In celebration of cooperatives' contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come.This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

1. Introduction and Preface Rhonda Phillips and Vanna Gonzales 2. Cooperatives in Non-agricultural Sectors: Examining a Potential Community Development Tool Sanjib Bhuyan and F. Larry Leistritz 3. Cooperatives in Rural Community Development: A New Framework for Analysis Kimberly Zeuli, David Freshwater, Deborah Markley and David Barkley 4. A different kind of social enterprise: social cooperatives and the development of civic capital in Italy Vanna A. Gonzales 5. So Happy Together or Better Off Alone? Women's Economic Activities, Cooperative Work, and Employment in Rural Paraguay Patricia J. Cohn, Matthew S. Carroll and Jo Ellen Force 6. Are worker-owned cooperatives the brewing pots for social capital? Wilson Majee and Ann Hoyt 7. Collaboration, New Generation Cooperatives and Local Development Norman Walzer and Christopher D. Merrett 8. Cooperative Community Development: A Comparative Case Study of Locality-Based Impacts of New Generation Cooperatives Curtis W. Stofferahn