The Experiment
For their life at work, young people are looking for autonomy, balance between professional and personal life, recognition, projects that make sense in a changing world. Hence, their growing attraction towards the cooperative entrepreneurship model based on horizontal relationships and resources pooling. .
In this context, since the end of 2015, the French Confederation of worker cooperatives (called “Scop” in France), has been engaged in a European project ERASMUS + aimed to offer an online center of educational resources for 15/20 year olds and their teachers. This ambitious project involves the School for Social Economy in Andalusia (Spain); the cooperative vocation training Irecoop (Emilia-Romagna, Italy); the magazine Alternatives Economiques (France), and the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives (CECOP-CICOPA Europe).
Completely free and open source, the tools produced in the framework of the project are based on an the “learning by doing” methodology: learning while creating a “coopworking enterprise”.
In the framework of the CoopLab project, we mean by “coopworking enterprises” the main types of cooperatives where the workers can be also owners and co-managers of the enterprise (worker-members), namely worker cooperatives and social cooperatives.