During the recent Asia-Pacific Regional Youth Workshop organised by ICA-AP from November 3-5, 2023, in Manila, Philippines, Anurag Dang, Assistant Director, NCUI conducted a training session on ‘Exploration of key issues that youth face while starting, maintaining, and developing their cooperatives’ as per the ‘CoopSpring Toolkit’ released by the ICA Global Youth Committee of which, Anurag is one of the first 10 certified trainers.
To create this toolkit, cooperative wisdom was drawn from a range of sources, including historical literature, recent research reports, coopyouth statements, and a series of narrative interviews with current coopyouth practitioners around the world.
The first half of the session covered an eye-opening discussion on CoopYouth Philosophy pronounced by key cooperative researchers & thinkers like Father José Arizmendiarrieta, AF Laidlaw, Ian MacPherson breaking various myths like the need for having the coops to be registered or to be only businesses or having board of directors in their structure, a press release informs.
In the second-half, the participants were then divided into small groups and were provided with real-life cooperative scenarios from which they assessed what are the challenges or opportunities within the scenario.
It also included a discussion on the Key Issues along with the responses provided by the interviewees as mentioned in the toolkit. Workshop participants designed responses to the challenges/opportunities identified from the scenarios, and finally presented their “first-next steps”.
It is worth mentioning here that these “first-next steps” served as the base for creating the CoopYouth action plan presented by the ICA-AP Youth Committee to the Regional Assembly being held in Manila from 6-10 November, 2023.