Inclusive Local Economies through Cooperatives Development (INECON project presentation)

Attila Katona (Hungary) is a prominent advocate of bottom-up solutions for a sustainable, climate resilient society. With experience from governmental, non-profit and business world, he is now developing his start-up in London and working as advisor and executive board member for multiple European NGOs and businesses. He is part of the team that conducted an in-depth analysis and empirical research on the social cooperatives of Hungary.

Erika Kármán (Hungary) is a trainer and community and organization developer focusing on ecological and sustainable solutions. She is the president of Szatyor Association – a social enterprise that aims to connect local farmers and producers with costumers, promotes environmentally conscious food alternatives and sustainable lifestyle in the urban setting. She believes that small community initiatives are the solution for global environmental problems.

Magdalena Hunčová (Czech Republic) is an external assistant at the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, University J. E. Purkyne in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic). She is a graduate of the University of Economics in Prague (Ing.) and holds a PhD from the Masaryk University in Brno. Her interests include accounting and finance of public and third sector bodies as well as cooperative and social economy - its theory and its practice both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Ilona Švihlíková (Czech Republic) is an economist focusing mostly on international economic relations and issues related to globalization. She is a founder and member of the civic organization Alternativa Zdola which promotes grass-root activities in the Czech Republic.

Dominika Potkanska (Poland) is a project coordinator/analyst at the Institute of Public Affairs, Warsaw, Poland. She holds a M.A. degree in sociology from the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on collective urban practices, social movements, cooperatives and social enterprises in Poland. Her Master's thesis focused on the analysis of the renaissance of the social movement of food cooperatives in Poland. She is also a founding member of the first food cooperative in Poland after the 1989 systemic transformation, which has established as a cooperative grocery store in Warsaw.

Mária Nemcová (Slovakia) completed her studies at the Faculty of Law of the Comenius University in Bratislava and since 2012 she continues in her postgraduate studies at the University of Warsaw in Warsaw, in which she specializes in comparison of recodification of the new Civil Codes of the Visegrad Four countries with a particular focus on the comparison of the legal regulation of the institute of trusts in the new Czech and Hungarian Civil Codes. In her professional practice, she specializes primarily in company law with emphasis on the exercise of shareholders' and participants' rights in business companies, contract law, waste law, civil law and real estate law. At present, she works as junior attorneys in the law firm BAK & PARTNERS s. r. o. where she is responsible for providing legal consulting for clients, including representation of clients in judicial and arbitration proceedings.

Martin Hadbavný (Slovakia) graduated in 2009 from the Faculty of Law of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. In 2011, he completed his postgraduate studies at Coventry University, United Kingdom within the LLM International Business Law program. He specializes primarily in company law, contract law, real estate law and competition law with respect to illegal practices restricting competition and also on particular aspects in the field of provision of financial services. He works as junior attorneys in the law firm BAK & PARTNERS s. r. o. where he is responsible for providing legal consulting for clients, including representation of clients in judicial and arbitration proceedings.

Eva Riečanská (Slovakia) studied ethnology at Comenius University, Bratislava and sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She has worked at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the UNDP Regional Centre in Bratislava and currently as a freelance researcher and consultant. She has experience both in the academia and NGO sector. Her interest include social inequality (namely the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity and class), social movements and participatory, cooperative and community-driven models of development to address poverty and social exclusion. She is a member of the association Utopia. She has coordinated the research part of the INECON project and carried out empirical research and analysis on the present situation in the cooperative sector in Slovakia.

 

How Can ICT Foster Cooperativism (mobile phone application presentation)

Doruk Salor (Turkey) holds a BSc Degree in Software Engineering at the Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. He has worked as a project developer in the IT company JOOMACE and a project manager in the social media team of his university. Since the summer of 2014 he has been dedicating himself fully to conceptualising and developing the IYPF's mobile phone application for cooperatives networking. The Board appreciated his wholehearted commitment and creative approach to improve the IYPF and appointed him as Director and member of the 2014-15 Board.

Çelik Gümüşdağ (Turkey) is a graduate of the Bahcesehir University. He worked for 3 years in various IT companies as a software engineer before joining Job'N'Coop's team. He is a co-developer of the IYPF's mobile phone application for cooperatives networking.

 

Cooperative and Social Economy in Practice (roundtable and plenary discussion)

Zoltán Erdős (Hungary) is a founding member of Green Routes Social Coop – a newly starting cooperative in the field of sustainable tourism concentrated mainly on the guided tours but also aiming to form a network of locally responsible services. After having ventured to the English countryside, Zoltán is preparing this social cooperative with his companions in Budapest.

Erika Kármán (Hungary) is a trainer and community and organization developer focusing on ecological and sustainable solutions. She is the president of Szatyor Association – a social enterprise that aims to connect local farmers and producers with costumers, promotes environmentally conscious food alternatives and sustainable lifestyle in the urban setting. She believes that small community initiatives are the solution for global environmental problems.

Petr Jelínek (Czech Republic) is an environmentalist and activist. He studied forestry at the Mendel University in Brno from which he also has a PhD degree and where he teaches environmental protection and tropical forestry. He has been a long-term environmental activist both in the Czech Republic and abroad (e.g. the Ladakh Project in India). He is a founding member of the first Czech carsharing cooperative Autonapůl.

Markéta Vinkelhoferová (Czech Republic) is a project coordinator at the Ecumenical Academy Prague and a member of the Czech fair trade cooperative Fair&Bio. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the Nový Prostor street paper, Literární noviny and Týdeník A2 and an English language teacher. She also has experience with working with immigrants in the Czech Republic as well as with volunteer work abroad (Bethlehem, Palestine).

Jiří Guth (Czech Republic) is an environmentalist with ample experience from the NGO sector. For 10 years he worked at the Czech Ministry of the Environment, part-time teaching at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. His research focuses mainly on landscape ecology and his work in the public sector is related to the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) and on nature conservation (esp. Natura 2000 network establishment and monitoring not only in the Czech Republic, but in Romania and Croatia as well). Recently, he has been active in rural development and the co-operative movement. He is a member of the Alternativa zdola initiative and the Green Party and is the head of the Board of the Borovany Brewery Coop.

Tarcisio Tamarosi (Brazil) is an electronics technician at the Industrial Technical College, Universidade Estadual Paulista. He worked in the Incubator of Popular Cooperatives developing training and working on development of supportive economic enterprises, engineering methods and optimization for recycling cooperatives. He has experience in solidarity economy, social and appropriate technologies, transparency and social control, solidarity finance, gender issues, self-management, cooperatives, popular education, entrepreneurship, and a special passion for open source culture: open source data, software and hardware.