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A cooperative business is briefly described, including its structure and basic principles. Twelve steps involved in most cooperative development projects are introduced and explained. Important considerations—such as practitioner principles, pitfalls to avoid, cooperative capitalization, legal aspects of cooperative development, and general rules for success—are presented. This information should provide a reader with a comprehensive understanding of the cooperative development process.

In a cooperative, only participants who have met the requirements for membership are allowed to be owners. All cooperatives operate on the principle of “one member, one vote”, so control is allocated evenly among the users of the co-op without regard to how much money each has invested. Cooperatives operate for the benefit of members, and those benefits are distributed in proportion to each member’s transactions with the cooperative. In a co-op, the answer to the question of “who owns, who controls and who benefits from the enterprise?” is always the same – the cooperative members.

To be sure, anyone can make a statement about what the future will be like. But the authors have deep experience in cooperative organization, and they base their projection in large-scale data trends. This strategy of predicting the future does several things well: it gets our attention, it illuminates their reasoning, and it provides markers for assessing whether they will be right, or not so right. Thus, they are not merely advocating a set of values, but also taking intellectual responsibility for the assessment. This is a

A compelling need and a few community leaders can spark the idea of forming a cooperative. Usually, these leaders have an economic need or desire a service they believe a cooperative can provide. They also know others who have similar interests. These leaders can be small business owners, manufacturers, growers, artisans, or citizens who lack, or are losing, a market for their products, satisfactory sources of production supplies, or services related to their occupation. Or they may wish to secure some other needed service or develop sources of additional income.

Potential obstacles to successful cooperative start-up are presented for each of the six phases of cooperative formation. Pitfalls in cooperative development can include: a lack of agreement on the economic problem to be addressed, a cooperative business approach that is not appropriate for addressing the identified problem, other organizational options are more viable than forming a cooperative, a limited understanding the of the responsibilities of directors and members, a lack of qualified leaders, poor feasibility analysis, unrealistic member expectations, the inability to discipline members who are not meeting responsibilities, a shortage of member business volume, inadequate business planning, insufficient member equity investment, ineffective pricing policies, a poorly designed governance structure, an underpaid or unqualified manager, ineffective board of directors, poor quality of products or services, and overall industry weaknesses

if life were a baseball game homeownership would be like sliding into home base. Just as players reach for the plate with their outreached fingers aspiring homeowners reach for their home base