00:14 Where are you located, what is your name, and what is your relationship to this project?
00:32 When and where did Coop57 originate?
03:42 Can you explain what a financial services cooperative is?
5:10 How does a collective or a cooperative access a loan from a financial services cooperative like Coop57? What requirements do they need to meet?
7:26 Coop57 has ties to ethical finance and social and solidarity-based economics. Can you explain what this economic model entails?
9:00 Are there other tools similar to Coop57?
10:47 When the transformation to a new understanding of the economy is discussed in the public sphere, people tend to raise questions about growth, progress, and profit. How does Coop57 understand these concepts based on its economic proposal?
13:17 We have seen that Coop57 is, on one hand, a financial tool available to other co-ops and social collectives and, on the other hand, a cooperative network divided into regional branches –Coop57Andalucía, Coop57Barcelona, Coop57Aragón, Coop57Galicia, Coop57Asturias, Coop57Madrid, etc.– How many co-ops are part of this network?
17:21 What lessons have you learned from being part of a network like this?
18:35 There is something called New Municipalism in Barcelona. What is the relationship like between Coop57 and the Municipal Administration?
21:42 Is cooperativism a way out of capitalism?
23:26 Do you think that cooperative culture is well-received in Spain?
24:58 Is Coop57 invited to universities to discuss cooperativism and social and solidarity economics?
26:43 Is Coop57 a political project? If so, what kind of politics are we talking about?
28:46 What do you think keeps this type of collective work going?
30:43 Would you link Coop57’s work to the cultural paradigm of the Commons?
Coop57 is a financial services cooperative. It was officially born in 1995 but it was created in the 80’s as a response to a suspension of salaries announced by the Bruguera publishing house in 1982. Its founding was made possible through the use of another workers’ resistance fund: the sum of the severance pay received by the workers over the course of three years between their laying-off and the eventual court ruling in their favor. From 2005 onward, Coop57 would become organized into a nation-wide network of social economy and solidarity with local self-managed nodes. Coop57’s model, as well as its technical and juridical structure, thus begins to proliferate in different locations across Spain. To date, these include: Coop57 Madrid (established in 2006), Coop57 Andalucía (2008) and Coop57 Galiza (2009). It is at this important crossroads that some of the stars of this Constellation took root
