Legislation has been passed in 2013 in the Basque Country in Spain allowing students to form workers’ cooperatives called ‘Junior Cooperativas‘. The aim is that these can be a real and practical instrument for students to learn how to manage a cooperative, work with real clients and gain entrepreneurial skills during their courses.The objective of these cooperatives is to create jobs for their members, i.e. the students, who develop their entrepreneurial skills by producing goods and services to real clients. The members can work full-time or part-time. In this way students will be ‘user members’ while they develop a project and ‘collaborating members’ when they are not developing a project.
Their goal is to be a real and practical instrument so its members can learn to manage a cooperative. A junior cooperativa is a cooperative society with a clear social objective: the practical implementation of the skills and knowledge acquired by the student, the ‘user partners.’
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