Seeds of Understanding
Building Food Sovereignty through Cooperatives
Written by Camila Alejandra Bernal Frontal, Senior Manager of Programs & Partnerships, Food First.
October is National Co-op Month in the U.S., and with 2025 declared the International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations, this issue of the Food Sovereignty Digest celebrates cooperatives as essential infrastructure for food justice and systemic repair. Too often, cooperatives are treated as niche alternatives to “business as usual.” But in reality, they are critical strategies for community self-determination and are an ancestral technology for survival, sustainability, and liberation.
Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, cooperative traditions have deep and diverse roots shaped by local values of reciprocity, community, and shared stewardship. Long before the modern cooperative movement, African societies practiced systems of mutual aid and collective labor that laid the foundation for cooperative economics later carried throughout the diaspora. In Asia, we also see early forms of collective enterprise through rural credit and agricultural cooperatives. In Latin America, cooperatives emerged in the late 19th century alongside social and labor movements. Across the Caribbean, cooperatives became essential for rural livelihoods, consumer access, and land-based solidarity economies. Together, these histories reveal that cooperation is not a Western innovation but a global inheritance rooted in resilience, adaptation, and collective care. For decades, cooperatives have helped people reclaim control over the most essential aspects of life: food, land, and work. From the sharecropping collectives of the Reconstruction era to today’s worker-owned urban farms, co-ops have allowed communities (especially Black, Indigenous, and rural people) to build local economies rooted in care rather than extraction.
As former Food First Fellow Dr. Shakara Tyler reminds us, Black agrarian cooperatives are “anti-capitalist strategies and practical implementations of justice.” They demonstrate that another economy is not only possible but already thriving in the soil of collective action.
Photo by Camila Bernal/Food First, 2024
Cooperation as a Practice of Freedom
In her Black Agrarian Cooperatives and Grassroots Movements Syllabus, Dr. Tyler situates cooperative development within the long arc of resistance to racial capitalism and land dispossession. Through the lens of Black agrarian thought, cooperatives are not merely businesses, they are spaces of self-determination, community defense, and cultural continuity.
Whether through the Freedom Farm Cooperative founded by Fannie Lou Hamer or the ongoing work of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, these models remind us that food sovereignty is inseparable from economic democracy. Each co-op becomes a vessel for redistributing power, nurturing belonging, and transforming relationships to land and labor.
Today, this tradition continues across the Americas, in rural Mississippi, Detroit, Puerto Rico, and throughout the Caribbean and the African continent, where agrarian and food cooperatives serve as incubators for justice, not just production.
From Vision to Structure: The Cooperative Blueprint
As the curriculum Dr. Tyler developed during her Food First fellowship emphasizes, starting a cooperative begins not with paperwork or profit projections, but with visioning. The first and most essential question any co-op must answer is: What are we trying to achieve?
Step 1: Envisioning Your Co-op
Members begin by developing a shared vision, mission, and set of values.This process clarifies why the cooperative exists, the needs it seeks to address, and the principles that will guide its decisions. It also helps members define the co-op’s deeper “why,” the purpose that sustains their commitment through challenges. Tools like Padlet boards, which are digital spaces where users can post text, images, links, or videos to brainstorm and collect ideas, or community visioning sessions can help members articulate their purpose and choose a co-op name that reflects their cultural identity and community roots.
Photo by Camila Bernal/Food First, 2024
Step 2: Mapping the Model
The next step is defining how the cooperative will function. The Business Model Canvas offers a practical template to visualize this. It helps groups outline their value proposition, partners, key activities, and community relationships. For example, a community farm cooperative might identify its value as “providing culturally relevant, locally grown food,” its partners as “local markets and mutual aid networks,” and its revenue streams as “[Community Supported Agriculture] CSA shares, catering, or produce boxes for healthcare programs.” What matters most is that the model begins from community needs, not market competition or achieving profit maximization as the top priority.
Step 3: Building Governance and Decision-Making Systems
Democracy is at the heart of the cooperative model, one member, one vote. Effective governance ensures that all members have a meaningful voice in shaping policies, setting priorities, and managing conflict. Dr. Tyler’s Governance and Management module emphasizes the importance of anti-oppressive facilitation, clear communication, and shared accountability. Co-ops might experiment with decision-making models such as consensus or sociocracy, and use systems like meeting agendas, rotating facilitation, and grievance councils to keep communication transparent and relationships healthy. As the curriculum notes, co-ops thrive when they are intentionally structured to center collective leadership and mapping a shared vision rather than hierarchy.
Step 4: Ownership and Shared Wealth
What sets cooperatives apart is not only how they are governed, but how they distribute wealth. In a co-op, members are owners, not employees. They buy in, contribute labor, and share in both profits and risks.
The Ownership and Patronage framework from Dr. Tyler’s toolkit outlines how each member’s equity is tracked through an Internal Capital Account, how profits are distributed based on hours worked (patronage), and how decisions about reinvestment are made collectively. It’s a way to share profits fairly, making sure the value created by the members goes right back to them, not to people outside the community.
Photo by Camila Bernal/Food First, 2024
Step 5: Launching the Co-op
The Steps of Developing a Worker Cooperative (adapted from the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, NY) outline four developmental phases:
- Research & Ideation: Assessing community interest and market feasibility.
- Recruitment & Planning: Training founding members, defining decision-making rules, and drafting business plans.
- Business Structure & Marketing: Forming committees, creating bylaws, and incorporating the enterprise.
- Launch & Member Development: Implementing operations, refining management systems, and continuing cooperative education.
Each phase reinforces that co-op development is not a one-time event but an ongoing and continuous process that grows through learning, participation, and adaptation.
Movement Ecosystems: From Individual Co-ops to Collective Power
No cooperative stands alone. As Dr. Tyler’s work emphasizes, co-ops flourish in ecosystems, in networks of mutual support, technical assistance, and shared vision. In Detroit, for instance, the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network collaborates with the Detroit People’s Food Co-op and the Detroit Community Wealth Fund to weave together food production, education, child care and cooperative finance.
Similarly, in Puerto Rico, land, agricultural and fisheries cooperatives have become lifelines of food sovereignty in the wake of colonial neglect and climate disaster.
Photo by Camila Bernal/Food First, 2024
These examples show how cooperative ecosystems can regenerate not just economies but entire communities, building local resilience through collective infrastructure.
Cooperation as Infrastructure for the Future
On June 19, 2024, the UN General Assembly declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives under the theme “Cooperatives Build a Better World”, recognizing their role in driving sustainable development. This is a reminder that cooperation is more than a model, it is a movement. Achieving food sovereignty means communities must control not only the means of production, but also the means of decision-making and wealth-building.
Dr. Tyler describes cooperation as an “ancestral technology,” or a practice refined through centuries of survival and creativity. From maroon settlements to modern food hubs, the cooperative impulse has always been about more than economics. It is about belonging, reciprocity, and the collective imagination to build something different together.
For communities seeking to build their own co-op, the resources developed through Dr. Tyler’s Food First Fellowship curriculum provide a roadmap and a toolkit grounded in both theory and practice. Whether you’re envisioning a neighborhood garden co-op, a shared kitchen, or a worker-owned grocery, remember: cooperatives are not just tools for business, they are blueprints for freedom.
Further Reading & Resources: