Student cooperatives

Since 2016, new forms of cooperatives with innovative aspects have appeared: student cooperatives. These cooperatives, which are generally attached to university courses, are managed collectively by students in a quasi-autonomous manner. Their activities are very varied: support, studies, advice, but also beer production and entrepreneurial projects. However, they all have one thing in common: the desire to provide a real experience of democratic governance. Through this tool, students develop their project management skills, their teamwork and their entrepreneurial capacity, all the while adquiring democratic governance practices. Depending on the training of the student producers, the cooperative also allows them to put theoretical knowledge into practice, particularly the democratic governance and horizontality on which the cooperative model is based. This implementation of knowledge reflects an active, "by doing" pedagogy, on which the functioning of student cooperatives is based. The collective is at the heart of this pedagogy. The students take decisions together, usually by majority vote, preceded by a collective consultation, and decide which tools are the most appropriate to ensure the proper functioning of the Scic. These student cooperatives have a common feature: their temporality. Indeed, some are only active for a few months of the year, and with a different college of student producers each time. From the beginning of their experience within the collective, the students know how long it will last. To compensate for this, various means were put in place, such as handover times and the transmission of tools.

The conditions for experimenting with democratic governance within a student cooperative rest primarily on the choice of governance bodies and tools. Just like the great diversity of statutes offered by the cooperative model, there is a plurality of governance schemes.

Links

with socioeco.org

On the search engine, put: "coopérative étudiante "

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• Manifeste du Réseau inter-universitaire des coopératives d’étudiant.e.s and 7 such cooperatives (in French)

With Ripess NL articles or position papers

• Launch of ACC’ESS, a student cooperative, December 2021 newsletter, by Martin Georges