Cooperatives as a Human-Centred Reclaiming of Life

By: Maree Bashir

The idea of working on cooperatives at Mujawarah for Life & Development didn’t emerge from books, conferences, or polished reports. It came from a far simpler yet deeper place: a question we found ourselves asking again and again as we walked alongside communities facing immense challenges —

What do people do when systems fail them, when institutions no longer listen, when dignity is stripped away by design, not by accident?

In the spaces we move through, crises aren’t abstract—they are lived realities. Economic disempowerment, political instability, ecological stress, collective exhaustion. And yet, amidst this, we met people full of ideas, energy, and the will to live differently. What was missing was not capacity or creativity—it was the tools, the trust, and the spaces to organise.

That’s where cooperatives reappeared for us—not as a trendy development model, but as a profound human response to systemic breakdown. Not as a programme to implement, but as a pathway to reclaim agency and reimagine what economy, community, and care could mean.

My own journey into the world of cooperatives began out of curiosity. But the more I explored, the more I came to see them as a life philosophy, one rooted in dignity, mutuality, and shared responsibility. Cooperatives, at their core, reject the notion that survival must be competitive. They insist instead that a good life is only possible through others—through solidarity, trust, and collective care.

I kept returning to the story of Rochdale, a working-class town in Britain where the modern cooperative movement took shape in 1844. Faced with exploitation and scarcity, a group of weavers didn’t wait for top-down solutions. They organised themselves, pooled their resources, and founded what would become the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society. They were not economists, but they knew what justice felt like—and they built from there.

Their story reminded me that people don’t need to be experts to build something meaningful. They need the chance to organise, to be seen, to participate. In many communities across Palestine, the Middle East, and other regions we serve, I see echoes of this same spirit—in the traditions of ‘aouna’, in the collective harvest, in neighbours building homes together, in informal networks of care and resource-sharing.

These traditions, though disrupted by modern individualism and external dependency, are not lost. They are dormant. Cooperatives, as we see them in Mujawarah, are not imported models—they are a revival of indigenous wisdom, structured in ways that meet today’s complexities.

When we began thinking of cooperatives as a central direction for Mujawarah, our questions were practical, yet philosophical:

Can we support the emergence of economies that serve human wellbeing over profit?

Can we help build structures that reconnect people with their environment, their neighbours, their own capacities?

Can we support communities—especially displaced, marginalised, and refugee groups—in reclaiming ownership over their food, work, learning, and futures?

The answer was never a project or a policy—it was a process. We do not offer solutions from above. We walk with people as they ask their own questions, unlearn patterns of dependency, and co-create the systems they need. Cooperatives became for us a living school of hope, of governance, of reweaving the social fabric.

More than economic vehicles, cooperatives are political in the deepest sense. They shift power, they cultivate belonging, they create spaces for people to see themselves not as beneficiaries but as contributors, as creators, as decision-makers. They provide an alternative to fragmentation, alienation, and consumerism. They teach us how to live together again.

In a world marked by growing inequality, climate breakdown, forced migration, and cultural loss, I believe cooperatives are not a luxury, but a necessity. They are community-led responses to global disempowerment. They are bridges between survival and dignity. And they are a reminder that reclaiming life is possible—when we do it together.

This is why, at Mujawarah for Life & Development, we are investing in cooperatives not as a trend, but as a transformative path—one rooted in local knowledge, built on trust, and guided by the belief that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.