Discover Co-opAbility
Our Vision
A future where people will cooperate voluntarily and effectively in order to improve their lives and businesses economically, socially, and culturally. A world where producers, traders, processors, retailers, and consumers will co-operate for the common good through sustainable cooperative enterprises.
Our Mission
To facilitate, support, and speed up sustainable cooperation between and among people, groups, cooperatives, and other organizations.
Our Philosophy
We firmly believe in the power of awareness-based collective action to transform the lives of people towards a brighter future. In the words of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, commited, organized citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Our approach is based on systems thinking thought and practice because we try to see the iceberg as a whole and not just its tip floating above the water line. People and human relationships are the focus of all our efforts. This is why all our training and educational programs are 100% experiential, and our research and support services are designed to be fully participatory, action-oriented, and solution-focused.
Our key innovation is in exercising and constantly improving our deep listening abilities, moving from emphatic listening to generative listening in order to be able to co-create with people and organizations sustainable solutions to their most pressing problems and challanges.
Objectives
- Change the prevailing mental models and remove institutional and organizational constraints and obstacles that prevent producers and theirs partners to cooperate in developing sustainable collaborative relations and enterprises.
- Educate a new generation of cooperative leaders, who have significant cooperative genius and mentality; leaders that combine state-of-the-art knowledge, skills, and experience to design, govern, and manage sustainable cooperatives.
- Reverse and transform the prevailing negative public opinion about cooperatives in Greece.
- Create social fields conducive to cooperation and collective entrepreneurship.
- Install and improve cooperation and collective entrepreneurship capabilities and skills across all age groups and small local communities.
- Co-design with cooperative members and leaders sustainable solutions to the persisting problems of their cooperatives, current or future.
- Create an independent, reliable organization that will actively generate and widely disseminate significant new research-based knowledge and hands-on expertise on cooperatives and cooperation.
- Create a fertile conducive to the development of cooperative start-ups, prototypes, and pilot projects.
Our Team
The Co-opAbility Institute is creared by a team of scientists who firmly believe in cooperation and cooperatives as a means of sustainable entrepreneurial development. Our Work is to co-create, together with interested partners, system-wise solutions to their problems based on awareness-based collective action.
Constantine Iliopoulos
Costas’ mission is to help people, communities, and cooperatives work together effectively in order to achieve their goals, seize emerging opportunities, and co-design solutions to the most pressing social dilemmas and challenges facing them.
Michalis Fefes
Michalis’s purpose is to support the organization and management of cooperatives and other types of collective actions, in order to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability. To achieve this, he uses his legal and organizational knowledge, and his practical experience in the banking, university and law industries as well.
Giorgos Varthalamis
George’s purpose is to promote and fully support cooperation between and among people. His purpose is fulfilled by adopting a pro-active stance, working with and for cooperatives and by facilitating cooperative businesses in becoming sustainable.
Thanasis Bizos
Thanasis’s purpose is to encourage and support people and communities for a more harmonic connection and high-level collective action in order to achieve economic and social well-being.
Vasia Stamouli
Vasia's goal is to help develop and spread a spirit of cooperation in groups and cooperatives. This is achieved through the constant search for creative solutions, the promotion of organizational and social innovations and the facilitation of the acquisition of skills that help to establish and manage sustainable teams.
Our Actions
The Co-opAbility Institute achieves its goals. See in detail all our actions.
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