About cooppa

The cooperative cooppa was initially founded as a cooperative press agency at the Schrems Whitsun Symposium of GEA and the Rückenwind Association in June 2017. We want to make the topics and content of collaborative business and the global sustainability goals (“SDGs”) accessible to a broad public through multimedia in the sense of positive and constructive journalism.

Today, we see sustainability communication as a broad field of activity that includes media communication as well as transformation workshops and talking directly to each other. To this end, we have also launched the Bureau of Civil Society.

cooppa is a cooperative of sustainability experts, journalists, and organizations (cooperatives, NGOs, civil society initiatives, companies…) that want to communicate their content and activities better and beyond their own circles.

cooppa supports these organizations with processes for social transformation, journalistically prepared stories about their content and activities, and organizes the dissemination within the network and beyond. Their mutual dissemination in their own media (websites, newsletters, …) is not only desired but downright the point. In addition, we facilitate the dissemination of press releases within and outside the network.

cooppa considers it essential to

• disseminate information about the activities for a “Great Transformation” in this scene,
• to create participative information
• establish cooperation in the scene
• send out information to other milieus (impact approach)

Together with our members (readers, journalists, companies, and organizations), we are currently working on an editorial statute and also a business model with which this goal can be realized sustainably. We are pleased about your interest. Please write to us at office@cooppa.at

Subject and target groups

In terms of content, the cooperative’s activities lie at the core of public welfare-oriented and common-spirited economic activity. The founders have been active in this field for decades and have excellent networks in the area of sustainability. The cooperative cooppa is an association of journalists and organizations that prepare their contents and activities journalistically and communicate them beyond their own circles. It provides cost-effective support to members of the Tailwind Association as well as other companies and NGOs that share similar values.

The target groups of the economic activity are

• Journalists (print, audio-visual),
• companies of the private sector,
• other organizations (cooperatives, NGOs, civil society initiatives),
• individual readers.

Team

Martin Hoffmann – Board Member
In addition to his work as a board member, he has been Secretary General of the Austrian Chapter of the Club of Rome since the beginning of 2022 and volunteers with Scientists for Future Upper Austria, mainly dealing with planning, project management and communication.

He is also a lecturer at Johannes Kepler University Linz and organizes a lecture series on the climate crisis and sustainability. Until the end of 2020, he worked as a theoretical physicist in the field of materials research.

Dennis Kacetl – Board member
Influenced by the one-sided narrative of technology, the connection to our earth and our future became stronger during my computer science studies. In the process, I realized that our economic goals are a big key to a high quality of life and that these should include social and environmental values in addition to financial metrics, as I like to suggest as a youth spokesperson for the common good economy. Community structures in Central Europe also still hold a lot of potential to create social and sustainable living spaces, which eventually brought me to the board of IniGBW to promote community housing projects. I see Cooppa as an opportunity to draw attention to forward-looking ideas and to create awareness.

Fritz Hinterberger – Founding member
Sustainability-motivated since my school days in Upper Austria 40 years ago. Working as a scientist and machinist on all dimensions of sustainability: economy, ecology and society. Studied economics with Kurt Rothschild in Linz and did my PhD on Monetary Social Policy in Giessen. I was a fellow of the German Research Foundation on Evolutionary Economic Policy and project and department head at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate Environment Energy for Economics and Ecology, Material Flows and Structural Change, founded the SERI Sustainable Europe Research Institute in 1999 and worked as Senior Scientist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2019 to 2022. Vice President of the Austrian Chapter of the Club of Rome and lecturer at universities in Austria and abroad.

Manfred Ronzheimer – Founding Member
is a freelance science journalist in Berlin, studied political science, traineeship Frankfurter Rundschau, co-founder Uniradio Berlin-Brandenburg, scholarship holder Robert Jungk Library for Futurology Salzburg, collaborator Wandeltaz 2015, married, three children.

Manfred Ronzheimer has developed the concept of “transformation journalism,” the main features of which have been discussed at conferences (“Große Transformation” in Berlin-Schwanenwerder) and realized as models in educational workshops and practical modules (Wachstum im Wandel, Vienna 2016, Uni Witten/Herdecke, Futurium Berlin).

Ilse Kleinschuster
“Let’s demand an appropriate environmental policy, after all, until in the end the economic regimes are subordinated to the global environmental regimes!”

I believe that the time has come for an ambitious sustainability policy, but that does not mean that we will let it pass by unused if we do not all seize the opportunity together now.

Offers

Journalists are supported by the cooperative to get paid assignments in a common good context and on common good topics.

Public interest-oriented companies and organizations benefit from our transformation workshops and support each other – coordinated by the cooperative – to communicate their topics and offers beyond their own circles and target groups.

The offer for companies and organizations is to be able to exploit all information on their own channels as well as to distribute their own press releases via our distribution list and an OTS-service.

In addition, we offer companies and organizations specific agency services (e.g. streaming of events).

Readers: Discounted service packages as well as the opportunity to have a say in improving the service and the cooperative, which in turn will benefit all members.

The common good orientation is reflected in the internal networking of the cooperative (cooperation between journalists and organizations/companies as well as among each other) as well as in the topics that are communicated via cooppa. cooppa also aims to produce a report on the common good of the cooperative every two years.

Cooperative membership

Individuals can become members by subscribing to a business share (=500€).
Companies and organizations can also become cooperative members by subscribing at least 2 business shares (=1.000€). The number of subscriptions depends on the number of employees (>10 employees: 5 shares (=2.500€); >30 employees: 20 shares (=10.000€)).

Key resources and start-up network

cooppa deliberately relies on the heterogeneity of its members: strengths are translated into collective and economic performance, according to the motto “Survive as a herd”.

The founders Dr. Friedrich Hinterberger (sustainability researcher) and Manfred Ronzheimer (science journalist) have many years of expertise and networking in the fields of journalism and sustainability.

Key partners include members of the Tailwind Association as well as journalists from the sustainability field. In addition, Friedrich Hinterberger has been an active member of associations such as “SDG-watch”, “Wachstum im Wandel”, the Initiative Zivilgesellschaft/Wandelnetzwerk, jury chairman of Green Brands (over 50 award-winning companies in Austria and Germany) and board member of the Austrian chapter of the Club of Rome. All these organizations can be considered as content suppliers as well as multipliers and potential customers.

Projects

Transformation workshops for companies.