40 years ago a group of cooperators decided to come together and create a space where interests, realities and challenges faced by cooperatives in industry and services from all around Europe were shared and discussed. This is how CECOP was born, in Manchester (UK), in 1979. Since then, CECOP has been promoting worker cooperatives, social cooperatives and cooperatives of self-employed producers to become as of today the voice of 50.000 enterprises and 1.3 million workers all over Europe. To celebrate this special anniversary, we decided to launch the campaign #CECOP40 and we asked our members to identify those cooperatives that best represent for them the history and the evolution of CECOP. Through #CECOP40, we would like to tell you who we are, what we achieved and how we are tackling future challenges. To give voice to men and women that everyday put in practice what we defend and advocate for.
In 1950, seven people, victims of the Second World War, joined together to create the worker cooperative Chernomorka with the aim to provide jobs for disable people in the town and region of Burgas, in the east of Bulgaria near the black sea. In order to start the cooperative, each member contribute...
In Finland, if you are a freelancer and you are looking for a job that is collaborative and fair, you can join the Lilith Cooperative. To become a member of Lilith means to be part of a network of more than 400 cooperators coming from all over Finland and widely specialized in different creative fie...
Founded in 1952 in Bucharest, the cooperative Muncă și Artă, literally “work and art”, is well known for its long tradition in the sector of textile manufacturing of sport items and uniforms.
In the 1990s, Muncă și Artă was the only supplier of sport equipment in Romania, fo...
Literacy is the ability to read and write. Reading and writing is however an outdated definition of literacy: we nowadays consider literacy as a set of competences, which includes reading, writing but also gaining knowledge, analysing critically a text and composing an articulate opinion on a giv...
The cooperative SOLEA started with three employees in 2000 in the plastics and metal component manufacturing. Based in Rybnik, in the eastern part of Czech Republic, it employs today more than 130 people; most of them (over 70%) are people with disabilities. This makes SOLEA one of the most signi...
Auxilium ensures that its patients receive long-term care and healthcare services in their home. This is a valid alternative to hospitalisation and caters to the needs of patients suffering from the multiple, chronic effects of their disease.
Smart started in Belgium in 1998 as a small non-profit organization aimed at providing artists with services adapted to the labour market evolutions. Today, it serves as much as 120,000 users in 9 European countries, 85,000 of which are based in Belgium.
SUMA is the largest independent wholefood wholesaler in the UK. It is also the country’s largest workers cooperative, with more than 150 members and a turnover of 56 million euros, 14 million of which is own-brand products.
