Project of the Day: Coopfunding

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The P2P Foundation is a full supporting partner of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, or CIC. We feel that they’re doing essential work in prototyping pre-figurative models of peer production, governance and property. You can find a lot of information about them, their ethics, and long term plans in their excellent English website, or in our own wiki entry on the CIC. We plan to report regularly on the CIC’s activities and our involvement with the group. Today, we want to highlight just one of their most inspiring initiatives: beyond specific target and time based crowdfunding, there is “Coop-funding“. Coopfunding’s own literature describes its platform in the following way. It is:

  • A crowdfunding platform to promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.
  • Supported by open source software
  • We envisage it as a self financed project which will sustain itself through donations and which will collect resources (monetary and non-) which will support its management. We will not charge commissions on the published projects or on their received donations.

Out of all their currently active campaigns, we’d like to showcase their contributive investment campaign, where all the funds invested will be returned in less than a year. Read on for more details.


CoopfundingAfter the general council of the cooperative of last Monday, June 9th, we want to share an important message which we hope will receive a response from all those who are in a position to do it.

First of all we want to express how rapidly the cooperative has grown in these last 4 years, counting nearly 2.000 members currently, between individuals and groups. The cooperative though, has not only risen in the number of people but also in the number of core groups in local self organised initiatives where all participate to make possible the revolution which we have envisaged.

All this growth has been supported financially up till now with the income of the Cooperative itself and the contributions form its members, always loyal to the principle of independence form State funding, so that none of our funds have come from banks, something we want to keep that way.

Since 2010, we have not made any requests for new contributions from the members and supporters who are in a position to do so, now we think it is the time to do so.

Why now?

logo_CICThis year, the targets are: the consolidation of our economic system, the strengthening of our autonomy and the diversification of our sources of income.

While we develop the software and the management structures to optimize the work in the most sensitive areas of the cooperative, like the economical management and the welcoming of new members, we also aim to create technological and physical tools and projects which will allow us to generate more economic interaction between the members and also with the outside world. In this way, we will shortly add to our Coopfunding project already released, the Integral CES, the Exchange Offices and the digital marketplace, all of which will not only benefit the members but the Cooperative itself.

All of this without entering too much in the details of the work that is still ongoing in relation to the Public Cooperative System, which include areas such as health, housing, education, transportation, technology, food etc. in order to materialise the objectives we have set ourselves through our consensus decision assemblies,

All these are costly enterprises which are stretching to the limits the capacity for self financing solely through our own activity.

Since the expansion we envisaged for 2014 is, at the present moment, slower than we had expected in our yearly budget, we have a need for short term financial support, something we had not anticipated, in order to sustain the 90% growth we designed in this very budget.

The contributions given to this campaign are returnable in the medium term. We are only asking for a commitment to leave this money at the CIC’s disposal at least until the end of 2014, better beginning of 2015.

Lastly, we also want to share some reflexions.

The sum proposed as target for this campaign is 25.000 euros , corresponds to only a little over 5% of anticipated income (458.000) for 2014 and even though it would be a significant help it would not change our commitment to self financing and economic self reliance through membership fees, and economic activity of many of the members.

In the budget we can see how the balance of incomings and outgoings is not even at present, yet we expect it to be within the 4th trimester of this year, this is why we see these financial contributions as short term.

We are moving more and more towards the use of 100% local currency in all the services we provide, something which should reduce our dependency on euros significantly in the short to long term, including the activation of all the before mentioned projects to promote economic interaction between members and outside.

We include the budget here, in order to have a more transparent picture of how funds are allocated in reality and how incoming and outgoings are fluctuating.

More info and contact

If you can give a sum in response to this calling, Fill the contribution form here in Coopfunding

You can also write us to [email protected] in order to recive more details :

Thank you for being there!

Let’s make possible a new way of living!

[Proposal approved in the General Assembly of the CIC of 9th June 2014.]

Contribute to the campaign here

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