When cooperative owners get together, good things happen. We saw that at the 2024 Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ Annual Meeting this month in Minneapolis, Minn.
There’s a focus and attention to strengthening the cooperative system anytime our owners gather in a spirit of true cooperation.
We highlight that sentiment in the latest episode of the It Takes a Co-op™ podcast, titled “Cooperative value in action.”
Tony Rossman, a member of the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ Board of Directors, is among the guests in the episode. He points to the cooperative’s focus on long-term success for owners.
“We have to understand not only where we're at right now in this system, but what we need to do to make the system more relevant long term,” he says. “We have got to be able to look out 10, 20, 30 years and make sure that everyone understands we're working in a global economy. And we have got to make those decisions so we can get this company and our patrons in a position to be viable, to be relevant and to capture more value.”
In her role as executive director of the Graduate Institute for Cooperative Leadership at the University of Missouri, Keri Jacobs consults with cooperatives of all kinds. She says it’s important for younger leaders to emerge in co-ops in the years ahead.
“We're coming to a period where farmers and ranchers think differently than my generation did about the role of a co-op,” she says. “And I think that alignment on values – personal values – with the company's values will be an asset to cooperatives.”
Others interviewed in the episode are Dustin Haaland, refined fuels trading, Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥; Casey Venters of the Lane County (Kan.) Community Foundation; and Megan Wolle with the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ Foundation.
Follow It Takes a Co-op and listen to it on podcast apps, including and , or via the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ website. Most episodes also will have a video version on the .
Have suggestions for topics or guests? Email them to social@chsinc.com.
