I recently returned from a delegation to Emilia-Romagna in Italy and the Basque Country in Spain, organized by the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI). CCI’s initiative, called Reimagining Scale, brought together a group of U.S.-based solidarity economy practitioners ranging from academics to organizers to investors.
Emilia-Romagna is a region in Italy with a decades-old robust and decentralized cooperative sector, and Bilbao, in the Basque Country of Spain, is a region with a highly centralized, established cooperative economic system. Our intention was to learn more about the enabling characteristics leading to these two thriving regional cooperative economic systems, and to consider what would be needed to scale the movement here in the United States.
There were 16 of us on the trip, and participants ranged from Jessica Gordon Nembhard, who wrote Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, to Dr. Ebony Edwards from Neighbor Built. Some of our close colleagues, like Nia K. Evans from at the Boston Ujima Project, Noni Session from East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EBPREC), and Anasa Troutman, who purchased the historic Clayborn Temple, also joined.
THE START OF THE TRIP: BOLOGNA
We began our trip learning about cooperatives in Bologna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. We toured a producer cooperative Parmesan cheese factory and I’ve never seen so much cheese in my life! The cooperative members are dairy farmers who pool their milk to meet the volume needed to go to market. It was a good example of how a cooperative doesn’t have to be inherently radical— sometimes it’s just a practical way to stay competitive.
We visited the Modena region, where they make traditional balsamic vinegar. The vinegar is aged in barrels kept in people’s attics. It’s a deeply artisanal and cultural practice. When a child is born, families often start a barrel for them, and after 25 years of careful aging, it’s given as a legacy gift when the child starts their own family. Because there’s not a huge market and the process takes decades, these artisans formed a cooperative to pool resources. As I stood inside the home of one of the producers, sipping on heavenly samples of balsamic, what struck me was how cooperatives can support not just artists, but also cultural traditions. These are legacy products. You won’t be surprised to hear I brought back a couple of bottles.
We ended our time in Italy with Emil Banca, a cooperative bank that operates like a credit union and serves nearly 50,000 members. They understand their work as being in service of the people, and they use the language of mutualism and intercooperation. I asked about their interest rates because, in contrast to the U.S. banking system—which often profits off of poor people through fees and high lending rates—Emil Banca is deeply community-oriented. On one loan they charged less than 3 percent interest, and the maximum they charge borrowers is 5 percent, depending on duration and risk. These rates really underscored to me how different their approach to capital is from ours.
THE NEXT STOP: MONDRAGÓN AND THE MONDRAGON CORPORATION
Next, we headed to Bilbao, Spain. I’ve never flown into a more beautiful place full of lush, green farmland. And Bilbao itself is a gorgeous city with the iconic Guggenheim Museum and the Nervión River running through the center of the city.
Having heard about the Mondragon Corporation for years, I was really looking forward to this part of the trip. Mondragon, a global federation of worker-owned cooperatives in Spain’s Basque region, is known for its innovative, solidarity-driven model blending industrial excellence with democratic governance and community development. Mondragon is a global leader when it comes to scaling a cooperative economy and truly serving the people of a region.
Mondragon defines itself as “a dedicated group of people with a cooperative identity forming a business group that is profitable, competitive, and enterprising, and capable of successfully operating in global markets. Our [organization] uses democratic methods in its corporate [organization], and its aims are employment, the personal and professional advancement of its workers, and the development of its community.”
The scale of the cooperative is absolutely visionary. Organizationally, Mondragon consists of 81 separate, self-governing cooperatives, which employ approximately 70,000 people. It has 12 research and development centers, occupying first place in Basque region business rankings and tenth overall in Spain.
When we arrived, we were met by two women, Kaisu Tuominiemi and Castañeda Urrestarazu, who were our hosts for the rest of the trip. Tuominiemi is Finnish and Castañeda Urrestarazu is Basque. They run a cooperative incubator called TAZEBAEZ that works alongside Mondragon University to support the development of entrepreneurs who may eventually become part of the Mondragon ecosystem.
Our first stop was the Mondragon Corporation headquarters, which are housed in a gorgeous old castle in the hills outside the town of Mondragón. Ander Etxeberria Otadui, whose sole job is to share about Mondragon’s work, greeted us and then walked us through the history of Mondragon’s formation.
The cooperative began after the Spanish Civil War, when a priest named Father José María Arizmendiarrieta encouraged a group of young people to leave the factories where they worked and start their own company based on the principles of workers’ democracy.
It was powerful to understand the historical conditions that allowed this cooperative economy to flourish—it was the aftermath of the war, unemployment was high, and the economy needed to be rebuilt.
