Vision

Through our efforts, cooperative and mutual self-help housing will win recognition and respect throughout the world for its unlimited potential and practical achievement in providing secure, affordable shelter controlled by those who call it home.

Mission

Cooperative Housing International (CHI) unites, represents, promotes and leads the international movement for cooperative, mutual self-help, and community-led housing.

Mandate

Cooperative Housing International unites cooperative housing organisations around the globe by seeking members throughout the world and helping them work and communicate together.

We represent the cooperative housing movement by helping our members win the legal and financial supports they need for success. We speak out about the movement’s success in creating socially, economically and environmentally sustainable housing.

We promote, encourage and help in the establishment of housing cooperatives in transitional economies and in developing and developed countries. We strengthen and encourage good governance principles and foster an inclusive cooperative culture. And we join with the broader cooperative movement to promote cooperatives as the people-centered form of business enterprise.

We serve our members by providing a forum where they can pool their experience. We hold education and training events for the sharing of best practices in cooperative housing. And we encourage partnership initiatives among our members and with other cooperatives to access financial capital so they can invest in the sustainable development, regeneration and expansion of their housing co-operatives.

Click here to read our Annual Review of 2018.  For more information about CHI click here to see Nicholas Gazzard’s presentation to the National Association of Housing Cooperative’s 2014 annual conference.

In the pursuit of our vision and mission we will:

• monitor our movement’s achievements in providing secure, affordable housing in different regions of the world;
• continue building a database of information on mutual self-help and cooperative housing models and systems throughout the world;
• develop a strategy for disseminating information about our movement and facilitating dialogue within it;
• take steps to make membership in Cooperative Housing International accessible and attractive;
• identify best practices in our members’ international development programmes and promote their wider adoption;
• seek opportunities for joint international development programming;
• organize one or more thematic seminars or conferences for members each year;
• seek appropriate support for cooperative housing development from the European Union;
• help our members in the new states of the European Union and countries in transition to secure appropriate cooperative legislation;
• cooperate with other regional and international bodies whose mandate is to promote sustainable human settlements;
• support the wider work of the ICA, collaborating as opportunities arise with the other sectoral organisations and the gender and development committees;
• test our members’ satisfaction regularly and change our working methods as needed to earn our members’ continuing loyalty;
• ask our members to meet their financial commitments to Cooperative Housing International.