Robert Owen Day: Celebrating Wales’ Co-operative History and Taking the Next Steps
Robert Owen Day offers a unique opportunity to reflect on Wales’s proud legacy as the birthplace of co-operative values and imagine how these ideas can build a stronger and fairer Welsh economy for people and planet.
Owen’s ideas were far ahead of their time and demonstrated that co-operation and empowerment are the path to economic success and prosperity. He believed in the power of people working together to improve their lives, businesses and communities through shared ownership.
Wales’ co-operative DNA can be traced back across centuries and it provides a framework for how we can build a better economy. In 2025, marking Robert Owen Day is notjust about celebrating our history, but must be about setting the marker for a new approach to Welsh economic development.
With the 2026 Senedd elections on the horizon, all of Wales’s political parties are in the process of shaping their manifestos and policy agendas. That makes now the most important time to ensure that co-operative values are embedded in our communities and in the future of the Welsh economy a as a pivotal part of a strategy to make Wales more prosperous, sustainable and equal.
A Wellbeing Economy, Rooted in Place
Across Wales, social enterprises and co-operatives are already leading the way – growing innovative businesses, delivering local services, building homes, creating inclusive employment, running community energy schemes, creating wealth and so much more. These are practical, innovative and entrepreneurial solutions that respond to local need and build long-term resilience.
Supporting these co-operative and social enterprise businesses, and being proactive in identifying new opportunities and bringing people together to act on them, will be a core part of the answer to the long-term, structural challenges in the Welsh economy.
Etholiadau 2026
The upcoming Senedd election gives us all the opportunity to put this at the top of the policy agenda. We were pleased to see that in the Future Generations Report 2025 there are specific recommendations to double the size of the social enterprise sector and invest in a co-operative development hub for Wales. Wales can once again show the world what a different path looks like by putting co-operative and social enterprise solutions at the heart of our economic development strategy.
Sustainable Prosperity
At Cwmpas, we believe in this model because we see the impact Welsh social businesses are delivering every day. That’s why, in the months ahead, we’ll be publishing our Manifesto for Sustainable Prosperity, setting out how we can support this sector and make it the business model of choice in Wales.
Drawing on our experience in supporting social businesses, co-operatives, and community-led development across Wales, our manifesto will set out a clear, evidence-based path for how Wales can generate wealth and wellbeing.
This means safeguarding specialist support for social businesses to start, survive and grow, investing in proactive market development of the co-operative sector, and ensuring access to the right types of finance.
It means celebrating the growth of employee ownership in Wales and committing to going even further teaching our young people about successful Welsh co-operatives and social entrepreneurs as part of the curriculum, and embedding rights to community ownership in legislation.
Wales faces a variety of challenges and it can sometimes feel like the way our economy works makes them worse, rather than solving them. But across different communities and sectors there are inspiring co-operators and social entrepreneurs making positive change happen, and we need to empower them and our communities to re-balance our economy and create a fairer, sustainable and prosperous Wales.
Robert Owen Day shows that this Welsh tradition of co-operation goes back centuries, but the challenge for us today isn’t to just honour victories of the past, but to learn their lessons and build a better future. Wales has taken the lead before, and in 2026 we can do so again.
If you are interested in working with us on this agenda, please get in touch with our Policy and Engagement lead, Daniel Roberts, via dan.roberts@cwmpas.coop.
