I’m Emily Alice, born and raised in the heartland of the United States, where my first job as a kid was working in the fields for Monsanto. Since then, I’ve lived in 7 different states, 3 different countries, and 15 different cities. I started doing cooperative work as a university student, and spent the next 15 years in the housing, worker, and development sectors. Throughout my work, I have been committed to youth organizing within the Cooperative Movement, especially on the national and international levels. I was a co-author of every CoopYouth Statement outlined in this toolkit, with the exception of the final formal governance resolution. As the global CoopYouth Movement has grown, so have I; my understanding of cooperativism has evolved largely through the support of my peers. Most of that evolution involved unlearning things I had accepted as truth, and finding concepts and terms from other movements to help put better names to what we were doing. This toolkit represents the voices and perspectives I heard in countless conversations with coopyouth at conferences, on conference calls, via email and text, and during the course of the interviews for this toolkit. While, at times, discussions would reveal that individuals preferred one political moniker over another, the core values and visions were, by and large, the same.
I’ve struggled with my identity as a “Cooperatrix” in recent years, as many of my youth peers have left cooperative work - often disenchanted by a movement they felt did not share their cooperative values, and/or unable to access the resources they needed to be successful. Contributing this toolkit is a hopeful attempt at articulating the interpretation of cooperativism that has shaped me and all the coopyouth spaces I have been in through the years, in order to validate and support young people - who came and are coming to cooperation for the same reasons my peers and I did - to stay. So many young people have worked so hard over the last two decades to create a CoopYouth Movement with a strong identity, coherent philosophy, and organizational homes; because the movement that already existed did not adequately meet our needs or reflect our dreams. The growth of our movement runs parallel to and is informed by the youth-led uprisings and organizing around the world this century that has loudly and consistently asserted that wealth disparity, nation-state violence, and climate catastrophe is not what we want, that things have gone too far. At times, the disconnect between the world we imagine via our values and the world we we live in is so expansive that it is hard to know what to do next.
The greatest thing this toolkit contributes is its demonstration of specific ways in which coopyouth values, often dismissed as overly idealistic or naive, can be expressed in practice - even in the tiniest of ways. Every step counts. It is my sincere hope that the world and the Cooperative Movement, at-large, will embrace and take heed of the wisdom this generation is contributing, and that this generation of coopyouth, even as we grow older, never stops striving towards a better world. “The greatest challenge confronting cooperatives did not come from the outside world. As in the past (and as it will be in the future), the most serious threat was not the competition. It was not even the altered political order. It was in the hearts of discouraged cooperators. It was a matter of resolve, an uncertainty as to what the movement could offer the contemporary world” (MacPherson, 1998, 230-231).
<3 <3 <3 Emily Alice
she/her || USA/Mexico