Last year, during the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) launched a new initiative bringing together leaders from some of the world’s largest cooperative and mutual businesses.
The Cooperative and Mutuals 50 (CM50) leadership circle had lofty aims: to use the strength and scale of the global co-operative movement to build a new global economy and reshape how the world does business.
After its official launch in Doha, Qatar, during the 2025 World Social Summit, the CM50 held its inaugural CM50 Leaders’ Summit in July, gathering 80 CEOs and leaders from 28 countries across 5 continents. Together, this group alone represents a combined US$500bn in turnover.
The event marked a long-term commitment of CEOs in the movement to position co-operatives at the centre of efforts to build a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable global economy. The group aims to nearly double the total global co-operative and mutual business turnover from US$2.7tn to US$5tb a year.
“This is a powerful new chapter for the global co-operative movement,” said Jeroen Douglas, ICA director and co-chair of the CM50 initiative. “Think of it as our own co-operative and mutual economic forum, built to deliver an economic model firmly rooted in co-operative values and principles. The energy in the room proved that when co-operative leaders unite, we don’t just discuss the future. We build it. We are the architects of the new global economy.”
Related: CM50 leaders pledge to ‘drive impactful change globally’
His fellow co-chair Shaun Tarbuck noted that “at the core of the CM50 is a powerful value proposition for co-operative and mutual leaders: by working closely together and scaling projects across markets, capital, digital spaces, and food systems, we do more than just strengthen our businesses. Through these deepening relationships, we ultimately uplift the families and communities we serve every day.”
At the centre of the summit was a set of five concrete, scaled up commitments, aimed at creating a cooperative digital and social ecosystem.
- A Cooperative Digital Marketplace: Building a platform used daily by 150,000 enterprises.
- The ‘Cloud Coop’ Infrastructure: Creating a dedicated cooperative digital commons used daily by at least 100,000 enterprises.
- Planetary Health: Moving 500 million people toward a healthy, sustainable diet that protects both people and the planet.
- Future-Proofed Leadership: Training the next 4,000 co-operative leaders at the highest level by building a world-class, global academic infrastructure.
- Crisis Reconstruction: Deploying the movement’s capacity to help communities and countries rebuild after crises in at least five major global contexts.
“These commitments will bring together its members across every geography and sector towards practical action,” said Douglas, adding that one of the most energising and critical elements of the event was hearing directly from members about innovation and resilience underway across the movement.
This included how Zimbabwe’s National Association of Housing Co-operatives is developing what could become one of the largest housing co-operatives on the African continent, drawing on successful models with deep roots in Europe and North America – and how in Brazil, agri co-op Coopercitrus is showing what cooperative trade infrastructure can do at scale when built around member ownership rather than investor extraction.
Delegates also heard how in Germany, a local energy co-operative and member of DGRV financed a football club’s stadium roof through solar panel returns, with members collectively choosing to redirect their dividends to the community rather than take them as income, and how in India, the world’s largest farmer-owned dairy co-operative Amul is extending its model into new territory, moving from milk to mobility by financing electric vehicles for its members and backing a ride-sharing co-operative, turning the clean energy transition into a direct economic dividend for farmers.
“These are not pilot projects or aspirational cases, but are happening now, within our membership. They are examples the CM50 is designed to amplify and help grow, across continents and across sectors,” said Douglas.
“Central to the success of the CM50 is it being fit for purpose in the world we live in. This world, as our keynote speakers told the Summit, has shifted considerably.”
These speakers included Alessandra Stråberg, chief economist and Länsförsäkringar, a Swedish mutual company comprising 23 local and customer-owned regional insurance companies. She outlined how the the world has shifted from globalisation and co-operation to nationalism, protection, and conflict, and beneath this geopolitics, climate change, demographic transformation and AI are reshaping the world before us. Her message to the summit was: stop being frozen by what cannot be controlled, focus on what can, and keep moving. Growth, she added, is the best crisis tool any co-operative has.
Also speaking was Kristof De Spiegeleer, the CEO of OurWorld (a sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure that enables people, businesses, and public institutions to own, operate, and monetize enterprise-grade and home-scale data centers) and CTO of the CM50. He closed the Summit by reminding delegates that we are living through an AI revolution. The question, he said, is not whether it will happen but rather whether co-operatives will be shaped by it or shape it themselves.
Over the next three to six months, the commitments made at the summit will be developed into workable business plans, with rollouts targeted for Q3 2026 and Q1 2027. The group is already planning for expansion, with an invitation from Bulgaria’s Central Cooperative Union to host the 2027 Summit. To sustain this momentum, CM50 aims to grow its leadership support base to at least 100 enterprise members by the end of 2026.
“The innovations, digital marketplaces, and data tools built by CM50 will eventually flow down to benefit cooperatives of all sizes,” said Douglas. “To ensure your co-operative is at the table and directly aligned with these massive shifts, encourage your CEO to look into the CM50 initiative, champion these targets, and bring your co-operative’s unique strengths into this history-making global team. Together, we are building the $5tn co-operative future.”
Find out more about the initiative at CM50.coop
