Cooperative Community Development: A Comparative Case Study of Locality-Based Impacts of New Generation Cooperatives

Abstract

The research question was whether the presence of new generation cooperatives (NGCs), whose members do not necessarily live in the community, have secondary community impacts different from traditional cooperatives, which are more locally based? The focus of this research was to compare two counties with NGCs to other farming-dependent counties. The purpose was to determine whether the impacts on financial, built, human, and social capital were different between the two new generation counties and the remaining farming-dependent counties. Relative to the other farm-dependent counties, 10 of the measures indicated an improvement in community capitals in the NGC counties, 6 indicated a decline in community capitals, and 1 was mixed.