solidarity

Vienna Webinar

On Thursday the 4th July 2024 we held a webinar hosted in Vienna to introduce people to Hansalim and to hear also from a cooperative in Vienna called Morgenrot which is setting out on its own journey inspired by the example of Hansalim. We gathered over 40 people from across Europe for a 2 hour session with talks by Ok-ja Kwon (president of the Hansalim Federation), Dr Miseong Cho (research director of Hansalim’s Mosim and Salim Research Institute), Dr Jonathan Dolley (Research Fellow at the University of Sussex) and Martin Gerstl (founding member of Morgenrot).

July 4, 2024 Read

Hansalim Study Tour

Day 1 On Sunday the 13th May Thomas Snellman and I drove the 20 km from my home in Yangju to Bonginsa Temple on the outskirts of Seoul. We were meeting up with Lars Laegreid, John Koeckert and Vilde Karoline who had traveled from Norway a few days earlier to enjoy a brief temple stay before we embarked on our whirlwind tour of Hansalim together. Thomas is an organic farmer in Finland and the inventor of REKO1, an ingeniously simple concept that has grown into a global movement of local self-organised facebook communities who enable direct sales between farmers and consumers.

May 19, 2024 Read

Helping Hands

On Wednesday this week, my partner and I participated in one of Hansalim’s ‘Helping Hands’ activities. We joined a small group of members from North Seoul Hansalim Co-op to visit a producer community a couple of hours journey from Seoul. We arrived at around 9:30 Here is a translation of his message. I hope you enjoy it! Drugs. As a farmer, I think it was about 18 years ago that I started to taste drugs.

June 15, 2023 Read

Addicted to the drug called 'Hansalim'

I visited Busan in March to interview some producers. After the interview one of them messaged me to share his favourite metaphor to describe Hansalim: drugs! Here is a translation of his message. I hope you enjoy it! Drugs. As a farmer, I think it was about 18 years ago that I started to taste drugs. It was in the spring of 2002, after returning to Korea in May 2001, when I met a Busan ‘drug boss’ with a bushy haircut and coy eyes that made it difficult to guess his intentions at a lecture by Cheon Kyu-seok at the Changnyeong Symbiotic Farming Village.

June 7, 2023 Read

Movement or cooperative?

I recently had lunch with a member of Hansalim. We discussed the past and future of Hansalim and the Life Movement and they said something that I found very interesting. “The cooperative form is incidental to Hansalim, a coincidence of history.” I asked what they meant by that and they offered me the following explanation: Hansalim as a movement selected the cooperative form as a tool to support and achieve their goals.

April 5, 2023 Read

Food Care

Han-gorang Sharing Han-gorang (한고랑) sharing is a solidarity practice in Hansalim which partners producers, consumers and activists in generous giving. Gorang means furrow, and the activity “sharing one furrow” involves consumer members and producers collaborating to donate food and other resources to vulnerable and low-income people. It is part of Hansalim’s “Food Care” initiative and the way it works is that one farmer sets aside a furrow of rice crop or a portion of fruit from their orchard to donate to one of the local consumer cooperatives through a local Hansalim shop.

March 27, 2023 Read

General Assembly

Newly elected directors Yesterday I attended Hansalim’s General Assembly which was held in Daejeon. The elected representatives from each cooperative and producers association as well as each of the other parts of Hansalim came together to hear reports of the previous year’s activities, the financial state of the business operations, the auditors report and the exciting progress with a new initiative creating multi-stakeholder care cooperatives. There was a buzz of excitement at the meeting as people greeted each other and caught up during the breaks.

March 16, 2023 Read

Busan Trip

My trip to Busan was very interesting and also extremely successful in terms of interviews. With the help of my colleague from Mosim, in just two days we managed 3 group interviews with a total of 9 people. Each one lasted almost two hours and were very intense but the most memorable thing was the passion and openness of the people we interviewed. Hansalim Busan’s Activity Center We met them in one of Hansalim Busan’s activity centers in the old down town area of the city.

March 12, 2023 Read

Hansalim's structure and activities

I have been working on creating a diagram to visualize the structure of Hansalim and to communicate the range of activities that fall under the umbrella of the Hansalim Life Movement. Hansalim’s structure Here is what I have come up with so far: What this diagram shows is the Hansalim Life Movement as an evolving entity formed of a huge diversity of organizations and activities. Each have their own specific purpose and have been developed over Hansalim’s 30 year history to address the challenges and opportunities of rapid growth and to respond to the changing socio-economic and environmental conditions.

March 7, 2023 Read

Regional Case Studies

Here is a brief update on the fieldwork. Seoul and surrounds Since September 2022 I have been interviewing members of Hansalim in and around Seoul, Gyeongi (greater Seoul) and some of the surrounding provinces north and south of the capital including Paju, Goesan, Cheongju and Asan. I have spoken with directors of some of Hansalim’s consumer co-operatives and producer alliances as well as activists, producers and employees. Throughout this time I have been reading about the co-operative movement in Korea and about Hansalim’s history and philosophy.

March 5, 2023 Read

About the project

The Big Idea Multi-stakeholder cooperatives Multi-stakeholder cooperatives (MSC) (or solidarity cooperatives) are co-ops that include two or more stakeholder groups in ownership and governance of the organisation. In food and farming this usually means farmers and consumers, but can also include workers involved in other activities related to the food system (e.g. processing and distribution). This novel arrangement is aimed at overcoming the conflict of interest between producers and consumers inherent in a capitalist market-driven food system.

September 1, 2021 Read