In a global economy increasingly dominated by large companies which sometimes bully their employees, the need for new ways to support workers is on the rise. Small companies, especially co-ops, provide an outlet for human initiative. What co-ops need, and what Valença provides, are the skills from a management toolbox to succeed in competitive markets where big business seems destined to prevail.

On a blindingly sunny afternoon in Rio de Janeiro, Valença walks through the high-income neighborhood of Ipanema. She passes people with blankets spread out on the sidewalk selling sunglasses, clothes hangers, alarm clocks, and tells a small group of American visitors, "The informal sector in Brazil, made up of independent workers like these, comprises about 40% of the economy." Leading the visitors into the Morro de Cantagalo shantytown, she describes her intensive training courses aimed at low-income women and youth.

Most shantytown residents, unlike their rich neighbors with maids, cars, and cable TV, "live in the third world," according to Valença. Without proper sanitation, housing, or access to employment, most sell goods on the streets, work as washerwomen or cooks, or, if they are lucky, get a job as a shop clerk. The possibility of advancement in a job like this is close to zero.

To help isolated workers find a new path toward economic sustainability and growth, Valença has designed a series of effective, useful courses that teach the philosophy of "cooperativism" and offer practical applications for people, especially women, to form their own co-ops.

Like a mini-M.B.A., Valença's curriculum counteracts the subtle disempowerment propagated by government-sponsored "worker improvement projects." The downside of most of those projects, says Valença, 35, is that while they teach concrete skills, like faster sewing, they hide the wider vistas that membership in a functional cooperative can open up.

The government-funded training differs from Valença's program because she does not offer "purely technical" assistance – how to bake bread or how to wash clothes – instead, she sows the seeds for cooperatives, in which people with skills and aims in common can share resources, manage their micro-enterprises, and set goals to increase their income while working in a human-scale operation that respects their civil rights.

Valença promotes "cooperativism," the international movement for income generation via effective participation in management and self-governance. The beauty of a cooperative is that each member – seamstress or baker, domestic worker or artisan – acts as an independent contractor and yet can rely on the infrastructure, shared expertise, and moral support of the collective.

Her organization, CEDECOP (The Center for Development and Education in Popular Cooperatives) was founded 12 years ago in the state of Pernambuco. Valença moved to Rio de Janeiro five years ago to implement her training courses and her network of multipliers, people who take best practices of cooperatives and spread them through their own communities.

Over the lifetime of CEDECOP, Valença estimates that she has reached 5,000 Brazilians. Through her network, she hopes to double that number over the next few years.

A Mini-MBA Makes Efficiency Sky-Rocket

The classes have nine sections of four hours each. A worker who passes through all 36 hours of the course is well prepared to either start up a cooperative with her classmates or move ahead with her pre-cooperative already in an early stage of gestation.

Most people who attend the classes have been struggling to feed their families with a meager income of half a minimum salary, R$65 (about US$34). After completing the management training, when the cooperative starts producing and bringing in profits, the members can hope to make R$250 (US$131) per month.

This huge jump is made possible because united workers with new skills in product development, marketing, sales techniques, and group dynamics learn a whole new way to approach sales. Their efficiency skyrockets. What's more, their self-esteem and the confidence they develop in themselves and their colleagues propels the cooperatives toward success they had only dreamed of.

Workers say that their original motivation for joining a co-op is to increase their take-home pay, but that later they discover the rewards are far more than financial. Valença cites the example of the first group to whom she provided training in 1987, the Washerwomen's Co-op of Pernambuco, in Brazil's Northeast.

"Before forming a co-operative, the women lived like slaves," she says. Washerwomen are at the low end of the totem pole in the informal economy because they do "dirty work." Dragging piles of laundry from a marble-floored apartment building, where they have to take the service elevator (as opposed to the upper-class residents' dogs, for example, who are allowed in the social elevator), washerwomen call their boss "Master," and are at their beck and call.

Disrespected and disenfranchised on the job, they brought home just enough money to put beans and rice on the table. Their husbands, manual laborers having difficulty finding short-term work themselves, often beat their women out of the myriad frustrations and attendant alcoholism that come from a life of poverty without hope.

