Community Cooperatives, shared knowledge and transformative economy

For more than ten years Italian community co-operatives have become an important social issue, a new form of collective enterprise that plays a role in regenerating local economies and social animation of the territories. This new form of business allows the civic forces to organize new services to satisfy some socio-economic needs of their communities. It creates collaboration networks with different stakeholders of the community and innovates both from the point of view of the evolution of the co-operative model as well as the practical implementation of the theories of community development (Bianchi, 2021). Community co-operatives are experimental laboratories of new forms of diversity coexistence and are based on organizational and management models that promote participation and involvement in independently of their productions, that could be of every kind: goods, artistic, recreational, social, cultural services. At the same time, because of their territorial nature, they combine the themes and values of active citizenship with those of environmental sustainability and solidarity. The contribution aims to investigate the characteristics and effective resilience capacity of these forms of "business" even in the face of the current pandemic crisis. We want to highlight the possible particularities of the approaches and solutions adopted and whether the distributed knowledge (social capital), that characterizes them, is actually used.