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Robert Owen
Born
The inspiration. Owen ran the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland from 1800, shortening hours, opening a school and a company store that sold goods near cost, and argued that co-operation should replace competition. He did not found a lasting co-operative himself, and his own utopian community at New Harmony in Indiana failed, but his followers took his ideas into the movement that produced the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844.
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Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch
Born
Urban credit co-operatives. Schulze-Delitzsch, a Prussian judge and liberal politician, organised loan associations for artisans and small traders from 1850, owned by members who bought shares and shared liability. He insisted on self-help without state support. His model became the German Volksbanken, and the framework he drafted shaped Germany's co-operative law.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen
Born
Rural credit co-operatives. Raiffeisen, a village mayor in the Westerwald, saw farmers ruined by moneylenders after the hunger winter of 1846 to 1847 and moved from charity to self-help, founding a credit association at Heddesdorf in 1864 in which members pooled savings and lent to each other under shared liability. Raiffeisen banks spread across Europe and still carry his name, owned by local members.
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Horace Plunkett
Born
Farmers' co-operatives in Ireland. Plunkett, an Anglo-Irish landowner who had ranched in Wyoming, set up the first co-operative creamery in 1889 and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society in 1894 to help small farmers process and sell milk together. Hundreds of co-operative creameries followed, the roots of today's large Irish dairy co-operatives and the companies that grew out of them.
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Alphonse Desjardins (co-operator)
Born
Caisses populaires. Desjardins, a parliamentary reporter in Ottawa, was shocked by a debate on usurious loans and studied European credit co-operatives before opening the first caisse populaire in his home town of Lévis, Quebec, in 1900, run from his house with his wife Dorimène. The network became the Desjardins Group, one of North America's largest financial co-operatives, still owned by its members.
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Edward Filene
Credit unions in the United States. Filene, a Boston department store owner, used his fortune to promote credit unions, funding the Credit Union National Extension Bureau from 1921 and pushing for state and federal laws to allow them. He also tried to hand control of his own store to its employees and was pushed aside by his partners, a revealing limit on a merchant's co-operative ideals.
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Toyohiko Kagawa
Born
Consumer co-operatives in Japan. Kagawa, a Christian social reformer who lived in a Kobe slum, helped found consumer co-operatives in Kobe and Osaka in the early 1920s so working families could buy rice and daily goods at fair prices. These grew into Co-op Kobe, one of the world's largest consumer co-operatives, and he became a leading figure in Japan's wider co-operative movement.
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Moses Coady
Born
Adult education and co-ops. Coady, a Catholic priest at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, led the Antigonish Movement from the late 1920s, organising study clubs where fishermen, miners and farmers learned economics and then set up credit unions, fish-processing and marketing co-operatives. The Coady Institute still trains co-operative organisers from developing countries.
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Gottlieb Duttweiler
From private chain to co-operative. Duttweiler started Migros in Zurich in 1925 with five lorries selling a few staples well below shop prices, then in 1941 converted the company into regional co-operatives and gave shares to customers, making them its owners. He barred alcohol and tobacco and committed a share of turnover to culture. Migros became Switzerland's largest retailer, a rare case of a founder giving his company away to its shoppers.
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José María Arizmendiarrieta
Worker co-operatives. Arizmendiarrieta, a Basque priest sent to Mondragón in 1941, founded a technical school, and in 1956 five of its former students set up a stove factory owned by its workers, the first of the Mondragon co-operatives. He never owned or ran the businesses; he supplied ideas, training and a co-operative bank to finance them. Mondragon grew into a large federation, though the collapse of Fagor Electrodomésticos in 2013 showed its limits.
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Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel
Born
Dairy farmers in Gujarat. Tribhuvandas Patel, a lawyer and independence activist, organised the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union at Anand in 1946 so small farmers could stop selling milk cheaply to a private dairy that supplied Bombay. Village societies collected milk twice a day and paid farmers promptly. He chaired the union for decades, the foundation of the Amul brand.
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Verghese Kurien
Born
Amul and Operation Flood. Kurien, an engineer posted to Anand in 1949, ran the Kaira union's dairy, helped develop milk powder from buffalo milk, and built Amul into a national brand while the farmers kept ownership. As head of the National Dairy Development Board he led Operation Flood, which replicated the Anand model across India and helped make it the world's largest milk producer. He died in 2012.
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Ela Bhatt
Born
Self-employed women. Bhatt, a lawyer in Ahmedabad, founded the Self-Employed Women's Association in 1972 for street vendors, home workers and labourers who had no union, and in 1974 SEWA Bank, a co-operative bank owned by its women depositors, which lent to people no ordinary bank would serve. SEWA went on to form many smaller member-owned co-operatives. She died in 2022.
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Muhammad Yunus
Born
Member-owned microcredit. Yunus, an economics professor, began lending small sums to village women near Chittagong in 1976 and made Grameen a bank in 1983, with most of its shares owned by its borrowers. Group lending without collateral spread worldwide and won him and Grameen the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Later studies found microcredit's effect on poverty more modest than claimed, and commercial imitators charged high rates.
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