Vision

Our goal is for cooperative and mutual self-help housing to gain worldwide recognition and respect for its potential and practical success in providing secure, affordable shelter controlled by the people who live there.

Mission

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

Mandate

Our primary goal is to bring together cooperative housing organizations from all over the world. We achieve this by actively recruiting members and facilitating effective communication and collaboration. Our role is to represent the cooperative housing movement, assisting our members in obtaining the necessary legal and financial support for their success. We are dedicated to advocating for the movement’s remarkable achievements in creating socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable housing solutions. 

In addition, we are committed to promoting, encouraging, and actively participating in the establishment of housing cooperatives in transitioning economies, as well as in developing and developed countries. We also reinforce and promote good governance principles while fostering an inclusive cooperative culture. As part of the broader cooperative movement, we promote cooperatives as people-centered business enterprises.

Our support for members extends to providing a platform for sharing experiences and learning from one another. We organize educational and training events to exchange best practices in cooperative housing. Furthermore, we actively promote partnership initiatives among our members and with other cooperatives to access financial capital, enabling them to invest in the sustainable development, regeneration, and expansion of their housing cooperatives.

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 organizations 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.