environmental systems and the widening gap between rich and poor. (BALLE
2002)
Judy Wicks of Philadelphia's White Dog Café, a national co-chair of BALLE, wrote in
an undated article, "[C]orporate globalization is causing the decline of local communities,
local businesses, family farms, and natural habitats. As wealth and power continue to
consolidate into growing transnational corporations, small and medium size companies
can help turn the tide for social and environmental justice by working together to build
local living economies in our own regions, and linking nationally and internationally."
Cooperatives are a viable alternative to a corporate controlled economy that threatens
environmental destruction and deteriorating social justice. Yet coops face tremendous
pressures from the surrounding corporate world. Coops need strong networks of like
cooperatives to band into second-tier coops that provide services and technical assistance,
and they also need networks of suppliers and customers that have similar values and
operate on similar principles. If nothing is done to address the needs of cooperatives in
this country and in the Northeast region in particular, individual cooperatives will
continue to struggle. "The prognosis for isolated worker coops does not seem to be very
favorable," write Lindenfeld and Wynn (1997), citing difficulties overcoming financial,
managerial, and policy-environmental challenges.
About half of adults in the U.S. are members of a cooperative (Jaeger and Gillis 2003),
and in the Northeast region nearly 10 million people are cooperative members of about
10,000 cooperatives (www.cooplife.coop). There are many strong associations of similar
cooperatives, such as the Cooperative Grocers Association and the Credit Union National
Association, yet very few links among complementary cooperatives. Cooperative Life,
the Northeast Federation of Cooperatives, is working on providing many of the
supporting services and technical assistance needed by diverse cooperatives in the
Northeast region. The goal of Coop Life is to "build a strong presence for cooperatives in
the media, in the public policy arena, and in the economy." They provide "products and
services to help cooperatives meet the needs of their customers, create strategic
partnerships, launch new cooperative enterprises and improve their business performance
in a fast-changing marketplace." (www.cooplife.coop)
The project described here would expand the services that Cooperative Life provides to
its members and to the Northeast cooperative economy to include facilitation of inter-
cooperative trade. In the future, Coop Life hopes to facilitate the channeling of savings
into new cooperative ventures. This would lead to the creation of a strong network of
cooperatives capable of sustaining individual cooperatives in the region. The goal of the
project is to increase the awareness of cooperative organizations about each other and