How was the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives for you and your organisation?
Throughout a set of seven regional events in Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, US (at the UN HQs), Paraguay and Panama, we addressed key themes and prioritised agendas for the future the regional co-operative movement: i) productivity and local development, ii) co-operative financing for SDGs, iii) education iv) youth, v) the care economy, vi) social justice.
We drove this process via the Regional Committee of the Allied Parties for the IYC in the Americas, a multistakeholder space we created for this purpose, that includes representatives from the co-op movement, international organisations and governments, providing strategic guidance for the development of Regional Agenda of the IYC in the Americas.
Thanks to the efforts and collaboration of all the constituencies of the Regional Committee we have been able to give visibility and a voice to our member organisations’ best practices and experiences showcasing their every day living, producing and being co-operative.
How? Not just via the seven regional events, but especially via the members of the Regional Committee who have outreached, with their own resources and local representations, the national level, where the national committees for the celebration of the IYC were raised: this offered a multiplier factor that generated success and made people want to come closer and join.
The special survey, dedicated to “what happened, how the regional co-operative movement evolved amidst the two IYC 2012-2025” is giving us the full picture about our impact in the region. The results to be published very soon.
What are your hopes for 2026?
First of all, we will continue consolidating our strategic alliances with various international organisations (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Labour Organization, UN Women, Unesco etc), and most of them have already expressed their wish to continue working together in a structured way until 2030 and beyond, turning the Regional Committee of Allied Parties we set up for the IYC in a permanent space and partnership.
This convergence, along with several agreements and memorandum we have signed in the framework of the IYC, will help us to powerfully deploy the social, economic and environmental impact of the co-operative model throughout the Americas.
On the short term all our effects will be channelled towards the regional-global “happening” we will host in Panama from 13-19 September 2026: there we will have the conjunction of the ICA elective assembly, (13-15 September) as wells our regional elective assembly (18-19 September), while in the middle we will receive all the delegates and co-operators from all countries of the world in a ICA global-ICA Americas joint event (16-17 September) on the legacy of the IYC2025.
