Conflict and competition indicate an adversarial relationship. The authors believe that we would be healthier and happier as individuals and would function more effectively as a society if we treated one another primarily as partners rather than as adversaries. Although cooperative action, both formal and informal, has a long history in this country dating back to colonial times, and while today 100 million Americans are members of cooperatives, the social and economic benefits of cooperative enterprises are largely known only to the initiated. Nadeau and Thompson present a sparkling kaleidoscope of cooperative ventures in twelve different areas of our society, among them agriculture, housing, finance, and utilities. They write about farmers who created value-added cooperatives such as the Dakota Growers Pasta Company, a strategy that helps family farmers make their farms more profitable, thus enabling them to stay in farming.
Housing cooperatives can help low income people to realize their hopes of owning their own homes.
They can also solve the housing problems of the elderly in urban or rural areas as some of the stories in the book demonstrate. Worker cooperatives can provide well-paying and secure jobs to people who might otherwise be on welfare. A vital area for cooperative action is banking. However, the research also showed that for every dollar on deposit, only one cent was being reinvested in the area. In just three years, Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union has become the largest minority-controlled community development credit union in the country.