From Marcelo Vieta:

Most of you also know that 2012 is the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives. As one of the many celebrations around the world to commemorate this year of the cooperative, EURICSE, in collaboration with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), is spearheading the stories.coop initiative (www.stories.coop), where one cooperative from anywhere in the world is featured everyday–a different coop each day for the entire year. By the end of this year, EURICSE and the ICA will have collected 366 stories. Stories.coop will remain as a depository of cooperative memory, and the ICA will later be publishing some of these stories in a book for posterity. The team working on this initiative here at EURICSE has asked me to spread the word about this great initiative for promoting the cultural, social, and economic alternatives offered by cooperatives broadly, and for highlighting the diversity of specific cooperative experiences. In this time of deep crisis of our contemporary economic system, I can’t think of a better way to spread the word about the possibilities for another mode of economic and social life inherent to the cooperative model.

If you belong to a cooperative, I invite you to upload your story to stories.coop, or send along a brief write-up of your coop to me and I will send it on to the team of writers here that will upload your story. You can also send me or stories.coop pictures of your coop, a logo, and, if you have a brief video of your coop uploaded to YouTube, stories.coop can also feature it. The stories should be in English, but we can help with translations here if needed.

If you know of a great cooperative in your part of the world, please spread the word to them. Or, send along their contact information to me or to stories.coop and EURICSE will contact them to see if they would be interested in participating. Stories.coop is particularly interested in knowing about more cooperatives from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but any cooperative experience from any part of the world is of interest.

Among the advantages to participating in this initiative are:

• the promotion of the cooperative and its story all over the world
• getting viewed by thousands of visitors that go to the stories.coopwebsite on a regular basis
• networking with other cooperatives, and
• totally free participation not linked to any form of for-profit or commercial interest whatsoever.

I invite you to take a look at the almost 70 cooperative stories that have been published so far at http://www.stories.coop. For the cooperative story featured today, go directly to http://www.stories.coop .