Jackson Rising and the International Decade of Cooperatives

The International Decade of Cooperatives was established by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) in 2010, to address the decade spanning 2011 through 2020. In 2012, the ICA produced the Blueprint for a Co-op Decade, to guide the activities of the decade and serve as a strategic plan for the global co-operative movement.

The basic aims of the Blueprint are to: 1) Elevate participation within membership and governance to a new level. 2) Position co-operatives as builders of sustainability. 3) Build the co-operative message and secure the co-operative identity. 4) Ensure supportive legal frameworks for co-operative growth. 5) Secure reliable co-operative capital while guaranteeing member control.

At the heart of this blueprint is the "2020 challenge" which intends to take the co-operative way of doing business to a new level. The intention is that by 2020, co-operatives will be acknowledged as a leader in economic, social and environmental sustainability, and will become the preferred business model by people throughout the world, and lastly, become the fastest growing form of economic enterprise and exchange.

Jackson, Mississippi has the opportunity of playing a major role in fulfilling this blueprint. Social movements in Jackson are becoming deeply engaged in struggles to transform how the economy functions, changing whose interests it serves, and whose rights its upholds and protects. Cooperation Jackson, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Jackson People’s Assembly and their allies in the Southern Grassroots Economies Project to create economic democracy and a solidarity economy are developing a long-term strategy of coordinated social action led by working people by developing an extensive network of cooperative enterprises in the city of Jackson by 2020.

The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference honors the Decade and is proud to be to serve as a vehicle towards its fulfillment.

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