Teaching about co-operation - making visible the alternatives. This is concerned with
ensuring that co-operative accounts of economic and social life are visible as a resource for
students, activists, politicians and citizens. This can be read as providing a critique of
capitalist forms of production, or simply as making visible the potential of an alternative
mode of economic organisation, and is often tied in with the wider goal of building a cooperative
movement.
Training for co-operation – building co-operative institutions. This is concerned with
ensuring that the co-operative movement and its institutions work effectively by ensuring
that members are aware of how co-operative institutions can best be established, managed
and run. It is also concerned with developing individuals’ skills and capacities to work within
and progress within these institutions.
Learning through co-operation – developing co-operative identities. This is concerned with
the broad goal of developing the ‘learnt associational identity’ intrinsic to co-operative
practice by giving individuals the opportunity to experience and benefit from relationships of
mutuality, equity and solidarity and to develop capacities for self-reliance and self-help. This
also involves the development of networks of support and informal learning through
relationships built up through participation in co-operatives.