Find Your Path Into a Cooperative
Whether you’re a young person starting out, a freelancer wanting real backing, or a church or community group ready to organise — here’s how to get involved.
For the Aspiring Youth
The 18-Question Self-Assessment
Is the cooperative model right for your group? 18 short questions across digital literacy, social capital, and professional discipline. It is not a test, but a mirror.
1. Is there a high level of trust among the potential founding members?
2. Are you ready to prioritise the collective good over individual gain?
What Would I Actually Do?
It depends on the sector, but it starts the same way everywhere: you join a workshop, work alongside people already active in a cooperative or the freelancer network, and take on real tasks under guidance before you’re on your own — from herd record-keeping to pattern cutting to community health work.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb
1
Take a Workshop
Smart Life, Smart Earn or Startup Sprint — hands-on from day one.
2
Serve a Real Client
Under our guidance, on a genuine job — not a simulation.
3
Back-Office Support
We handle bookkeeping, invoicing, and step in when a job gets complex.
4
Grow
Your career, your client base, or your role in a cooperative.
For Freelancers: Collective Power
“Your Client Stays Yours — For Good”
Complete a workshop, serve a first real client under guidance, and keep going with us behind you. You always keep your own client — we never compete for it.
- Bookkeeping & invoicing
- Tax compliance
- Management advisory & expert back-up
- A professional company name behind you
What We Will Never Do
Take your client from you. A freelancer trained through our programmes keeps their client relationship for good — we support, we never take over.
Work you can’t handle alone is passed to someone else in the network — never absorbed by Shirikiana itself.
For Churches & CBOs
Institutional partners are the bedrock of trust. Values-based cooperatives grow naturally out of church fellowship groups, home cells, and community-based organisations already used to mutual help.
CCI Founding Example
Christian Care International Church (CCI)’s mission — ‘to enlist, disciple, and redeploy a people in Christ for Christ, with joy’ — already does much of what a values-based cooperative needs.
Faith-based entrepreneurship and economic empowerment.
Spiritual, social, and economic growth for young people.
Ethical wealth creation and stewardship.
Fellowship group → registered cooperative — around six months, or as little as two when affiliating with an existing cooperative.
Cooperative Toolkit
Essential resources for building and managing your cooperative.
Monitoring & Control
Practical guidance on the controls needed before implementing project activities — procedures, timelines, responsibilities and budgets — plus key indicators for evaluating cooperative performance.
Self-Assessment
Our 18-question diagnostic tool for new members — not a test, but a mirror.
Applying Lessons
Self-test questions on the role of cooperatives, forming one, and member responsibilities.
For Individuals
Have a quick question about a workshop, the freelancer network, or starting a cooperative through your church or group? Email us directly.
Shirikiana —> to work with one another. The founding values of the cooperative movement, self-help, self-responsibility and solidarity, remain the most practical basis for collective enterprise. We join knowledge, applied action and ethical responsibility in member-owned, member-governed enterprise, guided by the International Cooperative Alliance’s principle of concern for community. We proceed incrementally, attribute every partner by name, and distinguish demonstrated capacity from stated intent.