In that moment of crisis, a leader with a specific theory of change, rooted in faith, was able to help people see a new way forward. Father Arizmendiarrieta communicated his vision using popular education. They were trying to spark cultural resistance—and it took shape in a beautiful way that led to the creation of a strong cooperative model. Early on, Mondragon was committed to including women in the cooperative and in education programs, facing backlash from the Spanish government, which banned cooperative members from participating in social security. In the face of this repression, they quickly set up their own structures for providing social support to their people.
Then we visited the TAZEBAEZ site, where Mondragon University has some of its offices. There, we met entrepreneurs and got to see the efficient cooperative machine that is Mondragon. They’re serious about efficiency and doing good business. Contrary to the context of U.S. capitalism, their work is all aimed at benefiting the Basque people, who are a historically oppressed group within Spain. Mondragon shows that a cooperative can be a serious, viable model.
One of the things I loved learning about Mondragon is their formula for sharing wealth while staying competitive. Within each of Mondragon’s 13 sectors, no one can earn more than six times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, and each sector is bound by the principles of intercooperation. If one business in a sector is struggling, at the end of the year when everyone balances their books, all the other businesses in that sector pool their resources to make it whole. This way, no one ever fails, because the whole is more important than any one part. Each business contributes about 15 percent of their income to Mondragon, which goes to things like capital accounts and workers’ future retirement. Then from what’s left, portions are allotted to the workers, community well-being, and research and development.
THE NEXT STOP: SAN SEBASTIÁN
The following day we went to San Sebastián, a gorgeous city in the Basque region, known for its gastronomic societies called Txoko (pronounced “cho-ko” and meaning “small corner”). The remarkable feature of the txokos is that they are like a neighborhood restaurant, but they use a totally cooperative model in which the members themselves do the shopping and cooking—and the eating, of course! Everyone contributes money toward supplies and upkeep costs. These members-only gastronomic societies offer a reason to get together with friends and family over food, keeping Basque recipes, language, and culture alive.
We had lunch at a txoko—which was a privilege as non-members— and ate a delicious meal of tomato salad, local guindilla peppers (which can be quite spicy), and bonito tuna. The bonito tuna is harvested during the very short window when it moves from the Bay of Biscay into the Atlantic for feeding. And, of course, there was a ton of wine and conversation with the people from the TAZEBAEZ community. Our group was mostly Black women from the U.S., and the TAZEBAEZ community is mostly Basque. Though we come from very different contexts, we have the shared experiences of oppressed identities and a shared commitment to building liberatory cultures, economies, and communities.
RESOURCING THE RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A NEW WORLD
The trip offered a truly immersive experience inside of a solidarity economy. Latin American solidarity economy practitioners often use the word conviviality—the idea of sharing and being for the simple pleasure of doing well together. To them, that’s what life is: eating, laughing, drinking, talking, and building.
I loved the cooperatives’ clarity around the principles of mutualism and intercooperation. Being on this trip with people like Noni Session from EBPREC and Nia K. Evans from the Boston Ujima Project, reminded me that our success is bound with theirs. We’ve always felt that reciprocal relationship, but what if, over time, we built up infrastructure so we were truly engaged in intercooperation? Shifting our mindset from: “We invest in them and do our best to support them,” to, “If they fail, we fail.” That orientation offers a different starting place from which to think about the kind of infrastructure we need to ensure we have stable footing as we leap into building an economy that works for everyone.
I started thinking more about the idea of a bank. Mondragon created an elegant loop wherein they needed to finance cooperative work, so they established a bank. People deposit money in the bank, and that money is recycled throughout the solidarity economy. It helps scale businesses and take care of the people. Could we collectively have something like that here in the U.S.—a depository institution that not only keeps our money safe but also loans it out within the solidarity economy? One that helps build collective wealth and well-being for our people?
We discussed this on our final day. We were all trying to understand our relationships to one another, and someone said: “We don’t have a backbone.” That really struck me because I don’t always refer to the meaning of our business name, which is Chordata, but it references animals with a backbone. As such, it was powerful to hear that language. Mondragon’s backbone, the thing that’s kept them a viable global competitor, is their banking system.
So now I’m wondering: who among us is going to start a bank?
The transformative power of the trip wasn’t because we were being facilitated through exercises or conversations together (though those were incredible!)—it was the relational infrastructure that we were able to build. Angie Kim, president and CEO of CCI, articulated her commitment to the trip as not just a way to “go learn about cooperatives,” but to “resource the relational infrastructure needed to build a new world.”
I feel deeply connected to this group of 16 leaders now after traveling together into another reality—one in which solidarity shapes almost every aspect of life. I’m so grateful to the people we met on our travels, who are so many steps ahead of us in building a formidable solidarity economy. Now our mandate is to figure out: What are we going to build here at home, while embodying a spirit of conviviality?