by Hilary Abell, TPSS Co-op Board of Representatives Member
Earlier this month, the United Nations celebrated the International Day of Cooperatives. This worldwide observance has been taking place on the first Saturday in July for more than 20 years. The 2026 theme is “Cooperatives for a Peaceful World,” and it is a chance to reflect on how sales of products carried at the TPSS Co-op can lift up communities far away from our store.
Equal Exchange founders Jonathan Rosenthal, Michael Rozyne, and Rink Dickinson with Hilary Abell and Myrna Greenfield, early worker-owners, in the 1990s.
Case in point: Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative that promotes peace through its equitable trading practices. Its first products supported small farmers in Nicaragua and El Salvador while raising awareness about the civil wars in those countries and the U.S. government’s role.
I was one of the early worker-owners (co-op members) at Equal Exchange back in the 1990s (that’s me in the photo, far left!), and it was a life-changing experience for me. I learned about cooperative principles as we applied them in the day-to-day work of importing and selling coffee (the company’s only product at the time) and by visiting farmer cooperatives in El Salvador, Peru, and Colombia. Those co-ops were a source of stability and hope in the face of social, economic, and political turmoil and sometimes, unspeakable violence. They were definitely “Cooperatives for a Peaceful World.”
Flor, a Peruvian coffee farmer who works with Equal Exchange, prepares to roast coffee beans.
Over the decades since then, Equal Exchange has continued to partner with farmer co-ops in war-torn countries and elsewhere (even here in the U.S.), always practicing an approach to trade that supports community development and local self-determination. Today, Equal Exchange buys coffee, tea, cocoa, avocados, bananas, nuts, and more from farmer cooperatives all over the world and sells them through food co-ops like ours, and many other venues.
Like National Co-op Month in October, the International Day of Cooperatives inspires and teaches us about the power of the cooperative model and the international principles that define it on a global level. Principle 6 – Cooperation among Cooperatives – is one of my favorites.
Every week, when I buy Equal Exchange products at the TPSS Co-op (bananas, avocados, tamari-roasted almonds, and Love Buzz coffee are my go-tos), I am experiencing Principle 6 in action. And when you choose Equal Exchange products, Alvarado St. Bakery bagels (in the frozen section), or Frontier Co-op Spices, you are too!
A Co-op shopper poses with a bag of Equal Exchange’s Women in Coffee blend, which includes Flor’s beans from Peru.
Isn’t it remarkable that our consumer co-op in Takoma Park buys food produced by farmer cooperatives around the world from a worker cooperative in Massachusetts? It’s a fully cooperative value chain spanning the globe. In other words, ordinary people like you and me own and control this set of transactions from beginning to end. No absentee owners, billionaires, multinational corporations, or outside investors whose interests trump everyone else’s.
As Equal Exchange Vice President Nicole Vitello recently put it, “You have a co-op to co-op to co-op supply chain, which is a pretty powerful thing because we’re all now operating on the same business practices.”
These cooperative business practices prioritize people and the planet. Profit too, because every co-op involved is also a business that needs to make money to fulfill its mission. But in the cooperative version of “People, Planet, Profit,” profit serves the interests of people and the planet.