As Valença describes it, "There was the boss to answer to at work and the husband to answer to at home."

Once Valença brought the women together to consolidate their efforts, they saw their laundry work as a business, and the former "bosses" as "clients." The workers divided up neighborhoods; before, each worker-boss relationship was one-to-one, and put their small money together to buy equipment to make their work easier. They designed business cards and set reasonable hours for themselves. They did surveys to find out what clients wanted and then were able to charge more for the improved product and better service. The Washerwomen's Coop gained a reputation of being the best supplier of efficient, professional laundry services in town.

More Money and More Respect Means Less Abuse

Today, members of the Pernambuco Washerwomen's Co-op earn more money than their husbands. From half a minimum salary R$65 (about US$34), they are pulling in between 2 and 5 minimum salaries per month. They put meat and potatoes on the table. They have bought color TV's, and their husbands are able to watch world-famous Brazilian football at home instead of hanging out in bars and drinking rum.

Most impressive is that domestic abuse has decreased. Because the women's sense of self-worth has increased and they are nearing financial independence, they can stand up for themselves. The husbands' reaction was of pride in their growth, not jealousy or resentment.

Finally, the women have managed to convince the banks to lend them money to build their own houses, an impossibility fifteen years ago. With the collateral of the co-op behind them, they are running the houses they themselves built.

In order to maximize their personal and professional opportunities, co-op members have to be careful not to let themselves be taken advantage of. The troubling factor is that when an already-disenfranchised worker seeks support, her individual identity and initiative can get misplaced in an unwieldy, poorly managed organization.

Valença also warns workers about "false cooperatives," employment agencies masquerading as non-profit organizations that charge high fees to businesses and send their labor force out to menial jobs with no hope of advancement.

In the "General Findings" report issued by Moira Lees of the Cooperative Wholesale Society in Manchester, England, problems such as "financial scandals, poor management control, growing distance between members and their cooperative society, and a failure of democracy" characterize the difficulties which European cooperatives are undergoing, which are threatening "the profile and identity of the cooperative system."

That's exactly where Valença's training provides the missing link: strategies for re-structuring micro- and macro-business plans. One example is the UniArte sewing cooperative in Rio de Janeiro. Hemming dresses one at a time for Rio de Janeiro's elite, a seamstress on her own lived close to the edge of survival.

With the power of the UniArte collective, however, the co-op is able to handle much bigger orders. They hit the big time when they sewed the costumes for a group of young Brazilian musicians and dancers (led by Ashoka Fellow Jose "Junior" Pereira de Oliveira) who performed at the 1998 World Cup opening in France.

With this publicity in their pocket, UniArte members are able to leverage their name to fulfill even larger requests. The fact that Valença belongs to the Ashoka Fellowship of Social Entrepreneurs has given her great opportunities to network on behalf of the co-op members who have passed through her training series.

CEDECOP courses in Administration, Market Research, Price Structuring, and Sales and Marketing benefit not only each member but the cooperative as a whole. Like a beehive in which drones become queens, each member takes responsibility for quality control – individually and in the hive as a whole.

From Seamstress to University Student

Elizete da Silva Napoleao, 33, is a case in point. After taking the whole series of Valença's courses, she says, "Before I got into CEDECOP, I never had any idea about what I could do. I was a seamstress, working on my own. I was trying to support my three kids, but I had very little hope and low self-esteem."

Napoleao heard about Valença's courses through word of mouth in her own shantytown community. Nine Saturdays and thirty-six hours later, Napoleao had learned management techniques, and today is the co-op coordinator of Corte-Arte, a training program for Afro-Brazilian hair design. Her range of experiences in the co-op led her to make a great leap of faith and apply for admission to Bennett, a private university in Rio de Janeiro.

It is common for the police to enter shantytowns on drug searches and haul off anyone in sight, guilty until proven innocent. There are almost no examples of Afro-Brazilian women in the field of law, and Napoleao chose this challenging field to open the doors of justice on behalf of her colleagues, neighbors, and family. She hopes to go into employment and workers' rights, promoting the cooperative movement that helped her enter the university and, in fact, is sustaining her enrollment.

