Sustaining Hope Under Uncertainty: Belonging as a Prefigurative Organizational Practice in Youth-Led Cooperatives

Building democratic, solidarity-based organizations under conditions of economic hardship is a profoundly hopeful act. Yet in organization studies, hope is often treated as an individual disposition or cultural ideal rather than as an organizational accomplishment embedded in political–economic struggle.

This paper theorizes hope as a prefigurative organizational achievement sustained through the ongoing production of belonging. Drawing on a qualitative, multi-year narrative study of four youth-led cooperatives in Mexico, the analysis examines how hope is organized—and contested—through everyday practices of founding, sustaining, and extending belonging.

Findings show that hope does not take the form of optimism about growth or success. Instead, it emerges as a disciplined willingness to remain engaged in collective governance despite material scarcity, conflict, and uncertainty. Belonging operates as the mechanism through which hope is stabilized, strained, and sometimes fractured. While governance capacity, relational buffering, and movement anchoring can render hope durable, economic pressure and emotional exhaustion expose its fragility.

Part of the GPE Brown Bag Seminar Series. All welcome.