The Hawaii Ulu Cooperative invigorates Hawaii’s indigenous food systems as a competitive supply chain and farmer-owned market for local bread and other regenerative crops. The HUC is owned by nearly 100 small, diversified family farms on the Island of Hawaii and Maui.
Founded in 2016, the HUC works together to improve community access to Ulu. The cooperative members are able to offer consistent, high quality ulu products that are delicious, local, healthy and sustainable.
When I visited the HUC in September 2018 as chairman of the Senate’s Agriculture and Environment Committee, they twisted my arm and forced me to eat ulu hummus and ulu chocolate mousse. It was more than vicious!
Cooperatives like the HUC help develop a resilient local economy in the spirit of Laulima, or many hands working with aloha. Officially, cooperatives are autonomous associations of people who have come together voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly run and democratically controlled company.
The collaborative business model offers a proven way for individual companies to work together to achieve common goals.
I introduced SB 498 this legislature to add flexibility to Hawaii’s cooperative statutes, which will encourage more beneficial parish partnerships to be formed. If my law is passed it will allow different types of cooperatives (such as consumer, producer and worker cooperatives) in a variety of areas of business, and also allow different stakeholders to be members of a single cooperative.
Unlike Hawaii’s current farm-specific cooperative statute, which requires members to be producers of agricultural products, multi-stakeholder cooperatives allow different types of interest groups within the same organization. Legal recognition of different types of cooperatives would lead to better access to finance from traditional banking institutions.
Many types of businesses such as B. in the areas of sustainable food systems, renewable energies, health care, childcare and social services, can benefit from setting up as multi-stakeholder cooperatives. For example, cooperatives dedicated to building a local food system may have both producer and consumer members, with the common goal that farmers can make a living from the food they sell and that consumers can afford it.
Worker-owned cooperatives – businesses owned and run by their workers, with workers sharing responsibilities and profits with their peers – are an answer to building a fairer and more resilient economy. Workers ‘cooperatives create decent living wage jobs, with the average starting wage for a workers’ cooperative being $ 19.67 an hour.
Labor cooperatives in the United States have an estimated annual revenue of over $ 505 million.
Cooperatives have long been known to build resilience in times of global uncertainty by putting communities before profit and preserving dollars and jobs in the local economy. Rather than promoting competition, cooperatives work together and network to set goals and standards that build sustainable societies.
A survey of workers’ cooperatives in 2020, aimed at assessing how well cooperatives coped with the COVID-19 crisis, showed that cooperatives were more likely to redistribute business money to pay workers and cut wages or take temporary vacations, to be dismissed as a worker.
Hawaii’s agricultural cooperatives like the HUC are leading the way in growing our local food system, resulting in less reliance on imported food.
While we have overcome the worst of the pandemic, rebuilding a healthy economy is at the forefront of our collective thinking. SB 498 will promote the development of cooperatives as a necessary tool – rooted in democracy, equality and ownership – for our recovery.
