ISBN : 9782897990718
Year of publication : 2019
Nombre de pages : 44
Langue : Anglais#French</trp-gettext#!trpEnglish#
How, over the course of 75 years, did a fruitful collaboration develop between a major university teaching institution in Quebec and a cooperative selling a variety of useful products to students and other faculty and staff? This is the main objective of this short history of coop HEC Montréal, which takes us on a journey from 1944 to 2019, from the Latin Quarter to Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine. From a small business in the back of a closet run by a handful of student volunteers to a medium-sized organization with over a hundred employees spread over 6 locations: cafeterias, restaurant, bistro, bookstore-computer store, the evolution is striking!
As we look back over three quarters of a century, we also see the cooperative's ability to keep pace with its members' needs, even if this sometimes means abandoning lucrative lines of business such as the sale of course notes. More fundamentally, these lines show the unquestionable added value of a cooperative and its attributes: concern for competitive prices, reinvestment in the community and service improvement, and a determination to ensure the organization's longevity.
Finally, it is a tribute to the many generations of men and women who have succeeded one another on the Board of Directors or as employees of the cooperative, with the constant concern to best meet the needs of its members.
Jean-Pierre Girard is an international consultant on collective enterprises, and has been lecturing in this field since the late 1980s at various universities in Quebec and Africa. He has contributed to a number of publications, including a research notebook providing a historical overview of cooperatives in French Canada, distributed at the International Cooperative Alliance congress in Quebec in 1999, and a book on the history of student and school cooperatives in Quebec, published in the Coopération, mutualité et économie sociale collection by Fides.
