The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of collective models and cooperatives.
Collective models involve similar types of entities coming together to share infrastructure, access markets, or build capacity they could not achieve alone. The most established are agricultural cooperatives, which date to the 1880s when dairy farmers in NSW and Victoria pooled resources to bypass middlemen and build processing facilities. The Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals has identified 229 agribusiness cooperatives nationally, of which 189 are in farming, fishing or forestry and 40 are irrigation and water cooperatives. These range from CBH Group – Australia’s largest cooperative, handling 85 per cent of Western Australia’s grain harvest – to smaller producer collectives like the Tooraweenah Prime Lamb Marketing Co-op, the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op (where young farmers share land, resources and customers on a single site), and the Prom Coast Food Collective, where 20 small-scale Gippsland farmers sell through a single online shop, eliminating the need for individual cool rooms or storefronts.
The Australian Government’s Farming Together program and its predecessor, the Starting Farm Co-operatives Program, have supported the formation of new cooperatives and collaborative models, with the Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals (BCCM) publishing the Co-operative Farming: Blueprint for Future Proofing Aussie Farmers as a practitioner resource. The Open Food Network, founded in Australia in 2012, provides open-source digital infrastructure that enables producers to create food collectives, manage hub logistics, and take farmers’ markets online. Dozens of regional food hubs now operating from Strathbogie to the Nambucca Valley, supported by feasibility studies in places like Bendigo, Wangaratta, and the Huon Valley. Food Connect in Brisbane pioneered a community-supported agriculture model that in 2018 raised over $2 million through equity crowdfunding to purchase its warehouse, creating what it describes as Australia’s first community-owned local food hub.
Beyond agriculture, collective models are appearing across diverse community functions. The Remote OpShop Project is building a network of community-led opportunity shops in remote First Nations communities, grounded in circular economy principles and designed to increase access to affordable goods while creating local economic opportunity. The Wilderness Collective in Mallacoota, founded by five local women after the Black Summer bushfires, has purchased a main street building (raising over $800,000, with 52 per cent from individual donors and 18 per cent from co-working revenue) to create an Innovation and Employment Hub. Charitable Reuse Australia functions as a peak body connecting op shop and reuse retail operations across the country, while individual charity retail networks such as Uniting Op Shops across Victoria and Tasmania, or C2A’s disability employment-focused stores operate as collectives that combine retail, social inclusion, and workforce pathways under a shared brand and operating model. These collective models are typically peer-initiated, commercially oriented, and structured around shared operational needs rather than a shared measurement agenda.
