Outside the U.S.

MODELS & BEST PRACTICES

Alberta Heritage Fund (Canada)
www.finance.gov.ab.ca/business/ahstf/index.html
Established in 1976 to ensure that oil revenues accrue to the benefit of Albertans, the fund since then has provided $27.6 billion, which has been used for Albertans' priorities including capital projects, health care, education, roads and tax reductions. The Heritage Fund earned approximately $1.1 billion from its investments during the 2004-05 fiscal year.

Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
www.brac.net
Founded in 1972, BRAC has become one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations, registering a membership of four million women. BRAC works in 65,000 of the country's 68,000 villages, covers a population of 78 million, has organized nearly 120,000 village organizations, and operates with an annual budget of US$196 million as of the end of 2003. BRAC has expanded most rapidly since 1989, when it worked in only 4,000 villages and had a budget of $20 million.

Co-op Atlantic (Moncton, NB, Canada)
www.co-opsonline.com
Co-op Atlantic is the wholesaler for the network of consumer cooperatives in Atlantic Canada, and functions as a second-tier cooperative, providing expertise and services to its member co-ops. Canada's second largest regional cooperative wholesaler, Co-op Atlantic serves 171 member cooperatives and 219,000 member-families in Canada's eastern provinces.

Co-op Kobe (Japan: note that site is in Japanese only)
www.kobe.coop.or.jp
Established in 1921, Co-op Kobe has grown to become Japan's largest cooperative, with over 1.45 million members in 2002.

The Co-operative Group (Manchester, England)
www.co-op.co.uk
The world's largest single consumer cooperative, the Co-operative Group has over three million individual consumer members and 144 corporate consumer members, which in turn represent millions of consumer members nationwide. The Co-operative Group operates over 1,700 grocery stores, over 3,000 retail outlets, and 29 department stores, and employs over 75,000 workers.

CoopZone (Canada)
www.coopzone.coop/en/home
This site, organized by the Canadian Co-operative Association, is focused on providing two things: a national Canadian network of cooperative developers, and an on-line clearinghouse of information, tools and resources. Information available on this site includes links to federal and provincial cooperative legislation, a considerable amount of resources on worker cooperatives, information on business logistics, and links to co-op consultants in each province of the country.

Fonde du solidarité FTQ (Solidarity Fund, Quebec, Canada)
www.fondsftq.com/internetfonds.nsf/AccueilAn_flash?OpenPage
(English-language site)
The Solidarity Fund QFL is a labor-backed development capital fund that helps create and maintain jobs in Québec by investing in small and medium-sized businesses in that province. Since its inception in June 1983, the Fund, whose assets stood at $7.3 billion as of May 31, 2008, has become a hub of knowledge, resources and contacts for Québec companies and a key player in the Québec economy.

Fundación para la Educación Superior (Colombia; note that site is in Spanish only)
www.fedesarrollo.org
FES was established in 1964 as a university foundation designed to mobilize funds for education and research. In 1975, the government recognized FES as a “commercial financing company,” which permitted it to seek resources in the capital market, make loans, and thereby accumulate capital. Soon thereafter, FES expanded its mission to include the promotion of social development activities, and it began investing its profits in social programs in six areas: health, education, economic and social development, children and youth, the environment, and civil society support.

Grameen Bank (Bangladesh)
www.grameen-info.org
Grameen Bank is a pioneer in the microfinance field and is well known for practices that have since become common throughout the world, such as village lending circles where the group guarantees payment by each individual. Having started by lending $27 to 42 villagers in 1976, the GB to date has offered credit to 3.36 million borrowers and disbursed $4.27 billion in cumulative loans. It works in 44,636 villages, operates 1,229 branches, and employs nearly 12,000 people.

Grameen Family of Enterprises
www.grameen-info.org/gfamily.html
In 2006, the Grameen made history, when together with founder Muhammad Yunus, it became the first community development financial institution ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But Grameen does just do micro-lending through its bank. Today, Grameen social enterprises exist in many sectors, including clothing production, cellular telephone service, information technology services, rural education, and energy production.

Japanese Consumer Co-operative Union (English language site)
www.co-op.or.jp/jccu/english_here/index.htm
Japan's consumer cooperative movement—the world's largest—is composed of 572 member co-operatives with a combined individual membership of 22,016,000, or thirty percent of all Japanese households.

