Home-grown business models for sustainable communities

Dr. Ana Maria Peredo (business) brings an award-winning perspective to the academic field of business and management, informed by years of living and working among the poor in her native Peru and in regions from the Andes to the Arctic.

Peredo's experiences and her commitment to promoting the concept of global citizenship with her students have won her the 2008 CBIE Internationalization Leadership Award, given by the Canadian Bureau of International Education in recognition of outstanding leadership in the internationalization of Canadian education and/or the international education profession.

William Warden, former diplomat and former director of the International Centre for the University of Calgary, where Peredo received her doctorate in 1999, said in his letter of support, that "she is expanding management concepts to include realities of the non-Western world."

Peredo has also taken on a one-year appointment as interim director of the BC Institute for Co-operative Studies (BCICS). One of 17 research centres at UVic, the institute supports research on co-operatives and acts as a central clearing house and information resource on credit unions and co-operatives.

"It has been a wonderful year," she says. "I'm delighted with the CBIE award and the recognition, and it is an honour to support the institute. Ian MacPherson, the founder and former director, is a well-known scholar of co-operatives. I'm happy to play a role in helping shape the institution for the future. My goal is to create a multi-disciplinary dialogue and space where faculty can meet with the diverse local grassroots community organizations to discuss economic alternatives."

Peredo has recently returned from a tour of the famous Mondrag&o#180;n Co-operative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. The MCC is the largest worker co-op in the world, made up of more than 150 companies, with manufacturing and engineering interests as well as retail, financial and educational divisions. Peredo is brimming with excitement about sharing the co-operative economic model with fellow UVic researchers.

Her published research introduces new business models that isolated, rural communities have developed for themselves as a means of dealing with their disadvantages. These models are often based on the same values as those embedded in co-operative organizations such as Mondrag&o#180;n, or-closer to home-organizations like Island Farms Dairy and Ocean Spray: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

Much of her research looks at the roles that cultural and social values play in the economic well-being of a community. "I came to see that the market economy is just one of several economic systems rooted in the social and cultural mix of rural communities."

Peredo hopes the CBIE award will help expand understanding that the role of business is to serve people and that it is not an end in and of itself. "Business must come back to seeing itself as embedded within community and culture," she says.