Co-op Members Help Each Other

Even when she was accepted, Napoleao had no way to pay her tuition until cooperative members collected funds among themselves, donating R$20 (about US$11) each. As of today, she says, "I just finished my first semester. Four and a half more years to go, and I'll be the first in my family to graduate, but everybody already calls me 'Doctor.'" She smiles. "I couldn't have done it without the cooperative."

Napoleao is one of Valença's "multipliers," someone who takes the cooperative's classes and then becomes a teacher. The day of her interview for this article, Napoleao was on her way to give a lecture on "Low-Income Women and Work Opportunities in the New Millenium," a subject she knows first-hand.

Valença designed her co-op management courses to benefit low-income women. Taking her methodology from her experiences as a student of the cooperative movement in Sweden, where she lived for four years in the mid-80s, Valença adapted the European model to the reality of Brazil, its low education level and trying economic conditions, especially for people of color and women.

Good Business Practices Also Work At Home

In Valença's Administration course, co-op members learn basic bookkeeping and how to create and manage databases. Since most of the workers in her program have not finished grade school, classes use simple mathematics and practical examples.

Valença says that once the women learn how to manage a business income, they immediately apply it to their own homes. "They carry around notebooks and keep lists of their personal expenses; it really helps." There is an ethical component to the Administration course as well; Valença firmly believes in full financial transparency.

The classes cost between 12 and 15 reais per hour ($US 6-7). Tuition is paid for in part by the students, who are still consolidating their co-ops and have little spare income, and in part by other non-governmental organizations who have seen the results of Valença's work.

The Museu da Republica, for example, an art museum that sponsors classes for low-income residents, recently put 80 teenagers through Valença's course. Tuition funds came from the museum's mini-foundation.

Eligibility is open, although demand is growing so fast that Valença is trying to put her multipliers in place across the country to meet it. Dropout rates are extremely low – Valença says that once in a while, a child's illness will keep a mother at home for one Saturday, but as her self-esteem increases, she starts to ask her husband and neighbors to help her make the sacrifice of time as an investment in their future economic security. The classes are usually small, from 8-12 students at a time, to encourage women who are not used to being in a classroom and to facilitate bonding and open discussions.

The classes do mirror what an MBA program might offer, although Valença's classes last a much shorter time, are more affordable, don't require an entrance exam, and are made up of people from the surrounding community, promoting networking. It would be almost unimaginable for a woman without a grade school education to try to enter a graduate school MBA program, and yet that's exactly the kind of knowledge she gets through the co-op training course.

Market Research is the next step in the course series. Without a product or service in public demand, small businesses will fail before they start. Some students enter the class with a set concept of what their micro-enterprise will look like but leave with a host of new ideas. "The Kit-Fruta co-op was producing dehydrated bananas (a Brazilian favorite) but they found that chocolate-covered bananas sold even better, so they diversified their wares," says Valença.

In the class called Price Structuring, students learn to gauge how much the market will bear for their products and services. This class teaches about fixed and variable costs, profit margins, and final pricing.

The Pao e Vida (Bread and Life) bakery cooperative fixes lunch for a martial arts class, but the students were allotted only 50 centavos (about US 27 cents), so they put together a package of hot dogs and fruit juices that would meet the budget and offer a slim profit. This is an example of how the co-operative applies their learning to a real-life business opportunity. At the same time, Pao e Vida is building up a clientele among the young students, who return after their martial arts class and use any spare change they have to stock up on more snacks.

Sales, Marketing and Creative Brainstorming

Valença's Sales and Marketing class is extremely popular because of the creative brainstorming that goes on. Co-op members stage dialogues and do skits about meeting with store managers and product distributors. The student audience makes comments and suggestions after the mini-plays to help perfect sales pitches.

Co-op budgets don't allow much advertising expenses, so members have to be innovative. The Corte-Arte hair design studio, for example, does cornrow braiding and extensions. A full set of the thinnest braids takes a day and a half to put in and runs about R$150 (US$79), but the people who sport the hair-do's are free walking ads for Corte-Arte, thanks to the strong word-of-mouth publicity.

