This is a field-based course offered in collaboration with the National Cooperative Business Association; it entails international travel to visit cooperatives. Meetings will be held with staff and members of cooperatives. The specific destination and cooperatives may vary from year to year. For example, in February 2008, harvest season in coffee country, we plan to take students to Central America to visit agricultural cooperatives and credit unions. We will look at how the cooperatives were organized; agricultural reform co-ops formed on a collective farming model started by governments, and other co-ops formed on the US model -- workers in the former are more like paid workers. Credit unions are more urban and play an active role in microenterprise development. We will examine a product chain; how a product moves from the field through value-added processing to markets. We will gain a deeper understanding of the fair trade movement, the role of cooperatives in a global economy, and how cooperatives contribute to building civil society.