Dear Members, dear Co-operators,
We are pleased to give you more information about the World Cooperative Congress which will be held in Seoul, South Korea, from 13 to 16 December. It will be the 33rd Congress since the ICA was founded in 1895, and we will celebrate both the ICA’s 125th anniversary and the 25th anniversary of the Statement on the Cooperative Identity, which includes the universal cooperative definition, values and principles. The event will focus on strengthening the cooperative identity. It will be co-hosted by the ICA and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, with the support of the South Korean Government and ICA members in Korea.
World Cooperative Congresses are convened only on very special occasions, like for the approval of the Statement on the Cooperative Identity (31st Congress, 1995, Manchester) or the UN International Year of Cooperatives (32nd Congress, 2012, Manchester). The World Cooperative Congress is a large gathering of members as well as co-operators in general (1). We are expecting around 2,000 participants. It will be the second Congress to be held outside Europe, an opportunity to reaffirm the fact that the cooperative identity is truly universal.
We will discuss an array of themes that are linked to the cooperative identity and will be useful both for cooperatives’ positioning at the national and international level at a time when the recognition of our specificities is increasingly difficult, and for cooperatives to learn how to better use the cooperative identity to do business and increase their business sales in a context of global competition. For this occasion, a number of high-quality papers and studies will be prepared and will be presented during the 3-day gathering.
The Congress itself will be preceded by an International Research Conference (10-12 December) and an International Cooperative Law Forum (12-13 December), which will discuss themes related to the Congress. On 13 December, the ICA – Asia Pacific General Assembly will be convened. Several other side events will also be organized.
The Congress will end with a statutory General Assembly on 16 December in the afternoon.
We encourage you to save those dates in your agenda. We will gradually provide you with more information about the event, and we look forward to seeing you in Seoul in December!
We will post more information about the Congress here as it becomes available.
Cooperatively,
Bruno Roelants
Director-General
International Co-operative Alliance
Email: roelants@ica.coop
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Global Office: Alliance Coopérative Internationale - AISBL
Avenue Milcamps 105,1030 Brussels, Belgium
Telephone: +32 (0) 2 743 10 30
(1) “A World Cooperative Congress may be convened by the ICA, with participation, both for Members, Associate Members and the general cooperative public” as per ICA Bylaws, Art. 17.
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