds of thousands of co-operatives. So we are there, we are quiet, and we are taking the opportunity of the international year to be less quite and to make sure that more people at this time, when they need us, consider us a solution.

2012 establishes three main goals: raising public awareness of the contribution of co-operatives to socio-economic development; supporting their formation; and encouraging governments to approve policies that back co-operatives and secure their stability. Considering how diverse the co-operative movement is, is it possible to unite co-operatives worldwide? Is it viable a common regulation for co-operatives?

Ultimately, the regulation and the legislation that most directly influence co-operative businesses is going to be the domestic legislation in their country. What we can do globally is to get the word out that we need national legislation everywhere which gives co-operatives the kind of environment they need to grow, which ensures the co-operative model is understood in different countries, and that it is understood why co-operatives need a different treatment from taxes and under regulations than other kind of businesses, so that we create this so called "level playing field". We can do that globally.

We can also raise the awareness of the public that the co-operative is an enterprise model that is available to them, and we can do that through bodies like the UN. For example: we need to make sure that co-operatives are actually integrated in the mainstream documents so that people who go to these  mainstream documents see co-operatives in there, understand that there are one of the solutions, understand how they are different, and understand what they need to do to help them grow.

Co-operatives are businesses focused on human need not human greed, could we consider co-operatives our natural evolution? Is not co-operating innate to human beings?

Recently, with this financial recession, and growing since then, we have seen recognition of the limits of a system that is wholly focused on profit. However, you cannot focus on any one thing. Talking about optimisation, you cannot focus only on profits, you cannot focus only on sustainability, you cannot focus only on environment, you cannot focus only on culture. You have to, in real life terms, balance these issues and make wise decisions, and the co-operative model is designed to do that. In that sense, whether it is our natural evolution, I think it was an inspired idea when it came along, and I think it might be natural but anyway it is certainly a desirable state.

We are starting a new year. I would like you to make a wish. How would you like the co-operative movement to look like in ten-fifteen years’ time?

That’s a very easy answer for me. Our goal is to ensure that the co-operative movement uses this International Year of Co-operatives, 2012, to launch a co-operative decade. So at the end of this decade, in 2020, I hope that the co-operative is the faster growing enterprise model in the world. I think that it is very possible, as people can hear and understand how co-operatives work, that they are a serious business model and successful, that they are value-based, and that sustainability is at the core of how co-operatives do businesses. And if they understand that members control co-operatives —and that makes a difference—, then we draw them to it: they will see it as a self-help model that allows us to optimise these otherwise competing interests, and they will see it as a model in which they have a voice, in a world where right now that voice is very difficult for them to exercise.

We all need to come together properly and, if we have a little luck and the planets align, and we work very hard, I think by the end of this decade the co-operative principles will be the faster growing model in the world.