President of the ICA Ivano Barberini passes away

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05.06.2013

President of the ICA Ivano Barberini passes away

Ivano Barberini, President of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) over recent years passed away on 6 May following a long illness. The news of his death was the cause for great sadness among all those with ties to the cooperative sector and the social economy worldwide, and constitutes an irreplaceable loss to the international co-operative movement.

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Born in Modena in 1939, Ivano Barberini dedicated more than forty years of his life to co-operative activities, leading a number of organisations and institutions on both the domestic and international stages. After completing his degree in Economics he began his professional career at Modena Federcoop in 1960, at the age of just 21, and was three years later chosen as Vice-President of the CIAM-UNIBON food cooperative. He was an Executive Manager of the Modena Co-operative Alliance up until 1968, and four years later became the Bologna representative of CoopItalia, the country’s largest logistics management cooperative, organising inter-regional actions for Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Marche and Friuli. In 1975 he became president of Coop Emilia-Veneto, one of Italy’s leading organisations thanks to its innovation in sales techniques, before assuming the presidency of Coop Nazionale in 1979, a position which he held until 1996.

In parallel, while developing his skills in business strategies and administrative innovation, Ivano held the presidency of Eurocoop, the European Association of Consumer Co-operatives, between 1990 and 1996, and became a member of the management team of the banking cooperative Banec. Between 1996 and 2002 he was an executive of Fondazione Italianieuropei, Vice-President of the Permanent European Conference of Cooperatives, Mutual Societies, Associations and Foundations (CEPCMAF) and of the Coordination Committee of the Association of European Co-operatives (CCACE), and President of the Lega Nazionale delle Cooperative e Mutue (Legacoop). In 2001 he was elected President of the ICA, and subsequently re-elected in 2005 for a further four years.

Ivano Barberini was the pillar of the development of the global cooperative movement, as well as being an individual profoundly committed to the values and principles of co-operativism, and a tireless worker in the struggle to achieve a more just, more humane society, with people at its heart.

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