Cooperative Identity in Focus: Highlights from CCR Europe 2025

Cooperative Identity – Who are we as a movement, as organisations, and as cooperators?

A timely and relevant theme for the 2025 ICA Committee on Cooperative Research Europe Conference, held last week in Helsinki 🇫🇮 — and we were proud to contribute with a practitioner’s and international development perspective.

Under #coops4dev🌍, cooperation with academia — especially Young and Emerging Scholars — is crucial. They are not just the future of cooperative research, but the future of the movement itself.

On 11 June, we hosted a workshop within the ICA CCR Young & Emerging Scholars (YES) Day — a one-day event at the margin of the main conference to support PhD students in cooperative research with advancing their research and connect with their peers across Europe.

We are grateful to the young scholars for their sharp insights on the purpose of cooperatives, their role in the environmental and digital transitions, the trade-offs between competitiveness and membership, and the role of trust in collective action.

“There is strong collaboration among cooperative researchers, yet we rarely bring them into the same room as businesses. Coops and academia are each other’s problem solvers — we need more platforms for this dialogue.”
— Annalisa Vallone, International Development Coordinator

Our closing reflections from the conference:
💭 Cooperative governance enables resilience across crises and sectors.
💭 Identity is shaped by both internal and external views of the model and how values are interpreted locally and globally.
💭 Intergenerational renewal remains a challenge — we are working with the YECN to address it, but more needs to be done.
💭 Dialogue between researchers and practitioners must grow — this connection is key for long-term impact.

#CCR2025 #IYC2025 #coops4dev🌍

This article has been co-funded by the European Union. The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of Cooperatives Europe and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union.