The community radio station for the Morro do Cantagalo offers free publicity pots for Corte-Arte and for Pao e Vida as well. The announcer of a "Flashback from the 70s, 80s, and 90s" show, Rita de Casa Santos Pinto, is a member of Valença's Co-op Network. In 1999, Pinto traveled to Chile, where she represented Valença's network and met with co-operatives from all over Latin America to discuss working conditions.

Support from Valença doesn't end at the ninth week of the training session. She provides ongoing consulting to participants, connecting them to new markets through the Ashoka Fellowship and through her contacts in Rio de Janeiro and the state of Pernambuco, trading business cards like a Las Vegas dealer, and always providing the moral inspiration to keep growing their micro-enterprises with an eye on the good of each member and the whole. In the year 2000, Valença will publish a book called "The Profile of a Cooperative Director for the 21st Century."

Plan, Listen, Facilitate

The top three recommendations that Valença gives for a millennial co-op director are:

1. Plan ahead – the market always changes, and you have to use your time and resources well to be ready.

2. Listen to your co-op members, communicate, and respect their differences – the workers are your resources.

3. Facilitate the development of all members. Take turns in governance and management. Help everyone grow.

"Practical examples in cooperativism," she says, "show the way to humanize the workplace. The new millennium and new technology will offer us greater opportunities for commerce, in the U.S., China, Brazil, but we must be careful not to 'pasteurize' our culture – I hope it will save the good aspects of our way of life."

Valença was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 1997. Her long trajectory of experience in Sweden, her success in Pernambuco, and her innovative approach to helping cooperatives across the country meet their needs made her a classic Fellow, according to Brazil's Ashoka director, Monica de Roure.

When Valença went to Sweden, she discovered ways of working that were completely foreign to the Brazilian consciousness. Still quite colonialistic, Brazil's economic and racial caste system maintains the desperate cycle of keeping low-income people voiceless and high-income people powerful.

With the help of currently-trained lawyers and future lawyers such as Elizete Napoleao, Valença's ten-year plan includes fighting the current governmental restrictions on cooperatives. A 1971 Brazilian law maintains that cooperatives generating income must have at least twenty members.

When most pre-cooperatives start with three or four women who are scraping to buy their first sewing or washing machine to share among them, the number "20" seems far away indeed. And until they reach that membership requirement, tiny start-up co-ops are kept in the informal sector, unable to register as a legal entity and derive tax benefits.

Valença is protesting this law. "Bring it down to eight, please!" she says, frustrated by the process. "Help us get Brazil working!"

Social Action Helps Women Workers – and Their Families

Valença's efforts to encourage women's start-up businesses to look at the social side of work was of special interest to Ashoka. Most often, low-income female workers are perceived as the recipients of assistance rather than as potential donors or organizers. As Valença points out, however, in March of 1999 the Rio de Janeiro Seamstresses Cooperative re-named itself "The Network of Women Social Entrepreneurs," and is holding monthly meetings to integrate members from other professions.

The Washerwomen's Cooperative of Pernambuco has incorporated social action into its mission as well. Members are leveraging their own ability to secure home-loans to convince banks that other low-income workers should be considered eligible borrowers.

Valença's special programs on behalf of women and leadership are precisely what are lacking in the international field of cooperatives, according to Maria Elena Chavez, the UN Development Liaison Officer at the International Cooperative Association in Geneva.

In a report titled "Women and the Co-operative Movement, Chavez writes, "We know that cooperatives can improve the lives of women by providing them services, now let us prove that cooperatives can be leaders in addressing gender issues and improving the overall economic and social status of men and women worldwide."

U.S. magazines like Fast Company are documenting the changing nature of workers in the new millennium. The global trend is a transition from dedicated worker bees to "e-lancers," self-employed professionals who find free-agent jobs via the Internet. The most marketable e-lancers are fast, flexible, and creative. Valença's in-depth training program is a response to this trend, helping Brazilian workers re-contextualize themselves and their approach to the business world: as entrepreneurs, rather than employees.

Douglas Engle is a photo-journalist with the Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro. His photos have appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, and other newspapers and magazines around the world. His snack at Pao e Vida was a fried chicken dumpling.