I grew up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by cooperatives long before I understood what they were.
We bought seed and fertilizer from co-ops. We sold our crops through them, and relied on a rural electric cooperative to power our home.
Like millions of Americans, I was part of the cooperative economy without realizing it.
Today, as president and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), I see that same model not as a relic of rural America, but as one of the most underutilized tools we have to build a more resilient economy.
Cooperatives are simple in concept but powerful in impact: they are businesses owned and controlled by the people who use them. That means the profits and decision-making power stay with members and within communities. In an era marked by widening capital flight and economic dislocation, that structure matters more than ever.
The scale is already significant. More than one in three Americans is a member of a cooperative, including nearly 150 million credit union members along with 43 million members of electric cooperative. Yet despite this reach, awareness remains surprisingly low. Too few entrepreneurs, advisors, and policymakers fully understand how cooperatives can be deployed to meet today’s challenges: from access to affordable capital to broadband expansion to workforce empowerment.
That gap is a missed opportunity.
In my work on agriculture and rural development policy, I have visited communities across the country, with many facing persistent poverty or economic transition. What stood out wasn’t just the challenges, but the capacity of local leaders to come together and reshape their economic futures.
Again and again, cooperatives proved to be a vehicle for that transformation.
In rural areas, co-ops have financed essential infrastructure like electricity and increasingly broadband. In cities, worker-owned cooperatives are giving employees a stake in their own livelihoods and a voice in decision-making. In the care economy, co-ops are helping improve job quality while expanding access to services like childcare and home healthcare.
These are practical solutions already working at scale.
And the momentum is growing. Worker cooperatives, for example, have expanded at double-digit rates for more than a decade. Younger generations, in particular, are showing strong interest in cooperative models, especially in digital and platform-based businesses.
When people learn about co-ops, they don’t just support them, they build them.
But growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires an ecosystem that supports cooperative development through fair tax treatment, access to capital, and strong technical assistance. It requires partnerships across sectors, across communities, and across levels of government.
And again, it requires something more fundamental: awareness.
Imagine an economy where every business advisor—from accountants to attorneys—understood cooperatives as a viable option for their clients.
Imagine if communities facing disinvestment had both the resources and the knowledge to deploy co-ops as a strategy for rebuilding.
Imagine if more Americans recognized that they could not only participate in the economy, but own a piece of it.
That’s not a radical vision. It’s a practical one, grounded in models that have worked for generations.
Cooperatives won’t solve every problem. But they offer a powerful, people-centered approach to economic development, and one that aligns growth with community benefit and opportunity with ownership.
At a time when many Americans are questioning who the economy works for, cooperatives provide a clear answer: it can work for all of us, if we choose to build it that way.
