Understanding the Member Role in a Cooperative
In a cooperative, a member is defined by specific legal rights that include ownership and the ability to vote for leadership. There can be different classes of membership and different roles that members can play, and there may be specific rules and processes that apply to each group. To become a member, a person usually purchases their membership either with money or some other kind of contribution. Each cooperative decides how individuals become members.
What is a Member?
Being a member of a cooperative comes with both rights and responsibilities outlined by either legal regulations or the cooperative’s governing documents. Your “proprietary interest” is essentially the bundle of rights associated with your membership, including certificates and any dividends or distributions. “Shareholder” and “member” are interchangeable.
A pivotal aspect of being a member involves voting rights. Voting rights refers to the ability to vote in direct elections. In some cases, based on the structure of the cooperative there might be different membership classes that have distinct voting rights.
How is membership determined?
A “membership” is like a bundle of rights that a person gets when they join a cooperative. These rights are laid out in the cooperative’s rules (called articles and bylaws) and the law.
The cooperative can hand out memberships either for free or by asking for some money. And when someone is thinking about joining, we call them a “candidate.” The candidacy period is a period of work an employee must complete to become eligible for membership in a worker cooperative. The cooperative then decides if they can become a member or not after the candidacy period ends.
Additional member roles
A cooperative member is a participant in the cooperative with certain rights and benefits, while a cooperative director is a member who has taken on a leadership role on the board of directors, contributing to the cooperative’s governance and decision-making
A “Board Member” or “Board Director” is someone who’s part of the group that makes important decisions for the organization. These decision-makers are called “Directors.” They can be named in the rules (called articles or bylaws) or chosen by the people setting up the organization. The term also includes those who come after them or are chosen in other ways to be part of the group that runs the organization. Directors are responsible for setting policies, approving budgets, and providing overall guidance to the cooperative’s management.
Multi-stakeholder Cooperatives
Some cooperatives have multiple classes, or types, of members. This is sometimes called a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Classes are often defined by a person’s relationship to the cooperative. For example, at the Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, North Carolina, both shoppers and workers are members, each with different rights. Having several classes of members can complicate the distribution of voting rights. These cooperatives are sometimes called hybrid co-ops or solidarity co-ops
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