While a few green shoots are beginning to sprout, social cooperatives, also known as social co-ops, are still a relatively new concept to many Americans.
That means their special characteristics, as we find them in the countries where they operate, are not yet well understood here in the U.S.
If we take the definition offered by the International Cooperative Alliance, a social co-op has the following characteristics:
An explicit purpose to serve the public good, beyond just member benefit;
The status of a non-state entity, independent from government;
Multi-stakeholder membership (workers, users, community members, etc.);
A democratic workplace, with substantial representation of worker members at every level of governance;
Non- or limited distribution of surplus revenues (i.e., some or all revenues are set aside for special purposes).
Social co-ops, a type of worker co-op, emerged in Italy in the 1970s as a community response to government cutbacks around social care for people with disabilities. They operated without formal government recognition until the Italian government finally passed a law granting them tax breaks and other advantages over their conventional commercial competitors. Since then, places like Québec and South Korea developed health ecosystems of social co-ops, to name only two of several.
So here’s a trick question: what do the following three organizations have in common?
SABSA is a team of nurse practitioners and social workers in Québec City. A few years ago, they noticed that there was a group of people on the street with addictions, HIV, and even Hepatitis-C, who were not getting care because they simply refused to go to a hospital. Additionally, many of them did not have an insurance card from Québec’s healthcare system. The SABSA team decided to start offering treatment nonetheless, working out of a mobile clinic which provided safe injections and supervised drug consumption (i.e., a harm reduction approach).
In 2016, SABSA faced pushback from the local doctors’ association and Québec’s Ministry of Health, as their nurses were taking on many of the tasks typically performed by a general practitioner. The SABSA team responded by pointing out that this was the only care the patients were receiving. Finally, the health ministry saw the value of this work and created a new category of “super-nurse” for these types of street clinics.
Pandora is a team based in Milan that works with returning citizens and people with former substance use disorders to train them for work. In anticipation of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Pandora acquired a small company called Steeteat, a mobile restaurant. Pandora plans to incorporate Streeteat into their model, including offering innovative services in