Cooperative

A cooperative is an autonomous association of people who unite voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through an enterprise that they jointly own and control democratically. Cooperatives are run democratically, with each member typically getting one vote in electing the board of directors, and they are generally organized from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. The main types include worker cooperatives, which are run by the people who work in them, consumer cooperatives, which are owned by the people who buy their goods or services, producer cooperatives, which pool the resources of independent producers, purchasing cooperatives, which combine members' buying power, multi stakeholder cooperatives, which share ownership across more than one of these groups, and platform cooperatives, which apply the model to digitally enabled services. By 2012 an estimated one billion people across 96 countries held some form of cooperative membership, worker cooperatives in the United Kingdom have been found to survive their first five years at a higher rate than other kinds of business, and the Mondragon Corporation, founded in 1956, is the largest worker owned cooperative in the world. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/