Dr. René Mendoza has been accompanying these rural cooperatives and organizations in the name of WPF since 2011. The key to his accompaniment has been his “grassroot research”  – ability to listen – which has provided insight into the world views, mental paradigms, forms of local organization, and motivations of rural populations. Significantly this has included their perceptions of and reactions to outside actors and their development programs.

This type of research is very rare because it cannot be done in typical academic settings, but requires immersion in those rural communities, facing the same conditions and context they deal with daily. This form of research goes beyond studying the reality with the people, but also innovating with them in their processes of building organizational alternatives to the economic, political and religious authoritarianism which is their context.

This enables a dialogue to be created between the academic literature on cooperatives and economic development paradigms on the one hand, and this learning with people in their efforts to bring about change, which results in initiatives responsive to the reality and world views of those rural communities. In contrast, most development proposals implemented in rural communities come from a dialogue among international development NGOs often based on no or limited immersion with local rural communities.

His research has also benefitted from visiting cooperatives and academics studying cooperatives in Central America, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Uruguay.

He has shared what he has been learning in his blog and facebook page, and in 2024 published a summary of his findings in a book called Reinventando el cooperativismo published by the Colombian publisher Magisterio. An English version of the book has now been released by Brill: Reinventing Cooperativism: the art of organizing and reorganizing with those at the bottom. Haymarket is planning on publishing a paperback of the English version sometime around April 2027.

To purchase the book in either Spanish or English click on their respective above links.