Kagiso Trust (South Africa)
www.kagiso.com
KT was founded in 1986 to channel financial support from the European Union to the anti-apartheid movement. Upon apartheid's demise, KT developed a new financing strategy based on promoting sustainable development through participation in joint ventures and the creation of an investment business. KTI maintains significant holdings in the businesses it has created, including: Kagiso Media Ltd., a collection of media-related companies; Kagiso Khulani Supervision, South Africa's largest industrial catering company, which provides food services to more than 650 kitchens in hospitals, schools and businesses, and employs more than 6,000 people; and Kagiso Financial Services, a joint venture with the international Rothschild Group.

Kiva (based in San Francisco, CA–operates internationally)
www.kiva.org
Kiva aims to facilitate micro-lending between individuals in wealthy countries and social entrepreneurs in the developing world. Through its website, individuals can make loans for as little as $25 which are pooled to support business ventures. Kiva does this by partnering with micro-lenders abroad, which screen the businesses to which the lending dollars raised go. When the loan is repaid, a lender can choose to withdraw their funds or re-loan to a new business. To date, over 54,000 lenders have participated, with a repayment rate of over 99 percent.

La Lega (Italy)
www.legacoop.it
Italy's largest umbrella group for cooperatives, La Lega promotes the interests of the cooperative sector at all levels of government, and conducts research to measure and influence public opinion about cooperatives. La Lega (or Legacoop) covers more than 17,000 cooperatives: approximately 5,000 worker co-ops, 3,000 agricultural co-ops, 2,000 consumer co-ops, 5,000 housing co-ops, 2,000 mixed-form co-ops, and hundreds of specialized co-ops in such fields as transportation and fishing (Smith 2001). By 2002, La Lega's total membership exceeded 6 million people, or slightly more than 10 percent of the Italian population. Of these members, 4.6 million belonged to La Lega's consumer co-ops La Lega's turnover in 2002 was 38 billion Euros.

Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market
www.mixmarket.org
Acting as a global, web-based, microfinance information platform, the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) Market has a goal to provide information on public and private funds that invest in microfinance, providing an important resource for those within the microfinance sector and the public at large. To date, the MIX Market maintains data on 1383 microfinance institutions, 103 investors and 182 partners.

Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa (Basque Region, Spain)
www.mcc.es/ing/index.asp
Mondragón, located in the Basque region of Spain, is a network of 264 companies, approximately half of which are worker cooperatives. Now the largest corporation in the Basque region and the seventh largest in Spain, MCC is also the world's largest worker co-op with over 34,000 members as of the end of 2007 and total employment of over 100,000. By 2010, co-op membership is expected to grow considerably to between 72,000 and 77,000, once Eroski, a network company that is mostly located outside of Basque County, completes the cooperative conversion process. Thirty-eight of MCC's industrial plants are located in fourteen countries around the world. Total sales in 2007 exceeded 16.7 billion Euros.

Owenstown (South Lanarkshire, Scotland)
http://owenstown.org
The Hometown Foundation of Scotland, dedicated to community development, has initiated a plan to create a town run as a cooperative. Conceived in the image of Robert Owen, a founder in the socialist and cooperative movements, Owenstown is set to have 8,000 homes for families of various sizes and incomes and will strive to be carbon neutral. The cooperative will be run by a board of trustees until the town becomes sufficient enough to elect its own board members. It is currently in the planning stages and seeking community feedback.

Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-operative Union
(Japan, English language site)
www.seikatsuclub.coop/english/index.html
Established in 1965 as a buying club for families to purchase affordable, pure milk, SCCCU has evolved into a movement concerned with building alternative production, consumption, social welfare, and activist networks. It has spawned producer co-ops, social welfare organizations, an activist political network, an environmental program, and a program to support world peace. Today, it is an association of 22 consumer co-ops and 8 associated companies, with 250,000 individual members. Annual sales for the last fiscal year (April 2003-March 2004) were $690 million.

Self-Employed Women's Association (India)
www.sewa.org
Founded in 1972, SEWA is India's first and largest trade union of informal sector workers, with a total membership of 694,551 self-employed women and a population coverage of around one million. SEWA also provides members services, often through cooperatives. As of 2002, SEWA's membership including 89 cooperatives, with a total membership of 41,393 workers. These include 55 milk co-operatives, with 8,000 members; twelve service cooperatives, providing health care/midwife services, child care, and wastepaper collection, with 2,000 members; eleven artisan co-operatives for weavers, bamboo workers, embroiderers, and other artisans, with 1,000 members; seven land-based co-operatives for tree growers and agro-forestry workers; and three vendor cooperatives for kerosene vendors and vegetable suppliers. The largest cooperative, SEWA Bank, has nearly 30,000 members.