Cooperatives are Member-owned Businesses

Cooperatives are part of the self-help tradition of America. Cooperatives are businesses organized by people to provide needed goods and services. Cooperative businesses:

• are owned by the people who use their services;
• provide an economic benefit for their members;
• are democratic organizations, controlled by their members;
• are autonomous and independent;
• recognize the importance of education about cooperative business and organizational practices;
• support cooperation among cooperatives, which has resulted in the growing importance of cooperatives in today’s global economy; and
• exhibit concern for their communities.

 

Cooperatives Serve Many Needs

Cooperatives provide just about any good or service their members need. Cooperatives offer credit and financial services, health care, child care, housing, insurance, legal and professional services. Cooperatives sell food, farm supplies, hardware and recreational equipment. They provide utilities, such as electricity, telephone, television and Internet service. And cooperatives process and market products and goods for their members.

• Throughout the United States, approximately 48,000 cooperatives serve 120 million citizens. Worldwide, there are an estimated 750,000 cooperatives that serve 730 million members.
• Cooperatives come in all sizes, from small buying clubs to businesses included in the Fortune 500. Many cooperatives are household names—Land O’Lakes, Ocean Spray, Sunkist, ACE Hardware, Nationwide Insurance, and the Associated Press.
• 29 cooperatives have annual sales in excess of $1 billion. These top cooperatives represent a diverse mix of industries: agriculture, food, hardware, health care, finance, utilities, bottling, recreational equipment and communications.
• About 30 percent of farmers’ products and farm supplies in the United States are marketed through more than 3,000 farmer-owned cooperatives. A majority of the nation’s farmers and ranchers belong to these co-ops.
• Approximately 900 rural electric cooperatives operate nearly half of the electric distribution lines in the United States, covering three-quarters of the land mass. They provide electricity for more than 37 million people in 47 states.
• Consumer-owned and controlled cooperatives pioneered prepaid, group-practice health care. Today cooperative health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) provide health-care services to more than 1.2 million American families. In addition, just about every type of cooperative—consumer, worker, and purchasing/shared services—can be found in the health care sector.
• Nearly 10,000 U.S. credit unions have more than 84 million members and assets in excess of $600 billion.
• More than 250 purchasing co-ops offer group buying and shared services to more than 50,000 independent businesses.
• More than 6,400 housing cooperatives provide dwellings for some three million residents. With 1.5 million cooperative housing units, the co-ops serve households that have a wide range of income levels and housing needs.
• Food cooperatives have been innovators in the marketplace in the areas of unit pricing, consumer protection and nutritional labeling. There are about 500 retail food co-ops in the U.S.
• 270 telephone cooperatives provide service to 2 million households.
• Some 250 purchasing cooperatives offer group buying and shared services to more than 50,000 independent businesses.
• More than 50 million Americans are served by insurance companies owned by or closely affiliated with cooperatives. There are more than 1,000 mutual insurance companies that total more than $80 billion in net written premiums.
• Two in every five people in the U.S. belong to a cooperative. That’s 40 percent of the U.S. population.

 

Cooperatives Have a Big Impact on Wisconsin’s Economy

According to a study by the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, 2.7 million cooperative members in the Badger State depend on approximately 800 co-ops to market and supply agricultural products as well as to provide credit, electricity, telephone service, health care, housing, insurance, and many other products and services. Wisconsin co-ops annually record about $5.6 billion in gross sales and they employ approximately 23,400 Wisconsin residents, paying nearly $700 million in wages and benefits each year. Wisconsin cooperatives pay more than $65 million in taxes each year.

• Wisconsin was one of the first states to enact a law authorizing cooperatives in 1887.
• Anne Pickett started the first dairy cooperative in the state in 1841, pooling milk from neighborhood farms, processing it into cheese and shipping it to Milwaukee for sale.
• The first Wisconsin rural electric cooperatives were energized in May of 1937 in Richland Center and Columbus.
• Wisconsin’s earliest town mutual associations were organized in February 1860—one in Manitowoc County and one in Kenosha County.
• The Cochrane Cooperative Telephone Company, incorporated in 1905, was among the first telephone companies in the state.
• Cooperative livestock marketing had its beginnings in Wisconsin during the 1920s, when local livestock shipping associations organized at rail points to ship livestock to a terminal market. With transportation and livestock processing improvements, cooperative auction markets were organized in 1957.
• The first grain farmer cooperative and elevator was started in Madison in 1857. It was called the Dane County Farmers’ Protective Union.

 

Cooperatives are Part of Your Life

Cooperatives are everywhere—helping people meet their common needs through group effort. Look around your community—you’ll probably find a cooperative or two. Some cooperatives do not have the word “cooperative” in their names, so you may not always know the enterprise is cooperatively organized. Yet there are cooperatives for everything. You’ll find them everywhere people need to get things done efficiently and economically.