Before building a cooperative, learn to cooperate: ‘Let’s Coop!’, The Cooperative Board Game Experience

Description

When people think about creating a cooperative, they often imagine legal registration, governance structures, business plans, and financing. These are all important steps. But after spending the past few years researching and working alongside cooperatives, I have become convinced that one challenge is often even greater: learning how to cooperate.

How do you make decisions when priorities conflict? How do you disagree without damaging relationships? How do you build trust among people with different personalities, expectations, and experiences? These questions rarely appear on registration forms, yet they often determine whether a cooperative succeeds in the long term.

Those questions eventually led me to create ‘Let’s Coop!’, a board game designed to help people experience cooperation in action.