Solidarity Cooperatives: Multi-Stakeholder Ownership Explained

What Is a Solidarity Cooperative?

A solidarity cooperative (in French: coopérative de solidarité) is a cooperative that includes at least two different categories of members, typically combining people with different relationships to the enterprise — workers, users or consumers, and supporting members — in a single democratically governed organization. It is one of the most developed forms of multi-stakeholder cooperatives.

The solidarity cooperative form was legally established in Quebec, Canada in 1997 under amendments to the province's Loi sur les coopératives (Cooperatives Act). It emerged from practical experience with cooperatives providing community-level social services, where neither a pure worker cooperative (workers only) nor a pure consumer cooperative (users only) adequately captured the range of people with genuine stakes in the enterprise's success.

The term "solidarity" reflects the cooperative's explicit goal: to build solidarity among different groups who share an interest in a service or enterprise but who would otherwise be organized in separate, potentially competing, organizations.

The Origins: Quebec's Social Economy

The solidarity cooperative form was not invented from theory. It emerged from the evolution of Quebec's social economy (économie sociale) — a distinctive tradition of community-controlled economic organizations that grew alongside, and sometimes in response to, the limitations of the state-provided welfare system.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Quebec's cooperative movement developed a range of community services — home care, child care, food distribution — through worker cooperatives and consumer cooperatives separately. By the early 1990s, practitioners were finding that:

Worker cooperatives providing home care services needed consumer input into service design and quality standards
Consumer cooperatives providing community services needed worker commitment and expertise in governance
Neither pure form could easily involve supporters (municipalities, community organizations, funding agencies) who contributed resources without being workers or direct users

The 1997 amendment to Quebec's cooperative law created the solidarity cooperative category, allowing organizations to formally include multiple member classes in a single incorporated entity.

Legal Structure and Member Classes

Under Quebec law, a solidarity cooperative must have at least two of the following three member categories:

1. Worker Members (membres travailleurs)

Workers who are employed by the cooperative and who, through their work, generate the enterprise's products or services. Worker members have the rights and responsibilities of both employees and cooperative owners — they elect representatives to the board, vote on major decisions, and receive patronage benefits based on their labor contribution.

Worker members are typically the primary governance group in solidarity cooperatives providing services.

2. User Members (membres utilisateurs)

People or organizations that use the cooperative's services or products. In a home care cooperative, user members are the care recipients (or their families). In a food cooperative, user members are the customers.

User members bring a demand-side perspective to governance: they represent the interests of the people the cooperative exists to serve, which may not always align perfectly with worker members' interests around wages, working conditions, and service design.

3. Supporting Members (membres de soutien)

Organizations or individuals that support the cooperative's mission without being workers or users. Municipalities, community foundations, religious organizations, government agencies, and allied nonprofits often join as supporting members.

Supporting members typically contribute financially and provide community legitimacy. Their participation can make the cooperative eligible for government contracts, grants, and subsidized loans that would be unavailable to a purely commercial cooperative.

Board Representation

Each member category elects its own directors to the board. The distribution of board seats is determined by the cooperative's bylaws, subject to the legal requirement that no single member category holds more than 60% of the vote.

A typical solidarity cooperative board might have:

3 worker member directors (representing 40% of board votes)
3 user member directors (representing 40% of board votes)
1 supporting member director (representing 20% of board votes)

This multi-class representation is the solidarity cooperative's defining governance feature — it structurally prevents any single stakeholder group from capturing the enterprise.

How Solidarity Cooperatives Work in Practice

Home Care Services: COOP AIDE à Domicile

The home care sector is where solidarity cooperatives have had their greatest impact in Quebec. Before the model's development, home care was either provided by commercial agencies (with no member governance), public sector services (with no market accountability), or worker cooperatives (without user voice).

COOP AIDE à Domicile Laval, founded in 1997, is one of Quebec's original solidarity cooperatives. It provides home care services to elderly and disabled clients. Worker members (home care aides) and user members (care recipients or their families) both sit on the board, ensuring that care quality standards, worker schedules, and service design reflect both sides of the care relationship.

By 2023, Quebec had over 50 solidarity cooperatives operating in home care, employing thousands of workers and serving tens of thousands of clients. The sector has become a model for community-based eldercare internationally.

Community Food Systems

Several solidarity cooperatives in Quebec and elsewhere combine small farm producers, local consumers, and community supporters in a shared food enterprise. These enterprises typically combine features of:

Agricultural marketing cooperatives (farmers as worker members)
Consumer food cooperatives (community members as user members)
Community development organizations (municipalities or food policy councils as supporting members)

Réseau des Marchés Publics du Québec (Quebec Public Markets Network) brings together farmers and market operators under a solidarity cooperative framework to support locally grown food distribution.

