Canada’s Co-Operatives: Helping Communities During and After the Coronavirus

Summary

As the epidemiological impacts of COVID-19 grow exponentially, so do business closures, unemployment rates, poverty, housing and food insecurities.

It’s not surprising to researchers of co-operatives and community economic development that the outbreak of COVID-19 spurred Canada’s co-operative sector to immediately step up and respond to the needs of communities — in many cases, sooner and more concretely than the federal, provincial and local governments as well as large corporations.

For example, grocery co-ops innovated employee safety and salary top-up while worker co-ops quickly shifted to producing medical products, and credit unions offered far-reaching grants to community groups, loan deferrals and even zero-interest credit cards.