What Does Aging With Dignity Look Like? A New Working Group Wants to Find Out

The week of 13 July, a new working group, Coop4Care AP, brought cooperative leaders and experts together for the first time to start answering exactly that question. Convened under the ICA-EU Partnership Programme coops4dev, the group is setting the roadmap for Creating a Better World for Aging with Dignity, an ICA-AP initiative on cooperative elderly care.

The premise is simple but overdue: populations across the region are aging fast, and cooperatives have quietly been part of the answer for decades, through mutual aid and community-based care that rarely gets counted or credited. Coop4Care AP wants to change that. Its roadmap will map the historic and ongoing contributions cooperatives have already made to elderly care, rethink who actually does the heavy lifting of care work, so often women, and so often unrecognized, and push back on the deficit narrative that frames aging as a problem to be managed rather than a stage of life to be supported with dignity.

The inaugural meeting was just the start. ICA-AP is now building out the roadmap in the weeks ahead, and wants to hear from members directly: how is your cooperative already addressing the care economy in your region?

Write to us at: naveen.singh@icaap.coop