A Sense of Community

摘要

Unicred has big plans. It is investing heavily in information technology to help exploit new customer seg-ments and further pene-trate its existing member base, while maintaining the ideology of a coopera-tive institution. In a dog-eat-dog world, money and friendship are uneasy bedfellows. Fortunately, there are always some individuals who are prepared to turn their backs on this culture of selfishness and embrace an approach based on solidarity and cooperation. As Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen did. In the mid-19th century, as mayor of a small German town now called Neuwied, he was confronted by an extremely impoverished rural population, which troubled him deeply. Villagers had to depend on loans to buy seeds and machinery, and many families lived in constant threat of losing their livelihoods. Raiffeisen's response was to persuade the villagers to form credit cooperatives, with the cooperative bearing liability for the individual members. As a group, they would obtain better terms for purchasing goods, while individuals would be better positioned to sell their own products.