Cultural and Community Services

Solidarity cooperatives have also been established for cultural services (community theaters, music schools, heritage organizations) where the distinction between "workers" (artists and staff), "users" (audience and program participants), and "supporters" (funders and community organizations) is natural and meaningful.

Quebec's Cooperative Sector: Scale and Context

Quebec has the highest cooperative density of any Canadian province and one of the highest in North America. This reflects a combination of:

The province's distinct French-language culture, which has historically organized economic life through community institutions
Desjardins Group, the cooperative credit institution founded in 1900, which became the largest financial institution in Quebec
The Conseil québécois de la coopération et de la mutualité (CQCM), the apex body supporting cooperative development, which actively funded the development of new cooperative forms including solidarity cooperatives
Provincial government recognition of cooperatives as instruments of social policy in healthcare, child care, and community services

As of 2023, Quebec has approximately 3,300 cooperatives of all types with combined assets over $400 billion, employing 93,000 people. Solidarity cooperatives number approximately 500, concentrated in home care, food, and community services. For the broader Canadian cooperative legal context, see law on cooperatives.

The Italian Parallel: Social Cooperatives

While the solidarity cooperative model is distinctly Quebecois in legal form, Italy developed a closely parallel structure through its social cooperative legislation (Law 381 of 1991).

Italian social cooperatives are divided into two types:

Type A: Provide health, social, or educational services. Member categories include workers, volunteers, and users.
Type B: Integrate disadvantaged workers into employment. At least 30% of worker-members must be people with disabilities, people recovering from addiction, ex-prisoners, or other disadvantaged groups.

Like solidarity cooperatives, Italian social cooperatives explicitly combine multiple stakeholder groups in governance. Type A social cooperatives share governance between workers and service users — exactly the solidarity cooperative model.

By 2020, Italy had over 15,000 social cooperatives employing approximately 400,000 people, making this the largest sector of worker-controlled social service provision in Europe.

Key distinctions from Quebec:

Italian social cooperatives can include volunteers as members, whereas Quebec solidarity cooperatives focus on the three formal categories
Italian law specifically targets social service provision and disadvantaged worker employment; Quebec's model is broader
Italian social cooperatives are eligible for public procurement contracts under specific terms; Quebec cooperatives must compete for contracts in most cases

Solidarity Cooperatives Beyond Quebec and Italy

The solidarity cooperative concept has spread gradually to other jurisdictions, sometimes through adapted legislation and sometimes through informal adoption of the governance structure within existing cooperative law:

France: French SCICs (Sociétés Coopératives d'Intérêt Collectif, Collective Interest Cooperative Societies), created by legislation in 2001, mirror the solidarity cooperative model closely. At least three distinct stakeholder categories must be included. By 2023, France had over 1,000 SCICs operating in sectors including renewable energy, local food, cultural services, and social services.

Spain: Worker cooperatives with multiple classes have existed in the Basque Country and Catalonia for decades, though without specific solidarity cooperative legislation. The Basque cooperative law allows for auxiliary member categories.

United Kingdom: Community benefit societies and multi-stakeholder cooperatives can operate with multiple member classes under FCA registration, though there is no specific solidarity cooperative legal form.

United States: No US state has a solidarity cooperative statute, but several states' worker cooperative statutes can accommodate multi-class membership. Some US cooperatives have developed solidarity cooperative governance structures within existing legal frameworks.

Governance Challenges in Solidarity Cooperatives

The multi-class structure creates governance complexity that pure cooperatives avoid:

Voting balance: Each member class wants sufficient board representation to protect its interests. Negotiating the balance is a founding challenge. Classes that feel underrepresented may exit or become disengaged.

Conflicting interests: Worker members want higher wages and better working conditions. User members want lower prices and higher service quality. These interests are structurally in tension — paying workers more costs more, which means either higher prices or lower surplus. The board must manage this tension continuously.

Supporting member role: Supporting members (municipalities, foundations) may bring funding and legitimacy but also bring their own organizational agendas. A municipality that contributes 30% of a home care cooperative's funding has significant informal influence even if its formal board representation is limited.

Despite these challenges, solidarity cooperatives in Quebec and Italy have demonstrated that multi-stakeholder governance can produce organizations that are simultaneously more responsive to user needs and more stable for workers than either pure consumer or pure worker cooperative structures in the same service sectors.