White paper. Community cooperation. Actions and policies to consolidate practices and unlock the potential for community entrepreneurship

In recent years, community cooperatives have gained increasing prominence and represent a new model of cooperation that comes from the bottom up to ensure services and goods that can meet various community needs while revitalizing the socio-economic development of both rural and urban territories. The number of experiences in the field is currently small in relation to the attention they enjoy, and even the production of analyses and studies is still almost entirely absent unable to capture their distinctive value

The objective of the white paper is therefore to demonstrate the existence of a universe of initiatives that identify with the cooperative economy, to summarize the basic elements of a community cooperative, to clarify its specificities, and to develop a framework of interventions geared toward promoting the emergence and consolidation of this new business model.

The book is organized as follows:

The first chapter frames the phenomenon of community cooperatives and the main motivations behind the emergence of this new model of cooperation.

The second chapter highlights the importance and contribution of the cooperative mechanism understood both as a business model that operates following logics of sharing and inclusion and as a regulatory principle capable of giving rise to unprecedented community models.

The third chapter analyzes the main requirements that a community cooperative should possess. It delves into their specific aspects and tools, presents examples of activities that community cooperatives can carry out and identifies the different types they can take on.

The fourth chapter identifies and proposes some guidelines for promoting and supporting the development of community-based forms of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this policy framework is to situate more precisely the regulatory instrumentation already available in the current legislative framework and calibrate any further regulatory interventions at the national level.

The last chapter is devoted to developing some proposals for action geared toward promoting and supporting the development of community-based enterprise.