Internationalisation from the perspective of worker cooperatives
25 October 2021
How and why worker cooperatives internationalise? Join the CICOPA online event on Thursday 4th November from 14h00 to 16h00 (CET) and find out.
The CICOPA event Internationalisation from the perspective of worker cooperatives is organised in the context of the SILK Project, a research project focusing on the analysis of the internationalisation of social economy organizations (SSEOs). The project is financed by the OECD and led by DIESIS, our European member.
Internationalisation is the process involving multilateral flows of goods, services, financial resources, information, skills, and knowledge within and between organisations, and across countries.
The reasons for SSEOs to internationalize, differently from traditional enterprises, does not exclusively follow a logic of market domination or profit maximization, but it is rather based on values seeking to benefit the community, both at the local level and abroad.
During this event, we will assess the primacy of the mutual/social objective over capital interest by hearing from the examples of two worker cooperatives active in two different sectors and countries:
- The worker cooperative Ceramiche Noi from Italy, a leading company in the international ceramics sector. Lorenzo Giornelli, business manager of the coop, will explain to us the challenges of transforming into a worker cooperative because of a worker buyout process, the capacity to maintain international clients, and create new ones while facing an unprecedented crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic that stroke the whole world.
- The International Digital Cooperative Community is creating space for exchanging knowledge, projects, and ideas between worker tech cooperatives from all over the world. Naska Yankova will walk us through the journey of cooperation and how people from different technical cooperatives are going the extra mile of exchanging knowledge, projects, ideas and evolve human collaboration within cooperatives to straighten our sector. She is part of the Bulgarian software cooperative Camplight and will have the chance to share the dynamics in her coop as part of the bigger mission of international collaboration.
Read the full programme here.
Interpretation will be available in English, Spanish, and Italian.
Participation is by invitation only. If interested please write to cicopa@cicopa.coop before the 3rd of November 2021.