GYF 2021: A celebration of youth coop entrepreneurship

7 April 2021

The second edition of the GYF took place online, where trainers, professionals, and youth from all around the world, got together and exchanged ideas on youth cooperative entrepreneurship, and much more.

The Global Youth Forum (GYF) 2021 took place on the 25th and 26th of March 2021, the event (originally scheduled to take place physically) was fully organized online, and featured multiple workshops, panels, and sessions. The 28 online sessions were spread out during the two full days throughout time zones to reach a diverse public from 70 countries.

The GYF sets out to bring together youth entrepreneurs and professionals, by providing meaningful trainings, peer-to-peer learning, and to help them develop new ideas in the fields of youth and cooperative entrepreneurship.

The event is organized by the International Cooperative Alliance, within the #coops4dev framework partnership with the European Commission.

In this edition, a lot of familiar faces from the 2020 edition came back to deliver trainings and talks. In a way, the 2021 edition was a commemoration of last year’s event, remembering the trainers that were physically there last year, and setting the mood for the World Cooperative Congress, scheduled to take place at the end of the year.

Some of the worker cooperative featured speakers were:
• CICOPA Board Member Sion Whellens
• Francesca Martinelli (Doc Servizi, Legacoop Italy)
• Salonie Hiriyur (SEWA, India)
• Neto Licursi (Argentinian Federation of Tech Worker Coops “FACTTIC”, CNCT, Argentina)

Additionally, CICOPA’s Advocacy Coordinator, Mila Shamku hosted a session titled “Worker cooperatives’ response to platform and non-standard work. An employment perspective” where she presented CECOP’s ALL FOR ONE report and the cooperative solutions to non-standard work.

The sessions featuring our members, showed how worker coops are viable entrepreneurship models within the cooperative world, and stable job providers. More and more, young people are turning to cooperativism as a mean of democratically working together and engaging with each other.

Curious to know more? Read our study on youth cooperative entrepreneurship and find useful resources here.

Read our article about the 2020 GYF edition here.