There are entities having a large impact on the Montana economy that aren’t exactly businesses.
According to research from the Montana Council of Cooperatives, cooperatives in Montana created 23,480 jobs, in a wide-ranging spectrum of industries, and $1.6 billion each year in income received by Montana households.
Now there are many new cooperatives being developed throughout Montana. Tracy McIntyre the Administrator for the Montana Council of Co-ops and the Executive Director for the Montanan Cooperative development Center explains some of the new ways co-ops are being used to provide unique solutions to Montana communities.
“We’re doing a lot of work around childcare and housing. What’s interesting in the childcare and housing is that the communities bring us in to talk about one or the other, but for the most part they are business owners that brought us in to talk to them and they don’t want to necessarily own a childcare facility and they don’t want to necessarily own housing units. So, what they have been working on are these investment co-ops, which are pretty new. They are actually pretty new to the U.S. Alberta has been using them very successfully, and we have one. There’s the Musselshell Rural Investment Cooperative there in Roundup. So, there’s a lot of flexibility on how we could use that, but we’ve got one community looking at creating an investment fund to purchase and refurbish old buildings and then lease and or incubate new companies in their main streets.”-Tracy Mcintyre
