Will Co-ops Succeed or Fail in the 21st Century? The Answer Lies with Co-op Education Efforts
As we struggle to get Australian co-operatives (with one or two exceptions) to recognize the importance of co-operative education, Brett Fairbairn, Director of the Center for the Study of Cooperatives at University of Saskatchewan, Canada has written that the answer to co-operative success or failure during this Century lies with co-operative education efforts.
This is interesting coming from someone who is at the forefront of co-operative education and thinking in a country that has taken the matter of education for co-operatives much more seriously than we have ever done in Australia. Fairbairn argues that there is a clear link between co-operative education and member commitment and loyalty to a co-operative. He says, "inadequate education is going to contribute to inappropriate business strategies, failed innovation and weak member commitment."
He recognizes that co-operatives have long been committed to education (although, sadly, that is not the Australian experience) and have done many things well. However, shortages of resources and concerns with efficiencies and effectiveness have become barriers to new ideas in existing organizations. Other less reasonable and less logical barriers to co-operative education include, a lack of legitimacy in many co-operatives for any active educational function, and mental barriers to realising the importance of education, which is certainly the case with most Australian co-operatives.
It is important, Fairbairn suggests, to distinguish education from training. Training imparts specific, predetermined facts, procedures and skills. Education develops in people the capacity to know what is important, how to do something and to find the education and skills they need. Co-operatives have got by for decades by doing a great deal of training particularly of management and elected leaders. But in this new information age, they have to go back to doing more education, especially member education.
One of the really important purposes of co-operative education is to help make the organization transparent. Due to their size, horizontal and vertical integration, and multiple roles and pressures, many co-operatives have become rather complicated organizations. An important corollary of this is a weakening sense of member commitment. Members feel less attached to organizations that seem more remote or harder to understand. There is less trust or loyalty when the co-operative's overall direction eludes easy grasp, when it serves many interests, or is active in many product lines or regions. As a result, members may fail to support the co-operative as much as they should, even when it is in their interest to do so.
Co-operatives need to remember, according to Fairbairn, that education is not only a means of distributing knowledge, but also of creating it. This creative function arises from education's role in making linkages between ideas and information, and linkages between people and groups. Members have knowledge that co-operatives need and should value: knowledge about their local community and conditions, about their needs, about their spending, purchasing, or marketing plans and intentions. Engaging these members in an educational process is a way of unlocking their knowledge, for the benefit of the co-operative as well as themselves.
In supporting Fairbairn's comments, Randall Torgerson, Deputy Administrator of the US Department of Agriculture's Rural Business-Co-operative Service says, "Education about co-operatives is critical to the long-term survival of producer and user-owned businesses as instruments of change and effective representation of members' interests. The focus should not be preserving institutions for the sake of institutions, but rather how co-ops can produce more member benefits. Education about co-operatives is a fundamental process undergirding their future success. The question is whether this is recognized and how committed leadership is to enhancing programs that accomplish it.
